JHK’s Three-Act Play
A Martian psychoanalyst observing the US Superbowl on TV would be shocked by the vicious animal spirits emanating from that spectacle, starting with the triumphal trumpet blasts borrowed straight from the old 1950s Hollywood epic movies echoing the prideful mis-steps of ancient Rome, along with the by-now clichéd CGI trick in the opening credits of gleaming metallic heraldic insignia spun into a military cordon of stars so as to protect the tender collective ego of this anxious nation. America wears its zeitgeist plastered right on its sweaty forehead.
Everybody knows that the commercial messages between the play-action amount to a national Rorschach test, and this year’s collection made us look more psychopathic than ever – starting with the advertisement for the Chevy Silverado: Fade in on a devastated nameless American city, the buildings smashed, the streets littered with debris, a gray ash coating over everything, and no living creatures in evidence…. A newspaper headline proclaims “2012 Mayan Apocalypse….” How reassuring! Wait! Something stirs behind a heap of rubble… it cracks open… and out drives a plucky American male lumpen “worker” dude behind the wheel of a gleaming giant pickup truck. He is soon joined by other men and their trucks, all of them blithely unfazed by the end-of-the-world.
A curious scenario. What’s the take away? I wondered, of course, where these plucky fellows would look for their next fill-up in the devastated landscape. Surely the service stations would miss the next scheduled fuel truck delivery. Are American men not expected to think beyond the immediate moment they are in? Are they on an intellectual level with lemurs and Holstein steers?
The Superbowl pageant is a window into the condition of American manhood, and the view is pretty pathetic. It’s a picture of men who feel so weak, insecure, and fearful that they have to compensate with fantasies of limitless destructive power. Ads for several new movies and (I think) video games followed the Silverado apocalypse romp. There were unifying themes throughout. All depicted the problems of life as 1) coming from outside our own society (or world); 2) in the form of aliens who wield mystifying technological destructive power; and 3) leaving a few human remnants on a smoldering landscape after a cosmic showdown.
These onslaughts from elsewhere in the universe always end with superior American guile and the latest technology defeating the purblind invaders. The aliens are vanquished by Apple computers, Air Force stunt pilots, and a little extra help from God Almighty, who is surely on our side. From these realms of engineered grandiosity, we slip in and out of the grinding ground game in Lucas Oil stadium in Indianapolis, another pseudo-military operation loaded with acronyms and jargon intended to confer an illusion of control and competence.
The reality out there in “flyover” land is an audience of diabetic fat men in clownish loungewear slouched on sofas in foreclosed houses enjoying stupendous portions of cheesy and lard-laden foodstuffs between cigarettes and beers. They have a lot to worry about and they have no idea how they might overcome their financial, familial, and medical problems. The real onslaughts besetting the nation in realms such as banking fraud, money in politics, peak oil, climate uncertainty, and economic contraction are at once too complex for the diabetic fat men to comprehend, and grossly misreported in the public arena, were Cable TV and newspapers work the levers of propaganda for one client or another.
Then there was the grotesque half-time extravaganza featuring Madonna, which was a weird parallel commentary on the state of American womanhood. Pretending to be ageless and indomitable, the old trooper performed a variety of standing crotch-locks on her Praetorian guard of hoofers and then stumbled more than once on the ridiculous bleacher stage-set that looked as if was designed to trip the performers up. Message to American women: be sluts as long as you possibly can because there is nothing else for you in this culture. I couldn’t help thinking that American chanteuses of yesteryear – say, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carole King – sang about adult problems and emotions with a greater thematic range, and would never have subjected themselves to such a display of pitiful narcissism. (Did anyone notice that Madonna’s corps de ballet all wore her monogram on their loincloths?) America needs a prayer, all right, but I don’t think they’ll find it by calling Madonna’s name.
Meanwhile, in whatever remains of the Real World, we have a couple of things to be concerned about this week. One is the ultimatum tendered to Greece by the Lords of Euroland to make a deal or die-dog-die. Last time I checked, they had until 11 a.m. today Berlin time to reply… and nothing happened.
The other matter is the pending possible robo-signing settlement with the TBTF banks, which is designed to let them off the hook for any and all future lawsuits in this matter if they pay a penny-ante fine. This latest ghastly trespass of the rule-of-law is a joint project of the Obama White House and 50 states attorneys general in an epic act of perfidy. You can read about it at Yves Smith’s excellent Naked Capitalism blog.
Your country is being stolen from you. I hope you are getting ready to re-occupy it with your bodies and minds. Don’t plan on giant magical robots flying to your rescue.
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
New Paintings from the 2022 Season
Barrel Racers, Cambridge, NY
Just Out! The whole shootin’ match going back to 1987!
For autographed copies:
Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY
Also at: Amazon, Barnes & Nobel
The Jeff Greenaway series of novellas. These rollicking, short books depict the misadventures of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in New York City in the early 1960s
Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:
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Dear Jim,
What a mess!!
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-whore-of-babylon/
And the non-winter of 2011-2012 continues here in the lower 48 as we continue to belch carbon into our fragile atmosphere!
On top of all that, NBC technology was unable to prevent the millions of viewers from seeing M.I.A. flipping them the middle finger.
James,
A little bit on why and how we need to prepare for the upcoming, localized issues:
http://subversesjournal.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/state-city/
I brainwashed myself some forty years back to just not see or hear commercials. At most, I hit the mute button. I commonly read a page or three in whatever book I have with me.
Halftime? There was an interesting program about the Serengeti airing at that time. I don’t have a clue as to what half-time was about.
As far as the actual game itself, it was pretty good. Relatively few errors and penalties and the outcome was in doubt until very late in the game.
All I watched was the game itself. All the rest of the stuff folks worry about? Yo no se nada…
Good lord, was that Chevy Silverado for real? A big, fat not so subliminal message of denial there.
I miss all that, thank heavens, not having a TV, I’m allergic to it.
Some of us are living a completely different reality already, one a little less in-toxic-ated but readily mobile.
http;//alttransbikes.blogspot.com
As both an ardent reader and longtime follower my only complaint about todays article is that our country has already been stolen.
http://alttransbikes.blogspot.com
“an audience of diabetic fat men in clownish loungewear slouched on sofas in foreclosed houses enjoying stupendous portions of cheesy and lard-laden foodstuffs between cigarettes and beers.”
I would add: waiting for NASCAR and Dancing with the Dunskys to reappear like magic on their flat screen technology now, also like magic, costing them 30%+ per month on the unpaid credit card balance to lul them into a catatonic stupor.
Poetry none-the-less.
Clint Eastwood, the quickly aging great-grandpa crimefighter and general hard ass of yesteryear was equally pathetic in his let’s go to ‘morning – in – America meme.
America is Dead. No Saving IT.
PUNISH THE GUILTY. DO IT NOW.
I noticed and commented on the apocalypse themed ads too. The Group Fantasy was in plain site last evening. Be prepared for blazing balls from the sky. But don’t look at what is happening in the halls of power.
I began my day with a trip to the shopping mall and compounded the surrealness with watching the Super Bowl. Good times. Laughing while Rome is burning. What else are you going to do? Take all this seriously? Nah.
You have to admit it was good game. Pageantry not withstanding.
Aimlow Joe was here
http://www.aimlow.com
I just could’t wait for your post super bowl post and you did not disappoint. We sat with the wood stove fire from wood I split, eating spagetti with sauce and garlic we grew, and a fab pumpkin pie also from the garden, not too bad a mid winter bacchanal. I loved the half time, very clever and over the top and thought the old gal in fine form and voice. The conflation of Rome and Football perfect. Our youth are drawn to dark themes, skulls, spikes etc. They have sub consciously absorbed the situation.
what game ?
As Jim has long predicted, the dismantling of suburban shopping has begun. Check out an article in the NYS Times, “How About Gardening or Golfing at the Mall?”
In part, ‘Malls, over the last 50 years, have gone from the community center in some cities to a relic of the way people once wanted to shop.” Sound familiar?
“Sears Holdings is closing up to 120 stores, Gap Inc. 200 stores and Talbots 110. Abercrombie & Fitch closed 50 stores last year, Hot Topic, almost the same number. Chains that have filed for bankruptcy in recent years, like Blockbuster, Anchor Blue, Circuit City and Borders, have left hundreds of stores lying vacant in malls across the country.”
“A new enclosed mall has not opened in the United States since 2006.”
“The efforts reflect a shift in how Americans want to shop today: rather than going to big, overwhelming malls, many prefer places where stores can be entered from the street, featuring restaurants, entertainment and other Main Street mainstays. Also, as commuters in urban areas shift to public transportation, the giant parking lots are no longer needed.”
The great shift is beginning for economic reasons, which is always why shifts happen.
Yes, it seemed that the Superbowl program was produced from soup to nuts to cater to those who still, after decades, think that the things we thought were truth-based in, say, the fifties, are still true. You’d think that Viet Nam would have opened more eyes than it did.
http://www.Thesisa.org/
Now I’m sorry I didn’t watch the Superbowel.
And then there was Clint Eastwood emerging from the mist to proclaim that an America down and out like Detroit will be reborn to drive Dodge vehicles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
I think the Magic robots will actually be small, and coming to attack, not rescue…
Had a solar booth last weekend, and spoke with several hundred of the ~25k people that came through. Lots of people get ‘it’ surprisingly, yet a hefty percentage remains totally clueless of how things work and what is likely to come. Sad. I continue to teach as many who want to listen…
Cheers Clusterfuckers.
PUSH ON. DO GOOD. KEEP SMILING.
I watched a bit of the pre-game show, found it boring, and switched over to CNN as I corrected my students’ assignments. I then completely ignored the Super Bowl as I instead watched my wife play a video game. It was more entertaining and I could cheer her on. Besides, I’m a Patriots fan and they lost. I was spared watching that, too.
Over at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News, I posted about the massive greenwashing the NFL put on as part of its Super Bowl community outreach (PR campaign). Despite it being greenwashing, at least it was an attempt at being sustainable, no matter how oxymoronic that might be in conjunction with a celebration of excess like the Super Bowl. I also pointed out how the GOP in general and Newt Gingrich in particular are now fully owning being the party of maniacs who promise their voters that they will be able to maintain the supposed entitlements of suburbia, right down to the McMansions, cars, and commutes, just as James predicted nearly a decade ago. Newt Gingrich went so far as to hate on subways and subway riders as elite snobs in contrast to the regular folks out in the suburbs.
I also posted some scenery porn of Yosemite, an update on my efforts to reduce my driving, Groundhog Day and climate change, and Peak Oil being mentioned in Nature, Ars Technica, and Wired, along with the money people in Forbes dancing around the subject as they deal with the reality of the bumpy plateau. I expect I’ll post Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl commerical on behalf of Chrysler. There is a reason why I sign off my comments “Happy Motoring–for now–from Detroit!”
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/
“He is soon joined by other men and their trucks, all of them blithely unfazed by the end-of-the-world.”
It was a joke, douche-boy. One ate a twinkie, the food stuff that is supposed to last forever. A statue from a “Big Boy” restaurant blazed in the back ground. It was a J-O-K-E.
“I couldn’t help thinking that American chanteuses of yesteryear – say, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carole King – sang about adult problems and emotions with a greater thematic range, and would never have subjected themselves to such a display of pitiful narcissism.”
Ella was great. Billie, good, but a hopeless junkie. Carole King? Carole-fucking-King? Please. (Which is not to say that Madonna did and always will…suck.)
So much for the hope that one of the gutless wonders would have protested Indiana’s anti union policy.
hey k.c. you’re not running low on c.! or R U?
…”America wears its zeitgeist plastered right on its sweaty forehead.” -JHK
Holy steaming, gargantuan piles of shit, Jim! Now I’m wishing I hadn’t missed this demonstration and object lesson, laid right out there in plain view by the best bullshitters and jivers in da known woild!
Madonna? You’ve got to be kidding me. *whew*, the weirdness is getting thick.
(Mayhap I’ll view the grotesquery after the fact just to be stunned and amazed.)
After looking at it, I think that should be: grotesquerie, but you know what I mean.
I read yesterday that Ford was up in arms over the Chevy TEOTWAWKI ad. I don’t see why. Consider the kind of people that such a commercial would resonate with. Would you want people like that as customers?
As for Clint Eastwood, he’s an old man, set in his ways. People like Clint don’t want to rock the boat, they want to right where they are.
Pay no attention.
I was distracted while it ran, but paid sufficient attention to the Eastwood ad that I thought I might be watching a full-minute-long political ad during the most-expensive time slot in American TV. What candidate or cause, I wondered, could the old tough guy be hawking, with the desolate images and somber music overlay an implicit recognition that whatever morning-in-America we might have thought we had lived in, times are damn tough now.
As we know, America hates downers, especially during the Big Game, so this seemed somewhat revolutionary.
The payoff moment came when the card was turned, to reveal this quite-overtly-political ad was for a car company that, as far as I’m aware, has done very little to acknowledge the reality of modern challenges to America, whether ecologically, politically, or otherwise. Still, it was an interesting moment, a kind of inflection point.
By the way, the NFL has been all over enforcing its apparent copyright on the ad (not Chrysler?),so it’s been taken down from YouTube, CBS, and other sites. But I did find it here:
http://jalopnik.com/5882502/chryslers-clint-eastwood-super-bowl-spot-is-the-best-political-ad-yet
You’re ‘number one’ for invective, Jim. Memories of Hunter Thompson. Hilarious.
By the Dawn’s early light finds me heading out to water the garden, feed the chickens and generally observe the weather here in the tropics.
As I came back from the beach last night, the screams out of any of the various ex-patriate watering holes provided at best a hint of the mass delusion that Jim has so thoroughly dissected in his masterful manner.
It takes an effort to leave it all behind, but it may well prove to have been worth the effort.
Interesting new evidence of other Kunstler / Peak Oil predictions:
2 weeks ago SpanAir, a regional Spanish airline,
went belly up suspending all flights without notice and stranding 23,000 passengers..
Catalonia’s Regional Govt which had been subsidizing it and keeping it afloat took SpanAir off the ventilator of Euros refusing to fund it any longer.
Last week, yet another regional airline went under when the Hungarian Malev Airline went under seized by creditors leaving more air passengers stranded:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/business/global/hungarian-national-airline-halts-flights.html?scp=1&sq=hungarian%20airline&st=cse
Of course a while ago American Airlines parent Company filed for bankruptcy in the usual dodge of
stiffing workers and their contracted pensions, benefits, jobs and wages in order to pay for the ever-increasing price of fuel and insure the 1% owners get the majority of the loot…
So the collapse of the airline industry is also proceeding…
For years on CFN I’ve been reading about how things will get so bad that a “corn-pone Nazi” leader will emerge to lead the “fat diabetic men.”
Now CFN is telling me things are bad. But no “corn-pone Nazi” leader has appeared.
In fact, the leading Republican candidate is the most LIBERAL of all the Republican candidates, someone who was for abortion, and took a lot of LIBERAL positions related to unions, stimulus, government health care (RomneyCare), corporate tax relief, etc. before he flip-flopped and was against them.
In 2012, instead of a corn-pone Nazi, we get a liberal Republican. Another failed prediction.
Don’t vote conservative. Don’t vote liberal. Vote for a radical, someone who gets to the root of the problems. Vote for Jill Stein, Green Party.
The super bowl party I normally attend imploded to just two people, the host and myself, who had to remove the plastic coverings from the furniture since the room had just been painted. One guy failed to show because as usual when his kids are not visiting, he was passed out drunk. Anther guy was too upset to show up because some incompetent asshole fucked up a recent sports wager improperly placing the bet in Vegas so he didn’t get the money to place on the Giant like he wanted….one catastrophe after another in shallow guy world. Hardly any of the football watching crowd is married even though these guys are in their early forties because they have correctly intuited that marriage today is for suckers, etcetera ad nauseum. The Clint Eastwood endorsement of Chysler made me ill because after all, Chrysler products suck to high heaven as any gearhead will gladly tell you. Guess that gearhead movie he made recently was just make believe like everything else in Hollywood. I did like the commercial where Queen Elton fell down a chute to the dungeon to be interred therein with none other than Flavor Flave as after all, the people must have their Pepsi sweetened with high fructose corn syrup iced down in tubs. Unfortunately you can’t have a Thunderbirds/Blue Angels fly over of the stadium when playing in a domed stadium so the opening ceremonies were somewhat deficient from a militaristic standpoint. Of course this morning I had to field stupid football questions from my female relatives so that was the same. Actually their question of how there could be a five point lead at one stage of the game wasn’t really so bad as of course it was caused by the safety which had occured earlier on.
Mocking the excesses of the super bowl is like shooting fish in a barrel. Seems pretty much self-parodying already, but I only watch it to deconstruct the advertising.
“…..acronyms and jargon intended to confer an illusion of control and competence.”
Excellent summation of what Amerika has become.
I watched the first twenty minutes, thinking that they might actually start playing football. But the entire time was taken up with countryfied national anthems, flyovers, and cutaways to a group of bewildered looking jar heads milling about in Afghanistan. They looked more like prisoners than heroes, but the crowd went wild to see the poor bastards.
Tuned in for halftime and thought Madonna was going to simultaneously blow Seal Team Six while singing “Like a Prayer”. Even our biggest media stars have become caricatures of themselves. But then, so have we.
Good post Jim.
Personally, I can’t stand American football, and especially the Super Bowl, what bull shit.
What about the advertisement for the Navy Seals movie? How freaky is that?
Occupy Earth!
Hey, at least with ads like that pickup commercial they are starting to introduce the idea that dystopia is on the way.
Now they need to take the next step and explain to the public that in a dystopia you don’t get to keep living they way you have been.
“Clint Eastwood, the quickly aging great-grandpa crimefighter and general hard ass of yesteryear was equally pathetic in his let’s go to ‘morning – in – America meme.”
It’s worse that that. Morning in DETROIT, for God’s sake.
Asoka:
People on here tend to think for themselves, therefore your pitch for the Greens, who are the party whose pitch is that the two conventional parties are NOT SUFFICIENTLY committed to a ludicrous unsustainable future, is not going to resonate.
At the beginning of the SB Chrysler ad, my wife asked what is that? The voice and images were indeed strange. I said probably a Chrysler commercial (based on previous ads), then I thought, maybe a political ad?
When the gutteral voiced speaker was revealed to be Clint “Josey Wells” Eastwood. I thought who better to bring the message that it’s half-time and we need to find a way out or invent a new one. Thinking of the movie Gran Torino. Thank you Josey. I’d give Chrysler an A+ for this ad.
James, Why would a man who incessantly points out mankind’s imbecilic activities waste his time watching and then writing about another of the gambling, oh pardon me I meant, “gaming” industry’s cash cows.
As to the un-health of today’s humans perchance the effects, undoubtedly minor, of the worst, IMO, invention human’s ever conceived, marketing/advertising, coupled with government subsidies to the very corporate producers of the unhealthy food stuffs accomplished by lobbyists, use of worst invention, employed by the recipients of such largess.
If the preponderance of American males had watched as many sporting events as I have and had not been influenced by as many advertisements as I have not, modern day equivalents of the Roman gladiators would not earn 10’s to 100’s of times the salaries of teachers, nurses, scientists, engineers, electricians, carpenters ….. and their owners would not be part of the (1/10)%.
SNAFU
Saw an interesting comment about the Eastwood ad.
Chrysler, the purpored vehicle for America’s comeback, was taken over by Italians.
And another: How about the corn pone leader of Susan B. Komen for the Cure politicizing breast cancer, good grief.
“…out drives a plucky American male lumpen ‘worker’ dude behind the wheel of a gleaming giant pickup truck.”
I missed the Stupor Bowl, but I did see the commercial and wish to remind JHK that the guy was a pretty boy, not a working man (or a diabetic fatso in clown attire). His truck was at least dirty, which is more than I can say for most of the trucks around here.
A pickup should be a work vehicle. Full disclosure: I own a recent-model Chevy Silverado, purchased used and driven for rural work only, about 4K miles a year. I hope it will be the last truck I ever need to buy; I’d have preferred a Ford, but a good price on a low-mileage truck is hard to beat. The Chevy does what makes a pickup lovable: hard work hauling tools, lumber, stone, and building supplies.
That is the purpose of a truck, just as it was for the lumber wagons it replaced and that may well replace it in a world made by hand, if JHK is right about our future. I’ll be sure to get a good team of mules and a wagon with an 8′ bed (anything shorter may as well be a car).
But the American pickup has evolved into something else: a totem of manliness in the age of decline.
JHK asks about American males, “Are they on an intellectual level with lemurs and Holstein steers?”
I don’t know about the self-confidence levels of either animal, but so many pickup owners buy their rigs to look manly. Then they “haul” a couple of bags of mulch home from Home Depot. When a buddy downsized from a Ford F-350 to a Mazda 4-cylinder, a co-worker on the construction site actually asked, with concern and not scorn, “but do you feel less a man with a little truck?”
And hence, American males today: few of them able to make things or do things by hand, fretful about the future, their masculinity wrapped up in a V8 engine. And do not get dirt or scratches on the bed-liner!
Bearfoot – Not sure what “c” is… Of course, that is, if your’e talking to me. But, generally, I think we all are runnin a bit low now. LOL
Pro Sports- keeping America’s men
dumb,
distracted
and docile.
Support your youth little league, youth soccer and track club. Leave the Pro sports to the professional dullards.
“Vote for a radical, someone who gets to the root of the problems.”
Your candidate has no 30 year track record opposing these “problems”. I agree don’t vote for a republican liberal.
“That is the purpose of a truck, just as it was for the lumber wagons it replaced and that may well replace it in a world made by hand, if JHK is right about our future. I’ll be sure to get a good team of mules and a wagon with an 8′ bed (anything shorter may as well be a car).” SJoe
Smoky,
Keee-wrecked!
There have been many times that I had wished for a 10′ truck bed (enclosed dimensions). I realize this would be a serious detriment to maneuverability and frame strength, but flopping those 12 and 14-footers out over the tailgate of an 8′ bed have caused me some anxious moments and iffy counterweight and cantilever “solutions”.
Beyond those mundane practicalities however, I enjoyed your thoughtful comments on pickup psychoses. Interesting.
Chomsky on Sports:
In fact, I have the habit when I’m driving of turning on these radio call-in programs, and it’s striking when you hear the ones about sports. They have these groups of sports reporters, or some kind of experts on a panel, and people call in and have discussions with them. First of all, the audience obviously is devoting an enormous amount of time to it all. But the more striking fact is, the callers have a tremendous amount of expertise, they have detailed knowledge of all kinds of things, they carry on these extremely complex discussions…
…and when you look at the structure of them, they seem like a kind of mathematics. It’s as though people want to work out mathematical problems, and it they don’t have calculus and arithmetic, they work them out with other structures…And what all these things look like is that people just want to use their intelligence somehow…
Well, in our society we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can’t get involved in them in a very serious way — so what they do is put their minds to other things, such as sports. You’re trained to be obedient; you don’t have an interesting job; there’s no work around for you that’s creative; in the cultural environment you’re a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff…So what’s left?
Last week I said that the Superbowl is the nexus between sports and entertainment and the whole wasteful meaningless expenditure of capital.
It’s very similar to the polital games of the ultra wealthy buying the elections and letting the little people play to their expensive propaganda.
There is nothing of value or gain, just an acting out of the empty hopes and vapid dreams of a dying culture.
Nothing this country does or the overly wealthy individuals who gain when you lose are doing anything of merit with their investments, but I promise you this, by breaking with classical economics for this disaster economy being implemented in Europe now as well, we will go down.
I am not one to watch the games and did not do my anthropological field study last night, but it’s always the same thing every year.
It is just deteriorating and at some point will be seen as something not worth fighting for anymore.
Get ready for a new economic disaster and more guaranteed bailouts for the casino players. We will be stuck with the bill.
Recommendations today. Charles Hugh Smith oftwominds.com
Max Keiser interview with Michael Hudson:
http://michael-hudson.com/2012/01/hudson-keiser-on-2012-imperialism/
The Super Bowl commercials were real stinkers this year – repeats of old, tired themes. Even the half-time show had old, tired Madonna prancing around and pretending to be young and sexy. Used to be the commercials were the best part! Those Budweiser frogs planning on murdering various rivals were funny, the Old Spice guy “You Could Smell like Me” was funny. None of that just weird stuff like Clint Eastwood rambling on about . . . something. The Mayan Apocalypse was kinda funny. Chubby, middle aged men driving trucks and eating twinkies. I guess if you have a truck and a twinkie, why you’re prepared for anything! But will they take credit cards at the gas stations after the Apocalypse?
Also caught a couple episodes of NatGeo’s Doomsday Preppers recently. Now that is really funny. These people or couples go on TV and show how they have prepared for the End, although the End could be caused by economic collapse, lack of foreign fossil fuel, giant meteorites and my personal favorite, the continents shifting because the poles might change their magnetic directions. Some of their plans were impressive because of the amount of time and money spent putting together shipping containers to build an impenetrable fortress. Or one family that converted an old swimming pool into a fish pond, goat shed and hydroponic garden. During the show, an expert rates the preparedness and makes suggestions of improving things. At the end of the program, the narrator gives the statistical possibility of any of these scenarios actually occurring and its usually a 1,000,000 to 1.
Susan G. Komen is really hoping for the Apocalypse and has learned that WOMEN like getting basic health care services WITHOUT the right wing religious nut jobs interfering. Komen’s funding has shot straight down the poop hole while Planned Parenthood is raking in the dough. This is what happens when you listen to “Pro Life” nut jobs who hate women so much that they would rather let them die slowly of undetected breast cancer than put politics aside. Bill O’Reilly (now lying full time) says Planned Parenthood is 97% abortions. Didn’t he learn anything from Sen. John Kyl’s “Not Intended to be a Factual Statement” when he was caught telling the exact same lie? Guess Billy thinks that if he lies to enough oldsters, they will swallow the same gunk over and over again. Susan G. Komen is sunk though. Women vote and most of us are very fond of Not Being Lied to, getting medical care and choosing what we want to do with our own bodies. Twinkie, anyone?
I thought of your “clown civilization” comments from ‘Home From Nowhere,’ Mr. Kunstler, when I heard about the SB halftime show – “We fill our idle hours enjoying the canned antics of professional clowns.” But if American entertainers are embarrassing, British entertainers are no better: that female rapper who gave the finger on national television is a Brit.
Smoky sez:
“And hence, American males today: few of them able to make things or do things by hand, fretful about the future, their masculinity wrapped up in a V8 engine. And do not get dirt or scratches on the bed-liner!”
SJ,
Here’s a good one for you.
Someone I know very well, bought himself a brandie-new Dodge Ram a few years back. What did he need it for? Ah, for “yard stuff”, ’round-the-house building materials, but mainly, to transport the dirt-bikes hither and yon. NOW, he’s SOLD the dirt-bikes as downpayment on a ROAD bike to SAVE GASOLINE that the truck was guzzling like cheap rot-gut! See how well that whole strategy worked out? lol
(I must say though, that other than a few very minor scratches and minute dings, that damn truck looks to be close to pristine. He takes good care of his stuff.)
Right on Smokey! probably 75% of the fellas at the firehouse drive pick-ups. Out of those I bet 8 out of ten are “Pretty Boy” trucks. The workin’ trucks are easy to spot. I had a guy ask to borrow my 4 popper Tacoma To pick up some loose mulch. I said, “You have a truck”. “I can’t put that shit in the back of my truck” was his reply. I almost fuckin’ screamed. I guess my truck looked okay to carry shit! Insanity, that’s what it is. Plus they all need four wheel drive and honkin’ big-ass tires.
P.S. – When Crosby, Stills and Nash performed an acoustic set at the Berlin Wall a week after it was opened, one critic actually accused them of jumping at a contrived opprotunity to make themselves look relevant. Madonna performs a mindless, meaningless Super Bowl halftime show – and she’s applauded for it? Why is she the only pop performer of the past five decades to be applauded for her longevity, while folks like Crosby, Stills and Nash are written off as irrelevant dinosaurs? CSN lost money with that Wall gig, but they wanted to be there to show solidarity with Berliners. What did Madge’s Super Bowl gig accomplish?
Howdy O3, Sorry I missed ya at the ice harvest. I caught a deal on craigslist for some 275 gallon palletized sap tanks. Took a trip to Athol, pronounced with a lisp like asshole. The guys got more if you need something like this. I got em for 75 bucks.I am using them for rain water collection
http://westernmass.craigslist.org/grd/2810550832.html
Hey Jim and all the gang
Well another Stupor Bowl safely over, we can all rest easier knowing that. And the Madonna show, well seriously, what over the top, canned poptrash. I especially liked the initial outfit she appeared in complete with horned headdress and gold cape. What was that all about? Madonna’s music always was marginal, and it hasn’t aged well. She appears a little plasticky, but after all she is in her fifties. The show was sorta sad and tacky, the panorama of a fading and failing culture slowly choking to death on it’s own poisonous paradigm. As for the commercials, didn’t see them, so that was all to the good.
Yes I do have to say this year’s Bowl did seem to be significantly scaled down from previous years. Just no oomph to it at all, we went to bed early, the spouse just lost interest. Not sure why. I would rather do just about anything than watch football, but peace must be kept in the house.
As for all those fat diabetic men, well I think if current economic conditions continue with 50% of the population in poverty, that will self correct. After all can’t be fat when you have no money to buy food or a car for happy motoring.
Patiently awaiting the kick off for the real game, the one in the Middle East. The war rhetoric appears to be getting hotter on a daily basis. Heaven help us all.
loveday
“What did Madge’s Super Bowl gig accomplish?”
-Steve
It probably gave her an insanely gargantuan pay-day (for the performance of ONE single fucking number, no less).
Isn’t that what defines worthiness these days? How over-paid you can get for how tiny a portion of time spent doing [whatever] supposedly productive/entertaining crapola?
That’s a heck of a good price for those containers! Certainly worth a trip to As- I mean, Athol. So far, I’m lucky to have an uphill water supply that I can access via gravity and getting creative with piping. Speakin’ o’ which, some 1-inch well-line [at discount] in 150′ bulk might come in very handy. Hmmmm…
See what are minds wander to when un-involved with gladitorial spectacle?
(Ps. Well-drillers in these h’yar hills are going hungry for work. REALLY sparse, and sparser as the folks get broker. Heard from a “horses’ mouth”.)
“our” minds
(Or what’s left of ’em. B’bye!)
Speaking of the Apocalypse, check out Webbot master Clif High’s website Half Past Human. He believes plans are in motion that on March 02, 2012 Mossad and CIA agents impersonating Iranians will stage a false flag attack on a US Navy ship, thus opening the way to a wider war. Of course, we know they’ve done it before – USS Liberty in 1967. If word of this spreads far and wide, they’ll have to cancel. Too many people will know its a staged bogus event.
I watched the SuperBowl last night and like watching a movie I was able to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the game.
Last fall I spent a couple of weeks with a climate scientist, Dr. Guy McPherson (Nature Bats Last), who believes that JH Kunstler is imagining that we’ll be able to reconstruct America using trains. In the Kubler-Ross model that means that Jim is still in the bargaining stage. In Dr. McPherson’s opinion the scale and speed of events will overwhelm industrial systems in the next 20 years.
Here is a trailer for the upcoming film: Somewhere In New Mexico Before The End Of Time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsPqtWfIQoQ
My small tv takes up a small corner of my living room and it wasn’t on last night. If the Chevy Silverado ads were as described, and I don’t doubt they were, one message from that might be that all the Chevy Silverado drivers will have missed out on the Rapture! Otherwise, why would they still be around?
-Phut
The contempt which Madison Avenue, the official mouthpiece for corporate America, has for American men and women, too (But that’s another story) is unmistakable. Our image from their minds is enough: Chubby, befuddled and brought into a happy, blissful content by whatever bullshit they’re trying to sell us. They’re right: Most American men are chubby and befuddled and there’s not much of a choice involved; but the contempt is certainly there, alive and breeding, telling us that it’s only the money they’re concerned about, only the idea that materialism and accumulation brings happiness and the contempt involved is one of understanding. It seems to be saying, “If you buy into our bullshit ideas then you deserve whatever fate awaits you, you stupid morons.” It’s truly the main premise of America – money and accumulation cure all ills, rectify all injustices and are the main and seemingly only reasons you are on this earth. It is how we are told to express our love. It is how we are told to express our displeasure, our hatred – buy our shit, don’t buy our shit. Well, those days, those ideas are rapidly becoming not only unemployable, but impossible. Uh, duh, what do we do now? Good question. There’s always our true humanity, the one which doesn’t involve money and accumulation and the idolizing of the monsters who are living in the sky cities of incredible wealth and wow, amazing power. But take a closer look. The sky cities on built upon the bones of the dead, the lost, those human beings who got in the way of ‘progress’. The Stupid Boil heavily re-inforces this message, heavily, but what it doesn’t tell us that is if you want to play THAT game, you’re more than likely, much more, to wind up in the bone pile of the others who are holding those cities aloft. Quit while you’re ahead. If you have any dreams let them concern reclaiming and holding on to your humanity. Good luck. It’s a long path, but remember – we’re not alone.
Interesting. I have been having the same thoughts re some naval provocation to bring us into another war for the last few weeks.
-Phut
“The real onslaughts besetting the nation in realms such as banking fraud, money in politics, peak oil, climate uncertainty, and economic contraction are at once too complex for the diabetic fat men to comprehend, and grossly misreported in the public arena, were Cable TV and newspapers work the levers of propaganda for one client or another.”
=================================================
Very good points indeed. Why is there no dialoge concerning preparedness for what’s coming ? And just wondering, why is it that when people start to take steps to prepare for the bad shit coming our way are they painted as conspiracy freaks or nut cases ? Don’t doubt that the 1% has their safety plans in place.
I missed the game,NatGeo caught my eye and that was that.
So who won ? How many times did madonna grab her crotch ?
On Facebook last night, a friend of mine mentioned his disappointment that the Canadian network which re-broadcast the stupor bowl replaced the much sought-after American commercials with ones for Canadian goods and services. I could only say in response that we have come to a pretty pass as a society if we’re complaining about being prevented from watching commercials.
I avoided the stupor bowl as much as possible, but I do listen regularly to NPR’s Planet Money podcast. From Friday’s edition I learned that Lucas Oil Stadium will cost local taxpayers $600 million over 30 years to pay off. I’m afraid the good people of metro Indianapolis are fools, but this seems to be the way of the world with people and their sports venues.
‘zone, what would be a good price for a roll of 1″ ?
I run across stuff all the time.
This is so so so……………………mean.
All I saw was Madonna on the Gym’s big-screen #7 getting off a big golden chair that looked like it was stolen from the temple of Isis. I was on an exercise bike listening to the most recent kunstlercast on a new toy I have. Never saw anything but her mechanical extravaganza to the worship of some Canaan deity. Did 15 miles and went home and never saw the game. Did somebody win?
So now I know we have only twenty years of natural gas and we get that by having a scorched earth gold-rush resource extraction policy. A link to Arthur Berman is on my site under Corn Pone, bottom of the list.
O3, Do you drill perchance? I thought about a well. I have city water. Screw the city. I am in town. My “old neighbor” tells me there is water close to the surface where we are at.
Hurra! Hurra! Hurra folks! Step right up! Watch the amazing America! She walks, she talks, she crawls on her belly like a reptile!! What a sick Superbowl spectacle. Who gives a f***. Well…..at least there is good news; the bankers got a ‘get out of jail free’ card; we’re saved! Unemployment numbers are down; we’re saved! A decadent multi-millionaire Republican presidential candidate who doesn’t think the poor need help will probably be our next President; we’re saved! The economy is on the road to recovery; we’re saved! The radio station out on the production floor just finished playing ‘Proud to be an American’ but I don’t hear people singing along to it much anymore. No body is feeling all that free these days.
Hey, my guess last night that Jim’s essay would contain something like this (below) wasn’t too far off.
As … America’s prodigious glutei maximi settled into their leather-cushioned Lazyboys for Super Bowl XLVI … Surely when the numbers are known pepperoni pizza sales alone would account for a discernible blip in 1Q GDP.”
Jim actually wrote:
The reality out there in “flyover” land is an audience of diabetic fat men in clownish loungewear slouched on sofas in foreclosed houses enjoying stupendous portions of cheesy and lard-laden foodstuffs between cigarettes and beers.
I laughed out loud at the succinct image. Nobody does a contempt rant better than Jim.
I am further amused by all those CFNers who have so often expressed their contempt for pro sports – Vlad, chief among em – only to be glued to their flatscreens through the entire spectacle.
Oh sure, Moo wrote “What game?” and Rick (probably gay ;-)) said he hated American football, especially the Super Bowl.
Prog, as usual, with his need to be everyone’s pal, was trapped in a politician’s dilemma. He confessed interest in the game but “didn’t know why.” He desperately did not want to be on the outs with the CFN majority – a certain academically elite type – who claim sports are gauche and unnecessary while secretly watching like rubber-neckers passing an accident scene.
Tootsie (Mrs Beasley) had a point in calling Jim a douche for not recognizing the JOKE aspect of the Silverado commercial. I mean, for Kricesakes, there’s product to be sold.
Heard Kim Mitchell on radio “Q107” a couple days back that ½-time performers only get their expenses covered, ie. travel, lodging, etc. for their entire entourage of course.
Chris Hedges, great vid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature…v=7zotYU21qcU#
or here:
http://www.goldismoney2.com/showthread.php?28576-Chris-Hedges-quot-Brace-Yourself!-The-American-Empire-Is-Over…
I guess the question of the day for JHK is..If you hate the SuperBowl so much, why did you watch it? You hardly needed to see it to know what sort of things were happening. Or did you watch it so you could rant & feel superior to all of the others who were? Me..I’ve never seen a single SuperBowl, and in fact, I’ve never willingly watched any sporting event. Are we declining and working our way to a disaster, absolutely? Does SuperBowl 46 confirm that? Who knows? I remember someone claiming 3 years ago that we wouldn’t have any food on our tables come fall of 2009 because the Agri-Business cartel was going to fold. I’m still waiting. You have a good long-range vision James, but if I were you, I’d not quite put such specific timimg on everything, since all of this is in the Lord God’s hands.
Why would you guys be so hypnotized by a bunch of truck dudes? You should be more like the Red M&M who was ready to stick his dick anywhere, in anyone, when he saw the Brown M&M.
“PUNISH THE GUILTY. DO IT NOW.”
I agree but I’m confident the guilty will profit and the innocent will pay.
“And the Meek shall inherit what’s left of the Earth. . .”
Listen to yourselves, you all sound like tired old reactionairies, Grouchy Old Man and all.
We yahoos of yesteryear warned you about this pop culture crap and had abuse heaped on us for our efforts.
Come to realize fine folks that you did the bidding for a stupid political cult out of guilt over the Holocaust, slavery and the abuse of primitive brown people without machine guns and what has this wrought?
Now what have we got? An Israel less secure, blacks devolving and getting dumber as a group and primitive brown people turning to a hateful religion or burning their country down to make iPads.
Liberalism has failed.
Thank you for changing your name back to normal. It was madness on your part. Madness. Did you see the ad where the woman head butted her husband into submission? Why does no one think that is strange? Imagine the out cry if an ad portrayed violence against women.
Well, first off I drive a Dodge with a Cummins diesel motor powering the truck. The Chev Ford thing didn’t do anything for me.
Yeah, I know, that diesel motor cost a lot more money. Diesel versus gas argument does (do something for me).
I intermittently watched the game between waiting for youtube downloads, in making a movie of my morning fishing adventure. Yeah, I am a bit overweight, but no, no beer, cigarettes, or fat laden foodstuffs for me.
Didn’t see the Madonna thing though. I will have to watch it now there is such a JK kinda fuss over it. Maybe it will get on youtube?
Should I get soused up to watch it?
To bad the fishing had me breathing fresh air most of the day and helped me to fall asleep before the end of the game.
It was pretty damn good ending to have missed.
Quite frankly, I do feel like a macho man when I jump in my 2006 Dodge truck powered by a Hemi. But I whimper like a little bitch when I glance at the gas gauge. When I drive my 1995 Honda Civic I feel not so masculine, more like a tattooed teenager except for the absence of an oversized tailpipe. But then I pay $275 to drive 3005 miles down to Florida and back, and I smile like that same teenager after he scores a couple Oxycoton..
Talking about screaming ids, no brains the Greek debt talks basically have fizzled to the finger pointing stage. That’s according to felix salmon in his blog.
Is this thing going pear shaped? Already has. The Greek economy, the measureable one that is, has apparently and by many accounts gone into severe recession. People working for both the public service and private companies report not getting paid, cops don’t respond to calls, there are stories of people being denied health services because the insurance company stopped payments and, well, because there’s no money.
The Greeks cannot seem to summon the will to either pay the taxes or collect the taxes necessary to fund their state benefits. Other Europeans see this and don’t seem inclined to pay for what the Greeks are refusing to pay themselves.
On March 20 there’s Euro 14 billion in Greek bonds maturing and that is Greece’s date with the hangman.
Hi Q, I see that reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated. Welcome back. I can honestly say I did not watch the great circus which is the Stuporbowl. To admit that is sacrilegious in these parts. After all, this is New England Patriots country. A gray veil has descended upon this town since last nights loss to the mighty New Jersey Giants. I am of course in the minority. I was walking my dogs during the game and I don’t think I saw a single car. I wish it was always that way.
How is a a Jewish State taken from the Arabs by force and fraud and surrounded by Arab States ever going to be secure? And who should secure it – us? Why?
Our allies? After the Lavon Affair and the attack on the Liberty? The Jewish terrorists who attempted the false flag in Egypt to get us into that war, were all given medals years later after we weren’t looking anymore. That’s Israel.
Several prominent Israelis have threatened to end Western European Civilization if things don’t pan out the way they want. With their long range missiles and nuclear submarines stupidly given to them by the cowed Germans, they are capable of making good their threat.
Allies don’t threaten to destroy you. They are not Western and we owe them nothing. Their influence is due to the power of money in corrupt Western Democracies and also to the weird version of Christianity they have engineered in America.
Yo Mook, 2 n’s in Oxycontin. Ask me how I know. ;o)
What gets up my nose is exporting crap American culture down here (downunder). We had the “Sooperbowl” live on one of our free-to-air channels yesterday and as the kids were home from school early from a swimming carnival I put it on for a few minutes so I could “bag” the event for a bit of humour (humor).
Before I began the diatribe I asked the kids, “Hey, you want to see a sport even more boring than cricket?” Both kids (girl 12 and boy 15) “Uh, okay.” I don’t know where in the game it was up to, maybe somewhere in the first half. I said, “Check this out, I’m going to count out the amount of time each “play” lasts and then the gap between.”..
Eventually the first play began and I counted out three seconds, it was then followed by fifteen seconds of two slow-motion replays from different angles and shots of coaches either gesticulating widely in frustration or speaking intently into a head-microphone with a photo of the player who did the most thrown in for good measure. The the next couple of plays were roughly the same until on the fourth play, which included one player falling down and hurting his knee in a somewhat manufactured manner, the gap was so wide they chucked in a local commercial as well as the thirty second gap for gesticulations, a bio on the fallen one, and much jumping of camera from coach to coach. Of course my running commentary was meant to be humorous and I had the kids laughing their heads off – the desired effect.
Naturally the costumes got a bagging as well, helmets and pads especially included. I’m not one for “team sports” but rugby is far more interesting to watch – and it doesn’t stop unless someone is carried off on a stretcher. Sadly today our local papers are full of “Sooperbowl” but all the coverage is about the adds and Madonna “raising her middle digit”. I don’t know who won the game, and I have to say I really don’t care, unless there was a riot by “sports fans” afterwards that caused a lot of interesting carnage.
Their influence is due to the power of money in corrupt Western Democracies and also to the weird version of Christianity they have engineered in America. – V
I wouldn’t put it all on the Israelis. Don’t minimize the power of the West’s own stupidity in this mess. And don’t minimize Arab/Muslim idiocy either.
Everybody is in an uproar over a postage stamp sized patch of real estate in the middle of nowhere. If there was just a half an ounce of brains in all the western and Arab foreign services (which there isn’t – just think of all the Ivy League educations and the foreign equivalents that were wasted over the decades on this thing) we would by now have had a public discussion on doing the obvious thing ie make like Pontius Pilate, wash our hands of it and let the locals duke it out. But no – avoid common sense at all costs.
Copy dat’ IH2!
“and it doesn’t stop unless someone is carried off on a stretcher.” that’s a classic! That is the what makes it a sport and not a “game”.
Heard rumours that the Goverment doesn’t want any “hoarding” of food – even asked Mountain House for their client list. What has anyone else heard?
Where did you hear this? Sounds kind of lame. I’m on the watch list and I have a right to know!
TRIPP
I think the failure is more pervasive than just one side of the political spectrum. Look at the gallery of no hopes, has beens and never will bes up for the Republican nomination. 308 million people and this is the cream of the crop?
I’m not saying that liberalism hasn’t failed. It has. Look at Obama, a pretty boy with a silver tongue but an awfully thin CV for the hardest executive job on the planet wouldn’t you say? For all their alleged intellectual superiority over the fat fucks from flyover country this is the best that liberals can do?
VK, I doubt if the feds even asked Mountain House for their client list. Since when do they “ask” for anything?
And who created and funded the NAACP? The Irish? The Italians? The Blacks? No, the you know who’s. And who dominates the Media and revels in the insult of White Men? And who constantly agitates against us and our Religion in the ACLU and the SPLC? And who were the masterminds of the Hate Crime Laws? That’s right the ADL of Bnai Brith.
And furthermore I say Carthage should be destroyed. (Sigmund Freud’s hero was Hannibal. And he felt the greatest tragedy of European History that Rome defeated the Semitic Carthaginians.)
Amazing! A lot of the above seems to say that folks just can’t bring themselves to not watch the ads! Why?
I totally tuned out and ignored the ads and the halftime and enjoyed the football. Overall, it was one of the better games of the season.
Overall in televised sports, you can see those who are best at what they do put out extreme effort to win. I may not care for some particular sport, but I like to know that those who are the best are striving to their utmost. There’s a lesson there.
And for many, there is much more to them than just physical talent and ability. One aspect of IQ is the ability and rate for processing information inputs. A low IQ doesn’t help at all in many of the action sports. Few university intellectuals ever have to process the inputs as rapidly as do quarterbacks or racing drivers–and survival depends upon having the ability. Might be why Elway and Penske are millionaires…
Please pardon my Old 6969 moment. I’m not anti -Obama .I’m anti big government in general. Somebody e-mailed me this and I thought it was a little provocative. I don’t know if it is true.
WHERE ARE BARACK OBAMA’S PAST GIRLFRIENDS?
I hadn’t thought about this – but where are O’s past girlfriends –
surely he had at least one? No past girl friends popping up
anywhere? Strange – strange to the point of being downright
weird!
OK, this is just plain old common sense, no political agendas
for either side Just common knowledge for citizens of this
country, especially American citizens, who know every little
tidbit about every other president (and their wives). We even
know that Andrew Jackson’s wife smoked a corn cob pipe and
was accused of adultery, or that Lincoln never went to school,
or Kennedy wore a back brace, or Truman played the piano.
We are Americans! Our Media vets these things out! We are
known for our humanitarian interests and caring for our “fellow
man.” We care, but none of us know one single humanizing fact
about the history of our own president.
Honestly, and this is a personal thing … but it’s bugged me for
years that no one who ever dated him ever showed up. Considering
his charisma, which caused the women to be drawn to him so
obviously during his campaign, looks like some female would not
have missed the opportunity….
We all know about JFK’s magnetism and that McCain was no monk.
Palin’s courtship and even her athletic prowess were probed. Biden’s
aneurisms are no secret. Look at Cheney and Clinton-we all know
about their heart problems. How could we have left out Obama before
or during the White House?
Nope… not one lady has stepped up and said, “He was soooo shy,” or
“What a great dancer!”
Now look at the rest of what we know… no classmates, not even the
recorder for the Columbia class notes ever heard of him.
Who was the best man at his wedding? Start there. Check for
groomsmen. Then get the footage of the graduation ceremony.
Has anyone talked to the professors? Isn’t it odd that no one is
bragging that they knew him or taught him or lived with him.
When did he meet Michele and how? Are there photos? Every
president provides the public with all their photos, etc. for their
library. What has he released? Nada – other than what was in
his so-called biography! And experts who study writing styles,
etc. claim it was not Obama’s own words or typical of his speech
patterns, etc.
Does this make any of you wonder?
Ever wonder why no one ever came forward from Obama’s past,
saying they knew him, attended school with him, was his friend,
etc ? Not one person has ever come forward from his past.
This should really be a cause for great concern. Did you see the
movie titled The Manchurian Candidate?
Let’s face it. As insignificant as we all are… someone with whom we
went to school remembers our name or face…someone remembers
we were the clown or the dork or the brain or the quiet one or the
bully or something about us.
George Stephanopoulos, ABC News, said the same thing during the
2008 campaign. Even George questions why no one has
acknowledged that the president was in their classroom or ate in the
same cafeteria or made impromptu speeches on campus.
Stephanopoulos was in the class of 1983 at Columbia – same as
Obama. He says he never had a single class with him.
Since he is such a great orator, why doesn’t anyone in Obama’s
college class remember him? And, why won’t he allow Columbia to
release his records? Do you, like millions of others, simply assume
all this is explainable – even though no one can?
NOBODY REMEMBERS OBAMA AT COLUMBIA .
Looking for evidence of Obama’s past, Fox News contacted 400
Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims
to have been there, but not one remembers him. For example,
Wayne Allyn Root was (like Obama) a political science major at
Columbia, who graduated in 1983. In 2008, Root says of Obama,
“I don’t know a single person at Columbia who knew him, and
they all know me. I don’t have a single classmate who ever knew
Barack Obama at Columbia … EVER!
Nobody recalls him.
Root adds that he was, “Class of ’83, political science, pre-law”
and says, “You don’t get more exact or closer than that. Never
met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him.
“At our 20th class reunion five years ago, who was asked to be
the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack!
And five years ago, nobody even knew who he was. The guy
who writes the class notes, who’s kind of the, as we say in New
York, “the macha” who knows everybody, has yet to find a
person, a human who ever met him.”
Obama’s photograph does not appear in the school’s yearbook,
and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years
at Columbia , provide school records, or provide the name of any
former classmates or friends while at Columbia .
How can this be?
NOTE: Wayne Allyn Root can easily be verified. He graduated
valedictorian from his high school, Thornton-Donovan School ,
then graduated from Columbia University as a Political Science
major in the same ’83 class in which Barack Hussein Obama
states he was.
There are lots of criticisms one can make about Obama, but you that tired old RW conspiracy email you felt was worth posting here has been repeatedly debunked… guess you all got tired of getting looked at funny when you asked about his birth certificate? Anywho, spend about 5 minutes with google and see for yourself. Hope that helps! Have a great day!
the media hologram infusing the superbowl was pornographic in every way – fitting for the debased culture described in this blog so well. Was half expecting shadow dances on the screen behind madonna suggestive of someone like her riding someone like d. rodmen’s “tower of power for over an hour” – apologies to f. zappa – o wait, those were shadows in my mind, not on the screen, getting increasingly hard to separate the two….
From an e-mail to my Brit friend Amanda, just back from an economically vital Germany:
Don’t know how the Germans do it. This economy and society are sliding down a slope that shall end who knows where, but some think facism. Here’s a clue — we were watching the Super Bowl yesterday. Mostly we watch it for the commercials, which cost 2.5 million per 30 secs and hence are usually well done and clever. The one that won this year in polls of viewers was made by a bloke with a great dane. The commerical shows the animal burying the remains of a cat then bribing the man with Doritos (tortilla chips flavoured with God knows what). Of course we were horribly offended. And other viewers were too, but MUCH in the small, almost insignificant minority. According to polls, Americans loved the commercial. The amateur who made it was awarded a million dollars.
This sick humor and veiled, displaced hostility is, for me, clear evidence of a hopeless, helpless, angry citizenry looking for relief through a victim. Since it’s no longer possible to victimize minorities, women, or the mentally handicapped, cats do nicely. And it will only get worse as the oil dries up and there is nothing to replace it. Now the reason we went to Iraq and Afganistan is clear. We want to be there until the last drop is extracted from the ground. I doubt there is any clear plan for what we’re going to do after that.
Nothing much we can do. We’re saving for a small place in a small town in an agricultural area.
We like xxxxxxx, about 20 miles from Sxxxx, everything close at hand. Looks like the best bet for the long term. Of course, I could be wrong. We could perfect and trust nuclear energy or discover super efficient solar panels, both possibilities being remote. Still, we’d be in a nice town and not living at the mercy of our landlords who are extracting the highest rents possible because after the bubble few people can get credit.
Some good news: some States are contemplating issuing their own gold/silver backed currencies or at least allowing gold and silver coins as viable currency in case of extreme inflation.
Too little too late? In most cases certainly. But who knows? Perhaps the Republic of North Dakota might have a chance: lots of grain, milk, and meat and oil for fuel. Not many minority enrichers either. They would have to barricade the interstates with their National Guard if they still have any in state. Compassion is going to be a private luxury. Any State Official who doesn’t see it that way will be a traitor.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/03/pf/states_currencies/?article
Like your blog. I didn’t watch the game either. I know some people who taped the game so they could watch the ads without interruption.
I wanta see Madonna driving that ol’ truck. Did Sam Elliot provide the voiceover? Buncha whores.
White Men too – see the one where the wife head butts her husband onto the floor. Or are you Ok with that like most people are?
Last year a White Man licked the fingers of a Black to get the potato chip taste.
To be “charitable”: many are inured to this because it’s so constant – and may not even notice it anymore. That’s worse btw since it’s operating in the subconscious.
And who is imitating their nicolaitanism?
I watched the ManU v. Chelsea soccer match instead of the football pre-game blather. No commercial interruptions during the two 45-minute halves, world-class players demonstrating skill, finesse and teamwork, and a thrilling come-from-behind tie for ManU.
I also watched Downton Abbey instead of the Super Bowl. No commercial interruptions, brilliant dialogue and story, and a poignant reminder that even the most powerful empire on earth has its zenith and its decline. Best wishes.
Ozone,
This is OT this week, but thank for the tip back in December on the first book from your deLorean-driving relative. (A flux capacitor-equipped deLorean, at that 🙂
It was a blast, and I couldn’t put it down!
? Ready Player One – Ernest Cline
(For a completely different treatise of a similar subject matter, check out Daemon by Suarez
?
? ?
Not sure how the Middle East or Obama got into this conversation but I can see it’s already headed off into nutbar land, thanks to our favourite regular trolls.
Enjoyed the rant today and will pass it along to my son. He loves his NFL and the superbowl is a big day for him. Not sure why, I certainly never encouraged an attachment to American football. He says our own CFL is lame and won’t watch it.
I see that the big car Eastwood is pushing for Chrysler is apparently Canadian made. Imagine that!
Did I miss something? The Super bowl happened yesterday? Oh, well…
Why complain? She the logical end product of the beliefs that you hold: socialism, feminine empowerment, atheism, globalism etc) You don’t believe in these? But you march with those that do. Why do you believe they will spare you in the end? Because you’re not me? But you’re not them either – and in the end all must join.
You are with your lust for out breeding. You and Grouchy both believe in a cafe au lait world. You don’t? But your policies would lead to it so it’s a differnce that doesn’t make a difference. If you are not with us, you are against us. Ham was cursed long ago even by your own theology – to be a servant till the end of the age. Now you would undo this for your own pleasure? Like Romney you are weak. He turned the car to the side of the road and wept when his false Prophet declared Blacks able to join the Church. His God, like your’s, changes his mind.
Read: http://cambriawillnotyield.blogspot.com/
Does it embarrass you to post such an ignorant, dumb, backwardass statement? Or are you all id and no superego?
That would be backasswards. Meaning that the Green Party was founded on sustainability issues, not more of the same wasteful Earth-destroying actions that the two corporate parties celebrate.
My question stands. Aren’t you the least embarrassed at showing your ignorance?
I watched the Superbowl and I had a blast. We went to a “Who Cares” party (no one cared who won since we’re all 49’s fans). Drank great wine and ate fantastic food. Made snarky remarks about Madonna. My favorite commercials featured dogs–the VW commercial was my favorite. I’m a sucker for any advertisement with chimps, dogs or bears!
Yes, I agree. If a truck is clean, the owner should be driving a car.
The ones that REALLY piss me off are the “trucks” with extended passenger seating and a covered 4 foot bed. In other words, a gas-eating passenger car.
Nah, they won’t care how many people know.
Look at 9-11. Obama still trots that discredited puppy out everytime he wants to kill someone new, or bomb another country.
Doesn’t matter how many people are onto them, as long as the TV people spout the right lines.
Well, good for you, Ripped.
One of the weirdest things that ever happened to me was when I lived on a crowded street in San Francisco.
I came around the corner one Sunday and there was no person in sight. The street was empty. But then there was an enormous roar of male voices, which made me jump in alarm.
What the hell? It turns out that there was a football game on that day, and all those apartments were filled with men watching it.
Another time, I was going on the train to New Orleans and the conductor warned us not to walk around the train station. She said it was dangerous.
But I looked at the map and thought, I’m not paying a taxi to go three blocks to the hotel. So I head off and foot, and damn!, there’s cops on every corner. 3 or 4 of them. This must be a dangerous neighborhood, I thought.
Right as I was heading up the hotel stairs, the doors opened and thousands of screaming people headed downstairs. I was swimming upstream. I wondered if it was a bomb scare, but they looked kind of happy.
Turns out the Superdome was behind the hotel, and the Saints had just won a football game. (This was before Katrina.)
OK, that’s my two football stories.
I found Eastwood’s ad fascinating. Not only that it carries the old theme of alternate reality where in the ‘second half’ we rebuild the driving utopia. By now, this pattern of corporatism trying to squeeze out the last drop of blood from a dying system is nothing unusual, sadly.
What’s fascinating though is the implied idea of hope for Detroit and other cities that follow the same path. That Detroit, a city that is somewhere around 90% black, with about 50% illiteracy rate, steadily slipping deeper and deeper into a typical African reality of violence, corruption, incompetence, decay, the overwhelming inability to self-organize and accomplish anything of value, that that city can be somehow transformed, rebuilt and restored. That Detroit’s decline had nothing to do with an invasion of Africans and the subsequent white flight. That you can replace an intelligent, creative and industrious European population of 100yrs ago with blacks, and still have a vibrant and prosperous community.
When it comes to completely ignoring reality, this idea of racial equivalence should at least compete with Jim’s image of (presumably white) diabetic fat men on their last legs expecting a miraculous turnaround of their failed fortunes, but on these pages at least, it seems to be a non-issue. Folks who seem to easily grasp the concept of peak oil and collapse of rapacious consumerist societies are in a complete denial when it comes to acknowledging the glaringly obvious and vastly different evolutionary outcomes for blacks and non-blacks.
Incredible…
OK, don’t you hate rugby? How many times a game do you have to haul their injured butts to the ER?
I truly hate working on rugby tournament weekends.
Roger. I never know whether my mother is flushing the real deal down the toilet because of these spellings.
How many of you 49er fans dropped your drinks or at least had on glance off the side of your leg?
One. Sorry.
“But your policies would lead to it so it’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference.”
You forget yourself. You do not know my “policies”, so you make yourself appear foolish { or over-reaching } by attacking that which you do not know.
Pride in racial heritage is a very personal thing, and should remain so. Choosing mates for others should, at the very limit, be restricted to parents.
Have you ever considered Duet. 23? Edomites { and perhaps others who were kin } were not allowed to “enter into the congregation until the third generation” and a “mamzer” was not allowed in until the tenth generation. IOW if an edomite {descendant of Esau} was to become a proselite, his children and grandchildren could only be proselites. Only after three generations of faithfulness to the Law could his offspring be counted among the Israelites. The offspring of a racial alien and an israelite were limited to being proselites until nine generations had passed.
It is time for you to recognize that Yahshua broke down the middle wall of partition set there by MEN.
Meanwhile in the West we are preparing to export 200 million tons per year of Wyoming coal to feed China’s voracious appetite. This will mean an additional 40 trains a day to the Coast, each 1.5 miles long, with each uncovered hopper car losing about 500lbs of black coal dust into our air and waterways each trip. Environmental despoilation and climate change – bring it on!
End of newsbreak, now back to the Big Game.
Madonna is still around? Really? I thought she married Prince Charming and was a housewife in Scotland. Whats she need to money for, getting dumped by the Prince? I was glad she was gone.
Well, dog damm. Gee, speaking of blasts from the past, whatever happened to Grace Jones? Now THERE was a potential stupr bowl singer.
😉
From your link: “But in order to face the dragon we must be connected to our past and believe what our ancestors believed…If he won’t have the faith of his ancestors, he will have oblivion.”
Do you think the israelites obeyed Duet. 23?
Recommendations today. Charles Hugh Smith oftwominds.com
==
Great stuff, per usual:
Our complicity in the corruption is never mentioned: our votes for kleptocractic politico toadies who promise us that our share of Federal swag will not be sacrificed, our interest payments to the banking cartel/oligarchy, our acceptance of bogus statistics, bogus “reforms” and ceaseless propaganda as legitimate, and lastly, our silence in the face of destructive deficits, lest our share of the swag be cut.
.
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oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: What If We’re Beyond Mere Policy Tweaks?
– http://goo.gl/xzpmj
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Say, now that i’ve seen the 1/2 time on utube, are you sure that wasn’t Betty White?
Whats next? The Go-Go’s? Banana Rama? The Bangles?
Geeeesh…..
😉
Four years ago, the excitement was mounting with the possibility that “We the People” might accomplish something groundbreaking, something that held great hope for positive change. Many of us still cling to that accomplishment and the hope. My vote for Obama was a lesser of two evils thing–the second time in a row I got talked into that crap.
Not this year. I will not waste my vote on any candidate that the corporate media hype as a “vaible” candidate and allow to fully participate in the presidential debates.
You can bet that JILL STEIN will not be invited to participate. The election is rigged to appear to offer a choice between two candidates that will serve the agendas of the PTB. Why go along with this scam? Even the tiniest bit of critical thinking shows to one not intent on ignoring the facts that IT IS FIXED.
If We the People REALLY want to accomplish something great, brave, radical, and meaningful, we must rally together to promote voting for a third party candidate, JILL STEIN or another.
Sorry, but a guy whose father was African and mother a white American sitting in the White House carrying out the elite’s agendas and talking out of the other side of his mouth is NOT a great accomplishment in my book. If he was purple with with yellow polka dots it wouldn’t friggin’ matter.
Obama, or Clinton, Jr. as i see him, is primed to out Reprivatean, his Demoncratic Poultry predecessor.
Look and see. Or choose to nazi, er I mean not-see. It’s a free country.
i AM LOOKING FOR someone to control me, Like a Rick or Sarah or Michelle, because God is on their side,BUT ALAS HOPE–Roseanne Barr for president!!!!!
“Well, in our society we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics…”
Since fucking when? When have politics had an intersection with intelligence?
“This is what happens when you listen to “Pro Life” nut jobs who hate women so much …”
You mean as opposed to Pro Choice geniuses? 50% of all aborted fetuses would have grown up to be women. Now who is it that hates women again?
“i AM LOOKING FOR someone to control me…”
May I suggest you cast your vote for Obama then?
MessianicDruid, I apologize if I have offended you with any offense of my previous comments. I ask for forgiveness.
I thank you for the link to the 3 hour long C-Span BookTV interview with Chris Hedges. I listened to it and I learned from it.
Thank you again for providing that link.
I am now going to the library to find the book Chris Hedges recommends: THE CROSS AND THE LYNCHING TREE by James H. Cone (2011) about the reign of terror called Jim Crow.
“The ones that REALLY piss me off are the “trucks” with extended passenger seating and a covered 4 foot bed. In other words, a gas-eating passenger car.”
Too right. They need to implement more controls on who can own trucks.
Your clickety-clacks on your keyboard are powered by coal powered plants.
America will look like Latin America, a few rich the rest dirt poor.
Touchdown Jim, full points on your review of ” What’s happenin’ ? ” in today’s digital world.
Now it’s time for the SUPER cleanup after
a time out for the SUPER Flush.
Virus not included.
Yeah M.
I copy CHS articles into my simple text library every day. I love the way he sees this and last week had a grouping of ideas: Counterfeit Money, Counterfeit Economy, Counterfeit Debt, Counterfeit Derivatives, which are worth checking out.
From the sounds of things I would say that the ideas of the corporations and banks being more powerful than nation states that Alvin Toffler futuristic books predict are coming true. Of course, I don’t think China and Russia are going for it. China has our former wealth and might just buy our assets on the cheap.
What if we weren’t a nation state anymore, but the voting public were the only ones who didn’t know?
That would explain the total breakdown of a functional response to what’s happening, wouldn’t it?
Frederick Douglas in his autobiography said that a “Good Master” was a Master who gave his slaves enough food to eat. “Food” typically was a crude, corn meal porridge “SLOP” that the Master would pore into a wooden trough similar to what hogs would eat out of. According to Douglas, some Masters were sadistic and would not give their slaves enough to eat, but most Masters were generous with the SLOP as they wanted to make sure that the slaves had enough energy to work. According to Douglas, the slaves were quite fond of the SLOP, and would supplement it by stealing food on the side.
What can I say? The gambler is in me. Most of the time I really enjoy football and the superbowl, and I know what it is. A millionaire’s club,bread and circuses.
My winning percentage on “close” games and taking the points is extremely high. Took the ‘jints end of 2007 season. Took ’em now. Let them smash their skulls and break their bones, just pay me.
I’m not just talking hundreds here.
Could I be doing something better than chest thumping here? Shit no.
Thanks for the link, lbendet.
I wondered about Keiser’s insistence on higher interest rates. We know that Volcker’s high 80’s rates devastated farmers all over the world, including our own, and led to Third World loans that can never be paid off, even though the principle has been paid long ago.
Michael Hudson straightened him out, I think.
Kunstler in devastating form again this week. One of his best in my humble opinion.
Also I just want to acknowledge and praise the reliability he has shown over the years. I am not aware that he has ever failed us of a Monday. Once or twice I believe he was a day late. Occasionally the writing was a little thin. Mostly it was welcome, usually very good, and occasionally (like this week) brilliant. But the sheer predictability of his Monday edition is extremely commendable, don’t you think? It’s no small thing to offer for free, and Jim if you’re reading this, I commend you on your generosity, discipline and dedication. All good American traits still present there to a large degree.
A decent price for 1″ well line would be about $.50/ft. new. So “laying around, collecting dust” stuff is kinda anybody’s guess, right?
I agree. I always thank JHK when I write in on Mondays (only I think I forgot today)!
____________
Wage, yes that was a good one and equally good is the Max Keiser site:
[KR245] Keiser Report – The Vaporized and the Deleted
We discuss the vaporized and the deleted – the new American soap opera in which the assets, wealth, jobs and economy of the 99% have been stolen.
In the second half of the show, Max talks to Daniel Collins of TheChinaMoneyReport.com about China’s imports of gold and their recent purchases of Germany’s legendary mittelstands.
A very personal thing? Fine, so don’t talk about the ten tribes then since it means nothing to you. It’s just pretending to be Identity when you’re not.
Like all Manichees, you care only for the soul and nothing for the body and its heritage. True Israelites know that God works through His Natural Laws most of the time. Or have you forgotten Phineas and his spear?
What if we weren’t a nation state anymore, but the voting public were the only ones who didn’t know?
==
I don’t think the US was ever a nation state. I think it was always a corporate slave plantation and was meant to be such from the very beginning. Everything else is/was just propaganda theater and lies, produced for the blind ignorant and gullible.
This imperialist idiocy is now being actively foisted on the rest of the world. I say idiocy, because it is a political and economic model that time and again has shown itself to be nothing other than death.
The Republican party (The Grotesque Oligarchist’s Plutocracy party) are neo-fascist in nature. (Many Democrats follow in lock-step, and are afraid to stand up against them.) They have bought up a great many of the “properties” on the board in order to control the message. Their goal is to make the government serve their own needs, as well as to give them access to the Treasury whenever they show losses. They have bought up the necessary portion of Congress persons (around 20 critical votes). They idealize the Italian style Mussolini plutocracy/oligarchy that existed there during WW2 where the elite controlled the government and in exchange bought them off.
They want to suppress wages and benefits, as well as eliminate the only voice working people have that can compete with the corporate lobbyist buying candidates and elections-–unions.
They want to make sure that the military, the police, and the intelligence sector works strictly for them against everyone else.
This is there goal if the voting public decides to give it to them!
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
Don’t forget about the Whites who were lynched too.
RT,
I don’t “do da drill”, but I would suspect your ol’ timer neighbor might know a thing or 3 about the water table in your dooryard. ;o)
If’n you want discount drilling, I sure can ask. 1/3-1/2 of a million dolla-ray equipment that lays idle don’t pay the bills…
A f’instance: a well of about 350-400′ should be right around 5 grand (boom-town days). The reason to pound such a deep bore when you’ve already hit water at 20′ is CAPACITY, or, “reserve” if you will. Then, you want to keep the pump off of “the floor” of the bore by 20-25′ so there’s a place for the [inevitable] silt to gather.
Wow! Expenses? Heeeeey-zeuz, exposure only! Must be an album or a “comeback” in the works.
Oh well, whatever the market will bear; good luck Hagdonna.
Thanks for the heads-up on that bit of americana.
So I watched it. The part I question is where he says the rest of the world will hear the roar of American engines again.
Who was it that pointed out that drones sound more like lawnmowers?
The US will increasingly save energy by killing people with drones, going green in their own sick and perverted way.
Thanks for the link.
Hedges is the go-to-guy for the pulse of the unacknowledged undercurrent that IS the true zeitgeist. No mistake, he’s seen the horrors right close and knows the signs of ferment to explosion.
That’s really funny, in an outre kind of way, but I’ll be damned if I know exactly why that might be!!
This is why I say about the Repugnacan’ts. Welcome to the Theater of Cruelty.
Nothing like a bunch who don’t believe in evolution to believe in social Darwinism.
Whatever they were a few decades back–they are a whole different animal now.
I don’t “do da drill”, but I would suspect your ol’ timer neighbor might know a thing or 3 about the water table in your dooryard. ;o)
You also don’t want to have too shallow a well, especially in an urban area. Why? The groundwater will be too contaminated with weed killer, bug spray, and all the other shit that people spray on their yards. Plus the old, closed gas station that just had the tanks covered up and are leaking all kinds of shit into the groundwater.
So you want one that goes below that and taps some cleaner ‘spring’.
🙂
Speaking of US-backed murders- lbendet, was it you who linked to the article about the Arab League report which didn’t follow the US-NATO-GCC line?
“The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.
Once again, the official NATOGCC version of Syria is of a popular uprising smashed by bullets and tanks. Instead, BRICS members Russia and China, and large swathes of the developing world see it as the Syrian government fighting heavily armed foreign mercenaries. The report largely confirms these suspicions. ”
http://www.atimes.com//atimes/middle_east/nb04ak01.html
Great Superbowl game! However the ultimate insult to anyone with a modicum of intelligence were the words, “WORLD PEACE” writ large in lazer light on the foreground during the half-time show of a nation with more on-going wars than any time in history. Some peace!
Yeah baby!
Keep that flux capacitor warmed up and ready… we may have to “jump” on a moment’s notice! ;o)
Yes, that was me.
Maybe yours are, but Actually and Fortunately my power is 100% hydroelectric and provided by a non-profit Public Utility District.
And if it wasn’t I would use a microsolar system to provide the paltry 150 watts.
So don’t ASSume, mrs B.
The ones that REALLY piss me off are the “trucks” with extended passenger seating and a covered 4 foot bed. In other words, a gas-eating passenger car.
=============
My neighbor across the street has the truck you describe but without the cover over the bed … a very slick looking “loaded” silver-grey Ford 150. His wife has a small German sports car … not sure what make. They’re in their mid-30s, have no kids and both work.
Every morning the guy picks up off his driveway the NY Times and “hauls” it to work with him on the truck’s front passenger seat.
Why not try a dowser first.
Yep.
Don’t watch or wait or look for the partisans…
they’ll show up; always late for the party, but that’s how it’s done. Survival first; cold choices second.
Re Obama:
Your long rant about his non-personhood reminds me of something I dismissed at the time.
In 2007, an acquaintance into the ET/UFO contactee “religion”, put forth that 0Bummer was a clone or an android. Haven’t seen him since. Given your post, maybe he was on to something!
I watched the bowl and all the commercials and loved every minute of it. It’s FRIGGIN ENTERTAINMENT
Is you from ’round h’yar?
…’cause most anywhere you have a mind to drill, you’ll hit water. UNLESS you’re silly enough to drill in a “development” of closely packed abodes, all sucking the same aquifer dry! ;o)
I simply said, “The house is goin’ here; drill there (stake provided).” 2 1/2 gal/minute; plenty good with a 400 gallon capacity.
(No offense to dowsers; they generally will find the best “flow” most times.)
I watched the bowl and all the commercials and loved every minute of it. It’s FRIGGIN ENTERTAINMENT folks. Nothing more nor less.
Yeah, the world’s going to hell in a hand basket. This was fun time. Can’t think about that tragic crap all the time. Too depressing.
Nice week’s work, JHK. Thanks to you, as always.
“Are American men not expected to think beyond the immediate moment they are in? Are they on an intellectual level with lemurs and Holstein steers?
The Superbowl pageant is a window into the condition of American manhood, and the view is pretty pathetic. It’s a picture of men who feel so weak, insecure, and fearful that they have to compensate with fantasies of….”
This is hilarious, JHK. Pointed, incisive, maybe even poignant – but still hilarious. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, does American cultural critiques like the host of this website, Mr. JHK.
Beyond that, the number of posters who write in to express their prideful non-watching of the super Bowl spectacle is a little off-putting, to say the least. Just watch the stupid thing next year, if you’re going to comment to CFN the following Monday. JHK will watch it.* I will watch it, though I still won’t know exactly why next year, either. I haven’t played football since high school. And I haven’t bet on pro sports since the early ’80’s. Why I’m trying to make myself be interested in the football in the Super Bowl is an enigma.
But – the SB Spectacle is an unique look under the hood into the psychological status of mainstream America. And it’s a look at the output of the “best and brightest” efforts of focus group research and marketing firms.
We don’t all know why we are the way we are.
And we certainly don’t all know how to appeal to our own group instincts. But somebody does. And they show their best research and their most expensive work for the year – during the Super Bowl.
And, hey, even the football game wasn’t too bad, this year.
*Unless TSHTF during the coming year. In which case none of us, even JHK, will be watching Super Bowl 47. And I would miss it, though I have no clear idea why.
Not sure where h’yar is but in the mountains of western Massachusetts your methodoligy could cost you mucho jing. Random staking is foolish.
King Tut was a European DNA evidence now shows. Too bad for you Afrocentric Bullshit World View.
methodology…sorry
I was disappointed in the commercials this year. Of course there were the usual beer commercials. Now INBEV (formerly AB) has a NEW TASTE FREE light beer – Bud Light Platinum! No thanks. I can filter my own water. Give me a locally brewed IPA or Stout instead.
Too many commercials were for lame 3D movies. I can’t wait to spend my $10 (senior discount) to see one. And I plan on buying a truck this week so that I can survive the coming apocalypse.
The only commercial that made me laugh this year was the one with the little kid in the fountain.
I missed the halftime show. I flipped to another channel to watch a re-run of one of the Republican debates. Drill, baby, drill.
At least it was a good football game.
Unless you are a real farmer or maybe running construction sites, pickups are the most impractical of available vehicles. Expensive, oversized gas guzzlers with 3/4 of the rig open to rain & snow (yeah, you have to shovel out your “bed”), plus general road filth, thievery, etc. Usually not your most comfortable or best handling, in general. Limited seating for passengers should you need it. Poor traction when empty – in winter you have to haul around sandbags just to stay on the road – well thats great for fuel economy.
Yet you see them everywhere, usually empty except for the (single male) driver. The bulbous hood, the diesel throb & stink, the false front grill and maybe a big set of ram horns – just to complete the testosterone + 92 octane-equivalant fueled rutting display. (The other version of empty is a pair of dirt bikes, snow “sleds” or some other fuel consuming atrocity).
There is a growing penchant for these rigs that I can only put down to massive compensation for American males emasculation in the service industry economy. Plus the evershortening male member due to numerous plastic estrogens present in the water, beer and soda pop. And the radiation.
Yes you can get a canopy and 4WD but its all at extra cost. Canopy access, security and weathertightness is crummy, basically why bother? Get a van and a small flat bed trailer – you will be miles and lower CO2 ahead!
LARWBD said “….I only watch (the super bowl) to deconstruct the advertising.”
And… ?
My analysis was the following: the audience is overwhelmingly male, the sport, all male, so, why were the advertisements dripping with femininity? Many of them featured the tired “dopey man, smart woman” theme. Scratch that- most did.
I have no problem with Madonna or the halftime show, but, clearly everyone else in the room did. FYI, 13 guys and one girl.
Is it just me, or does everything “around” the game seem infested with women? I feel as if it is a way of invading the “man cave” in a sneaky way.
Mostly true, as far as it goes.
The plutocracy controls a majority of Congress, not just 20+ seats. USA has the best politicians money can buy! So does the rest of the world.
The plutocracy runs the Repugnican and Demoncrat leadership, the major media, the foundations, the universities and the majority of the major corporations. They own the TBTF banks and the Fed and the other central banks. They control every significant power center in the world.
Voting will not change this.
“The people who vote decide nothing. The people WHO COUNT the vote decide everything.” -Josef Stalin (supposedly)
“There’s really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.” -HL Menchen (verified)
On wells and dowsers and other things –
Underground water in these Southern Appalachians where I live, is a hit-or-miss business. You can have a 300 foot well that flows 50 GPM, and the closest neighbor will have a 500 foot well that barely flows at all.
And it all is dependent on the underlying geology – and on a relatively “micro” scale, too.
I’ve seen dowsing done, successfully, to locate an underground sewer line, for a single residence in a crowded neighborhood. This was back in the early ’60’s, and long before everybody and his brother had electronics for locating stuff underground. So – I’m saying I’ve seen dowsing work incredibly well, in the hands of a practitioner who “BELIEVED!”
My well driller did his own dowsing.
He picked a piss-poor location for my well.
Somebody told me later that my drillers dowsing rods always seems to cross magically – precisely at the location where his drilling rig would easily back up into.
My well went down 500 feet. That’s at $10.00 per foot, without pump, wires, controller, pipe, and tank. Originally, my well flowed about one pint per minute. It was one sad well.
I hired a crew to videotape the inside of the well, followed by -GASP- “hydrofracturing” of the rock surrounding the well.
Now bless Betsy, after the fracking, I’ve got good water flow, even though my pump hangs only about 250 feet down into the well.
I still believe in dowsing, in the right hands.
But now I believe in fracking, too.
Your description of the randomness of finding water in the southern Appalachians is true in the southern Greens. It’s all a crap shoot. That is why using a dowser ahead of time is worth the effort. Preferably a dowser you know. My sympathies for your poor results, however the story of the driller’s dowsing wands magically crossing where easy access for his rig had me chuckling…
Ctrades said “Since it’s no longer possible to victimize minorities, women, or the mentally handicapped, cats do nicely. And it will only get worse as the oil dries up and there is nothing to replace it.”
What will be difficult to replace is the 40 pounds of kitty litter your little rug-rat shits and pees in. I was examining a bucket of this shit the other day, thinking to myself what resources it takes to sop up cat piss and shit. I mean, there are over 900 million cats in North America, and not one of these worthless hides is indigenous. We feed them chickens, tuna, turkeys, cows, and clear and plant wildlife habitat so the addled can have their cat-fancy.
When the trucks stop bringing the kitty litter, what happens? I’ll tell you what happens. Hundreds of millions of cats pissing and shitting all over the landscape, leaving indelible smells in the carpets, floors, and walls of abodes. Their fecal matter will ooze and spread and hitch rides on human feet all over the landscape leaving trichomoniasis and toxoplasma spores everywhere.
And when your friend finds her “xxxxx” rural place, 20 miles from “xxxxx” make sure she brings her diseased little pet animals! That will ensure she will be soft and addled when my goon squad shows up to rob the place blind. Muhahaha!
The bulbous hood, the diesel throb & stink, the false front grill and maybe a big set of ram horns – just to complete the testosterone + 92 octane-equivalant fueled rutting display.
==========
Excellent and Kunstler-like … laughed my ass off.
BTW, it’s equivalent but I’ll let you slide.
I barely paid attention to the Super Bowl. I did catch few commercials and the halftime show. Sad to say I am embarrassed to even call myself an American after that gross display of ignorance. I feel like an alien on this planet myself. I don’t understand what is going through people’s heads with that stuff. Anyway, I found a funny blog that sort of does try to explain some of it.
http://squarerootofzero.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/universe-of-absurdity/
Enjoy!
Well, I do admire Madonna. She didn’t trip (as far as I could tell) and apparently sang with her own lungs (although who can tell these days. She clearly runs the show, and M.I.A. was a good choice, a real firecracker, giving the finger. Her lyric “Music makes the bourgeois wanna rebel” is pretty awesome for use of the word ‘bourgeois’.
Music does wanna make the bourgeois rebel. Music was used to fine effect. When the heartstrings of America needed plucking, bluegrass stepped in.
I admire Madonna for her accomplishments and the stage show number was marvellously choreographed. The dancers were conspicuously athletic, the wire-walker was a surprise. The video projected display melded seamlessly with the lit stage. The illusions were top-notch.
SB XLVI featured lots of aging boomer icons, and among those, Madonna was the best presented. After all, you know Madonna works out and eats healthy. She’s been fighting gravity the longest time and it shows. Thats a real accomplishment worthy of respect.
The Motley Crue drummer? Doesn’t eat right, obviously. It made me curious to find out what Clint Eastwood eats. I’ll bet hes a vegetarian.
Good points. What is cat litter and its packaging actually made from (oil and trees, I suspect).
Lets see, 900 million cats clawing, screeching, retching and shitting over my immobilized and starving figure – my doom scenario is complete. And thanks for that.
PS
Lost in all the goofy hoopla is the fact that the game itself was pretty damn good – Incredibly skillful play with very few fouls!
The human condition is basically the delusion of the Ego. People that we consider “superior” are largely considered superior because they have some special ability or characteristic (e.g., more money, more power, gifted at physics, playing the guitar, etc. etc.), but they all have the same character flaws, flaws which relate to their Ego. Hence, everyone appears to be a constant state of individual or collective ego masturbation.
In the Eastern mystic tradition, the superior man is he/she who through mental training extinguishes his/her Ego.
That settles it! Obama was beamed down from an alien spaceship to become the Manchurian candidate of the Klingons.
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3:23
?Brooke Hogan – About Us?
I have some thoughts on the relative non-participation of women as to the Super Bowl and football in general. My thoughts are based on the admittedly too small statistical sample size of my wife.
Various male members of our family (one son, Uncle Pete, son-in-law Ed and myself) are totally into pro football from the pre-season right through to SB Sunday. Though we are scattered geographically we will stay in touch before, during and after the games via text messages, email and cell phone. Every nuance is discussed as if it actually had meaning in the grand scheme of the universe.
Family life in the four households involved must be scheduled around and within the pro schedule. Since this heavily involves the timing and nature of meals it tends to suck my wife unwillingly into the vortex. And fights erupt when she learns that a movie she had her heart set on going to see conflicts with the Jets on “Sunday Night Football.” And then there are those occasional Thursday night games when it all gets to be a bit much. Throw into this picture the fact that I simultaneously follow Rutgers football and will also watch just about any televised college game that catches my fancy.
It is nigh on impossible for her not to absorb some tidbits of what is happening but because of her underlying utter glazed-eyes disinterest it’s all a big jumble in her mind. She DOES try, bless her heart. Sometimes she wants to change the channel because she’s “sick of watching a bunch of huge dirty sweating men jumping on one another.”
Every week I find myself describing anew about the team’s need to gain 10 yards in four “downs” (what’s a down?), what the yellow and red flags are all about, etc. Certain prominent player names register vaguely because of a unique back story like the Manning brothers or the whole thing with Tebow and his religious shtick, but she can’t really keep it straight what teams these stars are associated with. Yesterday she got it in her head that Peyton was playing against Tebow. (“NO NO, Tebow’s with Denver and it’s Eli that’s with the Giants” I groaned for the umpteenth time.)
So, you can just imagine the trouble I had explaining the 2 point “safety” in the first quarter and why the running back tried NOT to cross the goal line with a minute left in the game but fell into the end zone due to unimpeded momentum etc. Well, I might just as well have tried explaining quantum mechanics to my 90-year old mother-in-law.
When it comes to football your average man and woman are two different species.
And may I say, Mr. Kunstler, you deserve a medal for your Madonna-bashing, for you can get in a whole lot of trouble for that. Rock critic Dave Marsh may have set the parameters for all the kisses her posterior has received when he wrote the following:
“Madonna’s music tended toward the black and Latin. So did her boyfriends. It’s hard not to imagine that the young white males who raged against her hardest didn’t find something out of order there.”
So, if you hate Madonna, and you’re a white guy, that automatically means you’re a bigot. And it also means you’re also a nasty, horrid person sick with hatred and musical snobbery. Hey, why not? That’s the criticism I got for daring to bash Madonna. And you know what horrible taste we white guys have in music, what with all those seventies classic rockers we idolize . . .
Oh yeah, there wasn’t a single honky supporting Madge at the Super Bowl halftime show. She must have had the time of her life dancing on the grave of electric guitar rock. And she must get a thrill to know that she’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame laureate and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson still has to pay to get into the building. Anyone know where those Rush records went?
I looked at the Clint Eastwood halftime commercial with a certain sadness because, actually, I’m a sucker for the underdog and Clint was there telling us that even though we’re hurting and divided, we can still be Rocky Balboa.
However, unlike Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech of thirty years ago, Clint might be about six years too late on this speech because a chipper attitude simply the bankers are going to insist of making indentured servants out of every last debtor who owes them a buck because they need that second house in the Hamptons more than John and Jane Doe need a roof over their heads.
Some of what Clint said is actually true. Detroit and Michigan have made a bigger economic comeback than Illinois or any other neighboring Iron Belt state. However, as we all know, much of that has been due to incentives to push future demand into the present. How long the comeback will last is problematic, especially in Q2/Q3/Q4 of this year since the indications are the best we can hope for is a mild recession.
Still, I felt that the Eastwood commercial on behalf of Chrysler was at least PARTIALLY grounded in reality and conveyed a sentiment that I certainly cannot object to … except for the “roaring engines” part. Eastwood did note that we are a hurting, divided culture. Any message worth listening to has to start with sober facts as a premise if they are to be taken at all seriously.
E.
Ahem, ahem (clearing throat). I must defend cats. You speak of 900 million in North America; I believe there are 55 million in the US, so I doubt the 900 mil figure.
Cat feces being carried everywhere? Yuck. But funny thing – what happens to human feces? Does it magically disappear? Or does it get flushed away, only to reappear in altered form in ocean outflows? Where fish drink it from the water and ends up in your tuna sandwich. Gross. So animal eaters eat shit. Of course, using horse manure to fertilize lawns, etc. means even vegetarians eat shit. Can’t get away from it.
My cat’s litter is made from corn – maybe I can recycle it into ethanol and use it to power my car. And cats have a pact with humans. We care for the cat and it rids our territory of filthy rodents (except for mouse and rat body parts the little kitty thoughtfully leaves on our front steps as gifts) in return. Even though cats are relentless, malevolent, vicious killers, they are good to us. Kind of like our military.
So remember, the next time you want to disparage a sweet little, fluffy mammal like a feline domesticus, think twice. Yuh ah aah (twirling my mustache ala Dishonest John. Remember him, Beanie?)
Do you know why I’m stupid? I do. The reason I’m so terribly stupid is because: even though I read all these alternative blogs and so forth; I still live the same way. I still go to the mall… play the stock market — then look outside my window for the impending doom like it might be entertaining, not like a nightmare. In sum, I’m stupid because I’m frozen, paralyzed. I don’t know how to act. We own some farmland, 40 acres in southern Minnesota. But we just rent it to a guy who grows Monsanto crap on it. We don’t know how to act. We don’t know what’s next, really. And I’m here in limbo. And I’m definitely one of us, one of use stupid people — a sheeple.
You’re not “stupid”, rather you’re a creature-of-habit. Moreover, when confronted with the choice of choosing between believing that something horrible will happen to you and your family, and the much more remote possibility that life will simply continue on as before, most people will always choose to be in denial. This explains why most Jews did not flee Na//zi Ger many even when the writing-was-on-the-wall, so to speak.
A poignant example of the apparent limitless capacity for human denial would be the case of the guards handing the prisoners a towel and a bar of soap and asking them to take a “shower”.
Lying to the people is necessary to control the people. For example, the Khmer Rouge told the people evacuating Phnom Penh that they were being evacuated because the U.S. was going to bomb the city, and they would return to Phnom Penh after 3 days.
“Folks who seem to easily grasp the concept of peak oil and collapse of rapacious consumerist societies are in a complete denial when it comes to acknowledging the glaringly obvious and vastly different evolutionary outcomes for blacks and non-blacks.
Incredible…”
Incredible indeed.
I tried to hint in this direction on the LATOC forum a few years ago. These brainwashed baby boomer liberals who claim to believe in free speech jumped on me life the fucking gestapo. They have absolutely no frontal lobe awareness of the demographic dimensions of our moment.
Hopeless.
Other more recent examples of the apparent limitless capacity for human denial are:
a. Obama’s signing statement to the NDAA; and
b. Obama’s assertion that we’ve got a 100-year supply of domestic natural gas reserves.
I’m seein only one answer to your dilemma there RIPPEDTHUNDER.
Latex over lizard skin.
And “A Lumpen Worken’ Dude” means exactly what to you wine drinkers and wind surfers? I’d much rather have them come pull me out of a ditch or save me from a harrasser than the John Kerry type. In case you haven’t noticed, not just Re-publicans are fat. Some of your esteemed Ivy Leagures are pretty rotund. Bringing us into why it’s witty and instructive when you call our side names, but silly and demented when we return the slur. Define a CornPone Nazi to me, which shouldn’t be hard, then go out and find one for evidence. Be sure he knows how to cut a bull and a ram, bob the tails of the lambs, and de-horn the cattle. Make sure he knows what breed they are and what that breed was bred to do. You might gain a little respect for the old fashioned working man who can make you sick with shame. You’re already up to your eyes in bullshit, you just can’t identify the odor.
Reference:
http://instantsingularity.blogspot.com/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
Reference:
http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=22324
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
Reference:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63868-information-relationship/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
I fear you’ve just done a disservice to lemurs and Holstein steers.
The “lumpenprole” was the colloquial term for the vast number of underclass previous to the early 20th century in Europe.
The lumpenprole worked in factories and made the sheap scheers you use on the goats, as a matteroffact. As opposed ot today, when Sam Walt-Mart sells you CHeEP SHEARS from China, that don’t WERK!!
Excuse my Buck’s County accent.
BTB said “You speak of 900 million in North America; I believe there are 55 million in the US, so I doubt the 900 mil figure.”
Did I say 900 mil? Oh sorry, I thought we were talking the distance in miles a Caesar salad travels to reach its destination on an interstellar mission to Mars, not cats.
BTB: “Cat feces being carried everywhere? Yuck. But funny thing – what happens to human feces?”
Human feces is by and large controlled by human brains, as opposed to cats, which, will shit just about anywhere.
The future of humanity is not anxle deep in its own filth; its how India got by for thousands of years right up to the present day.
You just cop a squat in the various designated public waste pits.
BTB: “Even though cats are relentless, malevolent, vicious killers, they are good to us. Kind of like our military.”
Who could ask for anything more? Toyota.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zheMsRE7faw
BTB: ”
Thanks to everyone who voted for Jill Stein (and not for Roseanne Barr).
Jill Stein took 90% of the votes. A big victory!
Romney only has a chance if people vote for him.
Obama only has a chance if people vote for him.
Jill Stein can win if people vote for her.
PoC said “Beyond that, the number of posters who write in to express their prideful non-watching of the super Bowl spectacle is a little off-putting, to say the least. Just watch the stupid thing next year,”
I tend to agree.
The Super Bowl IS the national holiday.
I actually sat next to a black man and it was fine. We watched the game together.
The racial harmony was palpable. Well, it cut through the white guilt…
NFL football features no racism, sexism, nudity, or even bad language or even politics. Nothing but a beatific theme of tolerance and unity in sportsmanship.
All that other shit comes in as advertising. Anyone who pretends that they can block it out is lying to themselves.
It is gladiators in a coliseum…
even if the gladiators are suffering Torn ACLs, sprains, and concussions, and instead of a bread-munching lumpenprole, It is millions of diabetic cheeze-doodle munchers that collectively produce 25% of the world’s pollution…
According to harper’s only 1 in 7 working americans are of average weight and not have a mental condition. (somewhere someone of average weight that has a mental condition is saying “uh huh. Yup.”)
The Super Bowl is probably the greatest spectacle our global civilization will ever achieve.
Who wants to read Socrates when you can DVR the image of a man’s chin being shaved by laser-guided razors in slow motion, not even realize it. Or be mesmerized by vampiric femme fatales as you are pitched soft drinks or colognes.
The human drama of athletes competing is emphasized by the camera, the wide helmet openings, the sheer number of faces.
The viewer assumes a superposition of extreme power. He sees all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyfdoZldrS4
Look again.
We are seeing the Egyptian goddess and empress, Cleopatra.
Lotta messages in there, a middle finger too. But not bad. Not bad at all.
This brought a tear to my eye.
The girl sings so beautifully. Grown men crying, ritually swaying back and forth.
Children, hopefully well paid for, singing their guts out.
http://youtu.be/ov9wZ_sTSxY
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Amplify Random
Nature alone does create random, quirk, details, fluke details and chaos, turbulence and such. But by creating Free Will Decision Points flung upon the sea of random (through Man Brains and similar structures and Interactors) it can create even more Random it can amplify and create even more hard to predict and patternize details and noise: so many individual and independent logical segments interacting (sometimes ? every now and then ? always etc.?) and colliding, each with their own special mental model or assumed mental model of the world and what their goals are (or sometimes as just an instant reaction in an action reaction circuit ? or sometimes deeply meditated and pondered upon (maybe for years just for one small Decision Point ?)) as in opposition and sometimes as in contribution and accumulation and all the intermediate mixes create a strange mix of random and pattern, strange artificially higher randomized configurations of Matter: as if Matter needs free will decision points to create even more contorted patterns, just look at all the details (cracks on the walls, designs, pebbles on the street, etc.) in buildings in cities as a result of the forces of random and people, etc.
As an example, all places have the Standard International buildings, boxes, midrises, suburb houses and such. But many cities have a structure where everyplace, every street or corner has a signature, is different from any other street or combination (in same city) as opposed to others that are very monotonous like London. Tokyo or Seoul or Paris have each place and street with a signature, London most places are the same style houses so very few signature.
Also, in brainium, if everything is a brain, then there are more brains than information for those brains to process, it is the other way around, there is not enough information for the brains themselves to process, hence they process other brains, and even the information becomes brains, etc. all reciprocal.
At what point does a technology become a science ? at what point do we confuse a technology with science ? When did computer become “Computer Science” so to say, and is it a Natural Science ? If so then why isn’t the game of Chess also simply a Natural Science ? and then why not Soccer or American Football a science ? a real science ? In this respect, we are not the “View from Nowhere” that science supposes it has, we are always the view from somewhere, from someplace, from some cultural or experience reference system, from some language construct, thought construct and memory organization of knowledge implied by a culture, civilization, tribe.
The discrepancies: the three body problem has no analytical solution (no precise solution in mathematical terms), the differential equations describing mathematical physics have very rarely precise, closed form analytical solutions, initial conditions must be imposed but are always iffy, random, not sure and not precise, non linearities abound, chaotic systems discovered, the butterfly effect ? and mostly look around you, can you give me the equation and precise solution that determined a given design of a given mountain ? can you precisely predict the exact shape of the next waveform of an ocean wave ? can you tell me exactly where the next raindrop will fall ? (but then again nature operates by simply yes and no and some intermediate state, it doesn’t need precision, it doesn’t care about precision, nature is very approximate, likes to make rough approximations like it will rain today or it will not, it doesn’t even know or have within itself the precise capability to know, care or even imagine where the exact next raindrop will fall, it knows it only after the fact, nay, not even after the fact, not even history is true, nay, it doesn’t and will never know, nothing will ever know, not even knowing itself knows…). These are all the walls of the reference system science is boxed up in, its perfect mathematical viewpoint breaks down as soon as you exit its reference system: in that case only the interaction and measurement and observation gives you some information, but information that rarely can be built upon to create a prediction as in : Thought is the Sickness, Measurements and Observations are the Cure.
When I saw the first pictures of the neural circuits in brains, I was amazed by how random, chaotic and non sensical it seemed, since I was used to digital electronics and Microprocessor Schematics. Now, I know that reality has no sense or logic, only that which we impose upon it by our thought, logic and our own schematics.
So, at what point does a technology become a science ? it is actually Science that is a Technology, in a very subtle way, and we don’t notice it, but Science is a Technology: and this is what will be important when we start to directly modify our Mind Brain Design and change the way it works, thinks, its organizations, its sensations, its experiences and such. We will invent a new and real Science, a Science much closer to reality and much more real than anything our Civilization could have even imagined up to now…
Is Reality Physics – Mathematics ?
The unreasonable precision with which mathematics describes reality has always puzzled physicists. The reason is most likely because the reality described is not really a reality and is much more so a Technology: an invention, mostly a machine, as most of those equations and interactions and experiments and laws have been furnished by how machines and devices interact with some kind of detached reality, a reality that is in essence pretty far away from nature, if with nature you mean the pure random blind forces operating under nature like inside stars (plasmas), the forces modeling the earth (earthquakes, mountain formation), the weather and most of the random natural events that occur like ocean waves and their exact form and design (can you predict them with mathematical precision ?). Of course we know and can apply mathematics to all of such, we know the general forces and such, but the precision is no longer “unreasonable”.
So what scientists do is confuse technology with nature, confuse a mathematical model and description and design of technological machines with nature, as if the technology is nature: but it is not so, technology is a very specifically configured slab of matter that closely follows and abides to mental, linguistic and especially mathematical models: what came first the technological machine and interaction or the mental mathematical model ? Mostly the other way around, the mental mathematical models influenced what kinds of contraptions we would design according to clear cut needs and functions according to how we interact with reality.
SO in essence, there is no “unreasonable precision” of mathematics to reality, but only a mostly reasonable precision of mathematics to machines that interact with reality and confuses us into thinking that they are reality. Like a particle accelerator: are they simply studying an engineered device or really studying the laws of physics ?
Matter is set up so as to express mathematical relationships, so as to emphasize mathematical relationships. Our mathematical models are more than anything mostly machines, mental models of machines that are providing us a function and as such easily lend themselves to models and especially mathematical models. Since the functions and operations the machines must provide have been defined and created within a mental model of reality through language, they already, from the outset have properties that imply models and eventually mathematical, precision models, models where you can apply equations and predictions and perfect them accordingly, but because the function is clearly defined and clearly delimited by language and the model and then mathematical models further delimit and perfect them: and then machines are designed and constructed and experimented within a very controlled and predictable environment, no free wills opposing their forces to what the machines must do, no random forces and quirk details messing up models like what happens in most of real natural systems and not modelized and forced systems carving their function out of reality, by force.
The Laws of Identity and Non Contradiction (should more correctly be named the Principles of Identity and Non Contradiction, since they are the very first principles from which all else is derived from) is in truth a Momentary Lapse of Reasoning “Matter” or “Mass Energy” or more correctly the “Monolithic Slab of Pure Existence as Delimited by Logical Entities” has in order to momentarily observe itself, contradict itself and then vanish again to where it all belongs, namely a place where all contradictions are operating, nothing is identified as distinct from anything else, all is real and fake, and so on, the more absurd and crazy the closer we get to some very remote and vague and indirect approximation of what all of reality is.
Obviously, the above block of text has absolutely nothing to do with what I wanted to say, it is 100 % unrelated, disjoint and not connected or associated with what I wanted to express…good luck in trying to figure out what I wanted to say…
write anything at all, no matter how wrong, idiotic and insane, just BS forever on the Internet, it is all OK, it is all fine, it is all good…
Write as many false and wrong ideas as possible, be creative and colorful, go man go, you can do it, just do it….
There is a simpler way to refute and demolish the laws of Identity and Non Contradiction: In order to state them, their opposite must exist, they must be compared to what their reciprocal would state, they must create their own existence by measuring themselves (and being measured by other entities and Other Observers ) against what they would mean if they weren’t true. But since all Metaphysical Items and Entities have existence because they are independent of any kinds of constraints, those laws are false.
So,now that the Laws of Identity and Non Contradiction have been totally refuted, have been finally demonstrated to be false, we can finally solve all of the “Unresolved Internal Conflicts” Reality (and Man Brains, especially) have: we can now invent all and have fun, we can transform reality into what we want it to be, no longer slaves of logic, and fixed circuits, now we are finally free, free your mind, you are free, God has finally set you free.
THis implies that making things up, saying lies, all kinds of lies is the truth, lies are all true now, you are allowed to SAY THINGS WHICH ARE NOT TRUE BECAUSE YOU HAVE BECOME THE BOSS OF REALITY, YOU HAVE BECOME YOUR OWN BOSS!!!
PLease, tell me lies, please lets create a new fake reality full of lies, please all lie, lie forever, make it pretty, make it better, I don’t care if it is true or false, just lie and make it pretty, pretty please, will you ?
And Jesus Speaks to Little Children and
BEWARE OF THE MARK OF THE BEAST
The Laws of Indentity and Non Contradiction are Impossible
Uh, oh, here we go again. I know, you will all say but you are using those laws to demonstrate that they are not true: but we always use things as though they were outside of themselves to pretend that they are false, eveything is outside of itself and disjoint, everything is using itself outside of itself to contradict itself and such (add as much confusion as possible, the confusion and vague mode of thought will set you free), everything is the outside looking in and using itself, or better instances of itself as distinct entitites, etc. (and the imporant thing is only if the block of text, the sequeuce of symbols “makes you feel good”, as if “you have achieved” and “won”, and you force it, just win and feel good, just do it, ignore all the clowns who want to contradict you, they are jealous and envious that you have won and feel good (and we can even just feel good independent of any sequence of symbols, just because, for fun, and then associate that feeling with any sequence and make yourself win and feel better ever more as in pure delusion of self, ever more pure delusion, lie, as in lying to yourself, illusions will set you free, ever more illusions..)).
If something is always different from other entitites and distinct then nothing could possibly exist because all entities would have to be ever different and not even separate space or points in time could cancel the fact that at least something, somewhere must be pure contradiction acheived, must deny and contradict the laws of identity: if you take the limit of any entity as space and time and any other properties tend towards zero and consider all of its constituent parts as those limits tend to zero, as the constituents become ever more smaller, but always distinct, you would reach a point of the entity simply vanishing since it could not support the rule of identity past a certain point, it would have to be a pure monolithic slab of contradiction and identity denied in order to simply exist, the algortihm and computer program of the law of identity and non contradiction must abruptly end in order for it to even exist, the monolithic slab of pure contradiction would have to be a distinct, disjoint delimited section of existence somewhat analogous to the limits of the observable universe, to a black hole event horizon and such, it would have to be a kind of reference point against which the rest of the ensemble of existing entites would compare themselves in order to exist, it would have to be a point zero in a reference system of reciprocal definitions…
But this slab of pure contradiction isn’t in any point of space or time, isn’t anywhere, but exactly for this is everywhere in a sense, of course, the abstractions and denotations continue to be ever harder to comprehend for our puny mind, but the sense of all is pure contradiction, pure non identity, all is the opposite of itself, all is a contradiction of its own existence, the laws of identity and non contradiction are the greatest lie and hoax in history, are totally impossible and crazy. There. I said it.
Now go on, and say I am wrong, go on and don’t make me win, but I win always, I win! I win! there, go away cray babies, I win! I win!
“So atoms are perfect mathematical equations. Matter is mathematics. So a completely simulated universe on a computer is just as real as ours. So reality is base on pure logic-mathematical systems and there are no other “metaphysical” aspects to matter-reality. Well then this reality is completely abstract and senseless, it is just a series of Feynman Integrals describing particle interactions. No, I think this is completely wrong, atoms have cracks on them, just like walls, and the level of details and complexities of the real world is infinite. What is at the center of an electron? what is the world like at 10^-100000000 mm size level ?”
Atoms are full of wild cracks all over them, they are crazy entities, so much crazy and wild random detail and all of those bozos want to describe them with equations!?!? I can’t believe it…
TOBOR THE 8 MAN
Another huge logical mistake is when they ask what is the probability of Life or the first cell and things like that: well it doesn’t matter what the probability is, It Just Happened. End of Story. There is nothing to explain, a random sequence of events occurred and created the first living cell, and then Man and whatever. But even if it were a one shot creation from nothing, well, there is nothing wrong with that either, It Just Happened, For No Reason at All, Just Because, For Fun.
And even if it was God who just did it, well who cares ? Anything goes, it is all just a random event, just a wild number picked out of a bag full of wild numbers, there is nothing left to explain, no relationships to discover or invent or uncover, etc.
This is real science since the simplest explanation is the correct one and no explanation is the correct one and best one. But even if this explanation is wrong, well who cares ? Be Your Own Boss.
And Busty, you snotty snob, always criticizing this and that and the USA, whoah! 99 % of all past (and present) countries and civilizations were (are) way worst from all points of views from the USA, you just have this absurd Idealism and Utopia view of the world having to be exactly as some kind of perfect mental model you impose on it: well guess what ? Your model sucks, is wrong, is a fairy tale, suck it up. We need trillions pf Pickups and cars and Jets and Skyscrapers, we need thousands of trillions of gadgets and devices and buildings, cement, steel, concrete, Rockets, you name it.
Now, as*hole, did you build those 768 thousand trillion 1966 Oldsmobile Ninety Eights that I told you to be build ? Why not ? Why are you not obeying me ? I am your Boss, I command you to build them NOW! Understand ? Please finish building them all by tonight, I need a ride…
TOBOR THE EIGHTH MAN
From:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=177982
Reference:
http://instantsingularity.blogspot.com/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
And Busty, you snotty snob, always criticizing this and that and the USA, whoah! 99 % of all past (and present) countries and civilizations were (are) way worst from all points of views from the USA, you just have this absurd Idealism and Utopia view of the world having to be exactly as some kind of perfect mental model you impose on it: well guess what ? Your model sucks, is wrong, is a fairy tale, suck it up. We need trillions of Pickups and cars and Jets and Skyscrapers, we need thousands of trillions of gadgets and devices and buildings, cement, steel, concrete, Rockets, you name it.
Now, as*hole, did you build those 768 thousand trillion 1966 Oldsmobile Ninety Eights that I told you to be build ? Why not ? Why are you not obeying me ? I am your Boss, I command you to build them NOW! Understand ? Please finish building them all by tonight, I need a ride…
TOBOR THE EIGHTH MAN
GG!!! Revenues flow into the Indiana rust belt!!!
Hell, The Bay Aryan bragged about how he and his significant other spent $3-6k on 1st class round trip tickets, $2-4k for a hotel, and $8-10k ($50k?) for tickets, so he could remain imprisoned in the coliseum for a few long hours…
OOPS!!! It *STILL* all goes to the 0.1% landowners/slumlords. The poor working class (hotels, restaurants, airlines, rentals, corporate [oil?] stadiums) see *NOTHING* different, than any other day… Same old minimum wage…
Seriously? Teh NFL screened that shitty Clint Chrysler commercial? These “mass-of-morons” are so dumb, they spent the day before the superbowl, hitting advertisement pages, in the 10’s of millions. That’s how you measure stupidity – people are actually trying/wanting to watch these adds (ADHD so prevalent now, with most TV programs running 5 minutes airtime, 5 minutes full-on subliminal hypnotic brainwashing in 30 second bursts).
Something missed seems to be the uselessness of goofball, and the major salaries that the useless meatheads earn. Supported by 20% auto adds, and the rest doritos/pepsi/useless poison. Was there a single advertiser that was useful in any way? (most were just pure poison – hydrogenated vegetable oil, high fructose corn syrup, ETF trading, gas *GUZZLIN*!!!)
Like a VIRGIN, indeed – was good in 1984 (45’F to 115’F same day @ 4 corners) – not so much *NOW*…
The malls are goin’ out of business due to big box/internet sales, *NOT* due to public transportation (light rail/busses). I refuse to use public transportation anymore, here in Portland, Oregon – the literal “peak” of public transport. They shit down our (*MY*) neck – raising the prices exhorbitantly, and cutting out routes, especially late night and weekends. I can use my motorcycle for 1/3 the cost of light rail, 2x as fast, and not have to worry about waiting for late night bus transfers (1 hour layover, and 4-6x as long). Portland screwed the *POOCH* on public transport – they seriously fucked it up hardcore…
And that is sad, indeed – as I used public transportation buses *solely* from 1994-1997, and public transportation light rail from 1998-2006. They really fucked it up, tho, and I’ll drive 30 minutes on a motorcycle, before I pay $6 for a day pass that forces me to get back on light rail before 11PM…
Hey, Juletta, my girlfriend is back! By the way, did you read my last comments to you, honeybunch ?
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/01/murmuration.html#comment-114033
Ok, I see you get the message, I will refrain from being “vulgar”…
And get a Man with a Big Pickup….
AN APE
I meant Juletta, which is my new girlfriend (don’t be jealous and envious Busty, now it’s my turn to have some fun, and she is Hot and Horny and has Big B*obs…)…
Please, Juletta, study this and all of these kinds of posts very deeply and seriously, thank you, I am your Boss now…
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=177939
To enter use:
user. spider9629
password: magnoliaM1
Thank You.
“True Israelites know that God works through His Natural Laws most of the time.”
We are not communicating. Here is how it works; I give you A, then you give me back the part of A that indicates you understand and acknowledge A. *Then* you present B and I give you back the part of B that indicates I understand and acknowledge B. If there is something about A or B that you and I don’t understand and acknowledge then we can hash it out. I already know about W.
Do you think the israelites believed {obeyed] Duet. 23?
I hope you’re not counting Van Halen and other late ‘seventies acts as “classic rock”, just because they get airtime on so called classic rock stations. To me not even Aerosmith counts as real classic rock because they showed up to the party too late to get in. On the other hand I would count the early prog rockers such as Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer as classic rock. Also some early Steely Dan, even if such bands were too sophisticated perhaps. Steely Dan gets a lot of play on jazz oriented stations, for instance. I also have a problem with Bruce Springsteen for being too late. Anyone who happened along much later than a couple of years after the Beatle’s breakup is not original classic rock. Which brings us to the worst offenders of all: Journey. And yes, it is an abomination that Jethro Tull has not yet been inducted into the Rock Hall of fame here in Cleveland, the Mistake by the Lake, but at least there’s a good radio station set up there which is on satellite radio and features Dusty Rhodes as one of the DJs.
You missed the biggest symbol of them all: the GIANTS defeated the PATRIOTS. The big corporations have defeated the little man. It hurts.
Youch! Talk about inchoate howling of the Id!
How much time do you suppose it takes for old (and “their” multiple incarnations) to manufacture those lengthy primal screams? Jeeeeeeeze; I guess making ceramic tile ashtrays, those woven pot-holders, and paint-by-numbers is not quite the time-filler/Id-suppressor at ol’ Greystone Manor Asylum that it once was. “Damnit, Ji-em, I’ve adjusted the dosages, but he’s still crazy as a shit-house rat! I’m a DOCTOR, not a miracle worker!” -McCoy ;o)
(Was it watching too many commercials that didn’t let Mama Nature finish her job hard-wiring the gray matter? We’ll never be allowed to know. ;o)
Oopsie! I guess now we’ll have to hire the Brave Little Tailor to bring ’em down. …Or perhaps The Man with No Name. Oh, that’s right, he’s busy with Chrysler ads.
Good catch, NightHorse.
Madonna at halftime! What a joke. If I am going to watch some female prance around at halftime, it’s sure not going to be some dried-up old bat like Madonna. I want to see a tight-bodied hottie exposing an indecent amount of flesh. Talk about cognitive dissonance! All the lard ass hombres who hanker after large pickup trucks want to see Madonna? Well, maybe it makes sense: she’s as shriveled up as the lard-asses’ peckers.
Indeed Mr. Klein, and hello Jim (JHK) and the regular CFN’ers…
Just a quickie ping in today, I sought out and watched yesterday that lame lip-sync’d plastic-pop-product-over-pampered chickadee ‘Madge’ strut her half-time track mash… oh dear?
She badly managed tottering about in those fetish heel boots, she took several stumbles, and though her physical testament to cosmetic surgery’s a nod-n-a-wink to have it all 50’s something western women, seeking wrinkle free toy-boy diverting nirvana’s…
*sniggers*
Her actual show turned out to be throw-back, barrel scrapping ole material – an Ableton Live cut-n-paste – matched with neo-nazi Rome burning branding costume/stage paraphernalia much as it was with Wacko-Jacko in his twilight zombie years – once you start wearing those fascist miltel neo-nazi get-ups… well the ‘real’ innovation is truly over.
I though it to be a hilarious Zeitgeist of the current mainstream 21st century age, ultra naff, all pomp and very little circumstance…
At least our eurozone Rugby football still harks back to a previous age involving ‘real’ muscle, sinew stretch sweat, dirt and well earned team glory…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Vi5-K_5w0
A bit like our ‘real’ rock bands of old too…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFQI-u5ExUE
As I said a wee while back, artificial is so over now, and most are simply waiting for a true knock-down, bitchslap smack of wake-up reality… when you get it… the right perspective comes quickly back into view…
(‘Talentism’ is indeed the only way forward)
Be seeing you…
Vlad I think you are dealing from weakness, all we “white males” have fallen for that failed model, its what professional conservatism is built on, being the loser.
I could care less about Israel, except our part in the future mass murders which the middle east will become where all of them will pay dearly.
Blacks are hapless, the Democratic party propaganda machine even tells us this.
Liberalism is over. The movie remake “The Island of Dr. Moreau” with Kilmer, Brando is basically liberalism’s path.
Question for you lefties, what do you think of Clint Eastwood’s implicit appeal to white men?
Another question of you “liberals” what of this paen to white males “Act of Valor?” Any opinions of this movie.
For a little background the SEALS are a very white men dominated outfit. Yes they do have some Asians and occasionaly a black man (very good story of a black officer who taught himself how to swim so he could join a few years back).
As for frontline units the Marine Corps’ combat units are now whiter than when I was in 81-85.
With those unpleasant facts in mind, any opinions on this movie?
all we “white males” have fallen
==
http://youtu.be/K7zNY0I5JNI
Oscar Goldman: Steve Austin, astronaut
a man barely alive
Gentlemen we can rebuild him
We have the technology
We have the capability
to make the worlds first bionic man
Steve Austin will be that man
Better than he was before
Better, Stronger, Faster
LOL!
If the Kali Yuga really is near, then the last group liberals need to be dissing is Red State white men.
“Vote for Jill Stein, Green Party.”
Suckers. How do you propose to clean up the environment, block mineral extraction on federal lands, and promote collective bargaining rights while the oligarchy imports millions of low-skilled laborers every year? Read the Green Party’s immigration platform–they are globalist sellouts.
Perfect for Asoka!
Sounds like ‘Green Party2’
Remember the 1980s and the Nuke melt down in USSR?
Greenparty was silent!
Imagine if the melt had happened in a capitalist / free country!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How the greens would have whined.
Ian anderson, when last heard of was fish farming…killing zillions of fish a year.
There are lotsa 1950s to 1980s groups that belong in HoF…that are not!
Madonna is Dance / disco but that is lumped by the lumpen with rock…
also rap acts are in hall of fame.
“Ian anderson, when last heard of was fish farming…killing zillions of fish a year.”
Yeah. Same reason cows and chickens are going extinct.
Idiot.
Anti-Gnostic said:
Suckers. How do you propose to clean up the environment, block mineral extraction on federal lands, and promote collective bargaining rights while the oligarchy imports millions of low-skilled laborers every year? Read the Green Party’s immigration platform–they are globalist sellouts.
**********************************************************
Or they offshore jobs TO low-paid residents of countries where multinational corporations find lax environmental restrictions and poor safety nets for workers. Globalists seem to want to improve the lot of just about every other country but their own.
The Green Party, to me, is a classic case of “the road to Hell was paved with ‘good intentions'”.
E.
Two minor quibbles: I don’t believe you meant to call Madonna a “trooper.” You might have meant “trouper,” which is something we might call someone who has long labored in showbiz. That would indicate that Madonna was/is part of a troupe, and yet she has always been a solo act. Also, not all 50 AGs have signed on to Obama’s dirty deal. There are five holdouts: Biden of Delaware, Schneiderman of New York, Harris of California, Cortez Masto of Nevada and Coakley of Massachusetts.
The Green Party’s essential flaw–in fact, the entire progressive movement’s essential flaw–is that they hate the white working class and want them displaced by Third World immigrants.
This is ironic, because black and brown immigrants do not give a rat’s ass about things like sustainable agriculture and ethical government.
When the Kali Yuga breaks, there are going to be a lot of liberals who wished they had redneck friends.
Don’t know how to respond. I seem to remember you saying that Israel was a Western Democracy we should care about a few months ago. Your 2nd paragraph where you try to express your view is too vague and brief.
Btw, I always admit that “our” Gentile Elite went along with them with enthusiasm. The Jews seem to have been more active in most areas but some of the old money folks chimed in too. And of course, the Jews reciprocated by never pointing the finger at them. Take Masonry for example: by and large for White Men with Blacks excluded, it never came up for a “review” by the Jew controlled media. They didn’t want to hurt their allies, the WASP Elite.
Liberalism is over? Yeah but they don’t get that yet. And the Leaders of Liberalism are the same as the Neo Conservatives anyway. It will go on and on for a while yet unless natural catastrophe steps in.
Anyway, I value your posts, but I’m just surprised someone who has such insight and strong convictions doesn’t seem to know anything about the Jewish aspect of the Conspiracy. In such cases, usually there’s an emotional conflict involved: part Jewish, Jewish son in law, believe they are God’s chosen etc.
Too polite? The John Birch Society bent over backwards not to mention the Jews. Did that get them any credit? “Fucking Nazis” is how Mr Kunstler characterized them. The Enemy laughs and shits on our politeness as just weakness – which it is at this point. A Gentleman of the old school can drop politeness in a heartbeat when dealing with thugs or evil. Only the pale imitators of today are unable to – by design.
Good lord Vlad that “conspiracy” we gripe about could be broken within weeks if we just started asking the right questions.
Like I said before I am a progressive and I have no desire to go thru the usual Jew/gentile games, the same destructive nonsense we always get stuck with, to our detriment.
We must admit “griping” as conservatism is reserved for losers.
8th man said “And Busty, you snotty snob, always criticizing this and that and the USA, whoah! 99 % of all past (and present) countries and civilizations were (are) way worst from all points of views from the USA…”
I have high standards, that apparently exceed expectations of reasonable standards, which you imply are the current standards, the status quo. Ah, okay. Gotcha.
“..you just have this absurd Idealism and Utopia view of the world having to be exactly as some kind of perfect mental model you impose on it: well guess what ? Your model sucks, is wrong, is a fairy tale, suck it up.”
“Perfect mental model”… thats rich. I merely suggest exploiting rather practical ideas that are safe, sane, and scalable.
My alternative model is one where no one is homeless, the poor are fed and housed, no one has a work at a job they don’t want to do, and universal health care is available. Its not a fairy tale, its reality in some countries. We could do it here, but we aren’t, because people like you are still sleepwalking through life, and the younger generations need strict indoctrination and programming to grow up to believe that this is the only possible world and that all other possibilities are “Utopian”.
“We need trillions pf Pickups and cars and Jets and Skyscrapers, we need thousands of trillions of gadgets and devices and buildings, cement, steel, concrete, Rockets, you name it.”
Your vision, your “solution” as it were, is simply recycled mega-industrialism, the conversion of natural resources to useless garbage in the name of short-term self-interest. I don’t think repeating the mistakes of the 20th century is a good idea.
What iterative, market-directed manufacturing will do is waste the remaining window of time we have to save ourselves. It will mean loading and firing the climate change gun at our own heads, and leave us knee-deep in useless intermediate technology, with no energy or resources for future generations (if they even survive).
We need only invent one thing: the genuinely better way of life, characterised by a higher quality of life, a meaningful life. That could be obtained by a society not based upon ignorance, waste, and coercion, a system based on fundamental rights and protections for the natural world and its aesthetics, with regulation of exploitative industry. People only work to dig coal out of the ground to stick in your laptop because of force- coercion. This is not a voluntary system. It is a system of masters and slaves.
But why complain about my great ideas? Wouldn’t you rather hang out with the 99%, all the regular folks with no brains and no taste falling over each other to stuff their faces and kick the can down the road? The ‘Kill Nature’ crowd is winning, why not revel in it. Oh wait- you do.
You said last week: our “White” Elite are offshoring our jobs. Well E, 40% of American Billionaires are Jewish and their percentage of the population is 3% or so. So something interesting is going on, right? Looks like the old stereotypes have some truth to them. And – they do not consider themselves White or have any loyalty to Whites. Interesting huh? Think that might have some relevance to the way things have turned out?
Now White Billionaires are all over the place politically and socially. Some Liberal, some Conservative. Some giving to Africa, some just lost in hedonism etc. The Jews in contrast are far more focused politically and socially. So if the White Billionares are a fist, the Jewish ones are a knife. Which would you rather get hit with, two square inches at thirty pounds of force moving twenty miles an hour or a 1/8 of inch at thirty pounds of force moveng twenty miles an hour?
My point: All the Billionaires share a class interest but the Jews have other collective interests. The Gentiles are far more scattered. So the Jews with their greater focus are far more powerful and determine the basic policy. The Gentiles go along for the ride. And of course, the Jews don’t go out of their way to offend powerful Gentile groups like Skull & Bones and of course Gentile Oil Men and Contractors profit from the Middle Eastern Adventure. Any potential conficts were ironed out generations ago and now the two groups intermarry. The few Gentile Billionaires who don’t like the syntheis better keep it to themselves if they exist. Not sure that they do anymore. Some of the old English Aristocrats didn’t like it but they’re gone now. There are probably millionaires who don’t like it but they’re small fry.
And some of the Jewish Elite have been influence in turn by the old “Social Gospel” of the WASP Elite. Even last century, White Aristocrats were worrying about the Africans while the White poor starved. So that was no great leap at all.
Oldsmobile88 said “Obviously, the above block of text has absolutely nothing to do with what I wanted to say, it is 100 % unrelated, disjoint and not connected or associated with what I wanted to express…good luck in trying to figure out what I wanted to say…”
So true, so true. What you need to do is start focusing on the quality of your posts. Practice Haiku.
Your vision, your “solution” as it were, is simply recycled mega-industrialism, the conversion of natural resources to useless garbage in the name of short-term self-interest. I don’t think repeating the mistakes of the 20th century is a good idea.
==
Exactly.
We don’t need to make “Steve Austin” better than he was before. We need to kill him and everything that goes with him. The nazi/vatican “superman” ideology is death marketed for idiots.
Disagree strongly. The Jews like to take over movement at the top and will do exactly that to White Nationalism if allowed – and then change it to suit themselves. Several of the big Anti Jihad writers have turned out to be secret Jews like Fjordman. What does it matter? Because the focus then becomes not saving Europe but just fighting Islam with Europe expendable. Israel becomes the sacred ground that cannot be sullied. And you know how they infiltrated and took over the Republican Party right? NeoCons?
Of course politicians tend to sell out – and in fact must to win. Democracy is a downward process once you allow everyone to vote. Nick Griffin of the BNP was ordered to make the Party multi-racial and cultural. So how much is left of it? Don’t think the same thing would happen here? And how much time do we have before the majority of the young are non-White? They’re already half. It’s very late in the day and the Elite laid their Plans very well. We’ll be saved by Economic and/or Natural Disasters if at all. We should be orgainized enough to take advantage of those if and when they come.
Blacks and Whites shouldn’t marry and have kids. Whites who do should be shunned. Children should be informed that this is the consequence of miscegenation. And when they get a bit older, they should be told why it is necessary and how Blacks are not just White Men with dark skins as you believe.
Progressive? Now there’s a word that doesn’t fit you since Wage and Prog both consider themselves Progressives too and don’t consider you one.
Sometimes more words are better than few. You are obviously using the word progressive in your own way. Progressive compared to me? Perhaps, but what does the word mean in and of itself? That new is better? Really? I’m with C.S Lewis: sometimes the past is better. And sometimes progress means going back; retracing you steps to where you stepped off the trail.
When you borrow the terminology of the enemy you do so at the risk of being misunderstood.
Wow, a billion comments to get through. That’ll learn me for waiting till Tuesday to reply! Jim, my Mondays usually involve reading your blog and Chris Hedges column on Truthdig. Although you two are resonating at the same frequency, I usually read your column last because your wry humour bucks me up. Alas not this week though, I see evidence for your arguments all around me but please turn up the humour: you’re harshing my mellow!
From:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63951-identity-principle/
Identity Principle ?
I have issues with the Identity Principle, and it should be called Principle and not Law since it is The First Principle from which all else derives. It is just plain Wrong. That’s all. I said it. And why ? Well any entity, in order to be identical to some other entity must be exactly the same, that is it must have the same spatial, temporal coordinates and all else. But how can anything even be the same to itself if even time is always flowing and changing ? the same entity that was a moment ago is already different from the same entity at this very moment because they now occupy two different time coordinates. And no matter how small you make the time interval, it is always different, at least in that measurent. Even at 10 ^ -1000 picoseconds which is way past anything we can measure, it still represents a different number, a difference, no matter what. And at the same time all other entities are also in different time slots, and the very act of perceiving and seeing and measuring any entity implies that the signal from the entity was generated a small time ago (the entity may not even be there when you receive the signal anymore ? or may just disappear and appear and fool you if even for a very small time interval ?), so the entire deal of calling something Identical to something else, even itself, implies a rough approximation, a rough guess, just a good enough measurement, a logical measurement, good enough “for us and our uses”. Don’t get too anal, you know, just accept that it is good enough.
But that is the whole point: if the Identity Principle was declared and established exactly because the Man Brain became “too anal” on the whole deal, started to want greater precision, started to want something more solid and absolute, and wanted to create a precise logic, then why did it stop halfway and just decide, oh, it is good enough now, now we can say two things are Identical ? Because it wanted to lie to itself and fool itslef, it wanted to state the falsest Principle of all time and namely two entities must be different from each other to be distinguishable and each entity must be identical to only itself, etc. But this is not possible, all entities are constantly different from themselves if only for the flow of time, and then start putting in the small movements in space and already two of the coordinates of the same entity have changed instantly, time and space, let alone all the other trillions of measurements against that entity that can be performed from all the other entities in the Universe, all of them also changing position, time slots and even properties and all.
So the real Principle should state: No Entity is Ever Identical to Any Other Entity or Even Itself, there is Absolutely no Basis for Any Logic at all, there is No Basis to Enforce the Principles of Non Contradiction, in fact Existence and all Entities are Total Absolute and Complete Contradiction of All with Itself and with All.
We only use these Principles of Identity and Non Contradiction because they are simple gadgets that just kind of work for us, that are just comfortable approximating tools for an approximating Man Brain that just decides the truth is anything that is comfortable to itself, not really wanting to achieve absolute truth.
Just like when Einstein became too anal trying to understand time and gravity and space and discovered how “relative” it all is, I became “too anal” with the Principle of Identity and discovered that it is false, a hoax and a joke.
All Contradictions are Welcome, I thrive in being Wrong, and who said I wanted to solve any problems ? I want ever more problems impossible to resolve, I want to fail ever more in my quest to resolve problems, I want ever more problems…
“Stormin” Bob Dornan of California was literally speechless when the Mexicans voted in one of their own – after he had done so much for them. After he had betrayed his own race saying “So what if future Americans don’t have White skins and blue eyes anymore”? Of course he was a “conservative” not a Green. But the same disease. These “conservatives” would be amazed if they ever met the Founding Fathers – White Men who loved their Race and saw their Nation and Culture as an expression of It, their Religion, and their Western Heritage – Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, etc.
“And when they get a bit older, they should be told why it is necessary and how Blacks are not just White Men with dark skins as you believe.”
Do you think the israelites believed { obeyed } Duet. 23?
Pius the 12th wrote several Encyclicals against Nazism and the ideal of the Biological Nietzschean “Overman” – so you are an idiot.
A Few Technologies ?
I was noticing how the Technological Economy is really based on the discovery and use of only a handful of technologies that then lend themselves to constant improvements and refinements and such. Like Silicon Technology in Electronics and Integrated circuits and Microprocessors or the Internal Combustion Engine, or Jet Airlines, etc. These are fixed technologies that have become better and better and more refined (but Silicon Technology and Integrated circuits is a truly Free Lunch (Moore’s Law), we went from 5,000 transistor Microprocessors in 1975 to 3 billion transistor Mircroprocessors in 2011), as if in reality, you can only discover a few breakthrough technologies and then nothing more and you can only keep on refining what you discovered.
So the expectation of always new game breaking technologies is unreal and not possible: Nature just gives us a few free lunches and powerful technologies with which to refine constantly: we probably will never find the breakthrough Battery Technology or Fusion Energy Technology: what could happen is that the constant refinement of one technology may compensate the non discovery of all of the others, like a super Virtual Reality may compensate never having found Fusion technology or Light Speed Space technology and such.
And then Matter itself may only allow certain paths to be taken according to how the Observer is designed and prohibit other paths for that same Observer design: a modifed Man Brain Body (aka an Alien) that deals with completely different constraints and environments may develop an associated technology to achieve all it wants as it may be a configuration of Matter that does not prohibit it from visiting certain new configrations of matter that are an enabling technology for the alien…
I’m not sure about Classic Rock but I’m pretty sure about classic San Francisco rock…It’s A Beautiful Day-those we’re the days my friend:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cin0QzuEss
Obama, the winner of the “Nobel Peace Prize” says the Drone Attacks don’t kill civilians. But in fact, the Drones go back after their initial stike and kill rescuers and also attack funerals.
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/05/u_s_drones_targeting_rescuers_and_mourners/singleton/
LOL! Vladik! The fact that you defend Pius the 12th tells all I need to know about your Pius the 12th.
full disclosure: i have always watched pro football, even while knowing it is a modern day form of gladiators, with all that goes with that…however, i detest most commercials, and literally do not remember the last time i watched the half-time show- from comments above, i aint missin’ nothin this time…that being said, i find myself, in the last year or so, less involved in the hologram; in fact i only watched about half of the games this season- and because of some of the views brought to my attention here, i ve realized that i m watching far less garbage than usual, with little patience for what looks more and more like propaganda…so thanks y all!
Which verse? It says not to despise the Egyptian or the Edomite, but to let them in after three generations. Is this what you’re saying? And that Blacks are the same? Or are they not if fact, more Moabitish, never to be allowed in?
It’s well known that the Israelites broke all their Covenants with God whether they believed them or not. The disbelief is often a later stage of denial etc.
Yes, it’s in the air and it seems to be spreading. The word, the awareness, the angst.
“Doomsday Preppers”, tonight on the National Geographic channel.
Wage Here’s one for you:
Re: US strategies in the Mid east specifically Syria Pepe Escobar is being interviewed:
http://geraldcelentechannel.blogspot.com/2012/02/pepe-escobar-on-russia-china-and-veto.html
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Unless we are on the Outside looking In: we are outside of the Universe looking inside of it from Nowhere, or from a Platonic, Logical World or from a pure Information Relationship world: We are a momentary lapse of dependency on Matter, we are momentarily independent from Matter and details and are justified in Gross approximations and translations of all into pure mathematical entities…
‘we’re’. WERE, Not we are.
‘Idiot’, no thats YOU.
Fish farming seriously endangers fish in lakes and oceans.
thanks to you and old69 for getting me through the comments faster.
everyone else, can’t we just have a little fun watching the game , driving a truck or just staring at the sky. i hope their is a little fun even after the s— hits the fan.
Yes absolutely. I keep the “It’s a Beautiful Day” CD in my car to this very day. I also have Jefferson Airplane CDs as well. While taking friends from Albuquerque on a tour of the Rock Hall of Fame Museum here in Cleveland I learned what a Jefferson Airplane was: a roach mounted on a toothpick to facilitate those last few tokes! The building is unbelievable, and even more so from the inside. Funniest display: Jim Morrison’s Cub Scout uniform.
“…the entire progressive movement’s essential flaw–is that they hate the white working class and want them displaced by Third World immigrants.”
You know, its sad really to see something twisted the way history has been by the RWing conservatives, but who was it who said the Winners Write the History, eh?
Think back to the 80’s at least:
Who supported unions and opposed the corporate move to shift jobs, first to the South where it was anti-labor, then to Mexico, then to Asia? The Liberals and Progressives NOT the Conservatives, who were doing all they could to break the Unions.
Who opposed the “liberal” immigration policies that lead to illegal immigrants being brought in to compete with Citizens (now just Consumers) for jobs? Not the Conservatives, no it was the Liberals & Progressives.
And yet who votes for the RW Conservatives and against their own interests instead of for the Liberal & Progressives that actually DO support the working class of the USA? The so called “white working class” thats who.
I imagine that Goebbles is laughing & laughing at the American “working class” in whatever cesspit of hell he is in, it just can’t get any better than that. People voting AGAINST their own interests and FOR those that willingly disenfranchise them…
Oh, so sad.
;(
“Did you see the ad where the woman head butted her husband into submission? Why does no one think that is strange? Imagine the out cry if an ad portrayed violence against women.” -vlad-
OK, Vlad, I can tell that ad disturbed you greatly, since you’ve mentioned it several times, now. Let me take a shot at explaining why you should not be quite so upset.
First, the ad was supposed to be funny. No, scratch that – the ad should have been funny to any man who is confident in his relationships with women. Why should it be funny, you ask?
And why would it not have been funny if the man head butted the woman?
Because, on average, due to genetic human sexual dimorphism – men are larger and more muscular than women. All other things being equal, men have been capable of being physically dominant over women for 10’s of thousands of years of human evolution. That is unlikely to change, going forward for thousands of more years.
So the ad is based on a sort of role reversal “slapstick comedy. It is unlikely that it is part of a much larger plot to debase sexual roles and feminize American males.
Now, there was probably a hidden Madison Avenue message to the ad. I may go buy some of that yogurt, tease my wife with it, and see what passions I can arouse in her tomorrow night.
I’m 6’2″. She’s 5’2”. If I can keep lethal weapons out of her hands, while I hold the yogurt dish in my hands – I think we’ll be OK.
If she had ever played soccer, maybe I’d be more careful with her and that yogurt, though.
Here’s the ad, if anyone’s curious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufbWWk_3k1E
BHMarc,
Sounds like you’re……. uh….. this song!
(Not that there’s anything wrong with that. ;o)
LOL
Well, that didn’t work!
Spin again, Vanna.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiHf3fpkXo
And away we go……..
“Who opposed the “liberal” immigration policies that lead to illegal immigrants being brought in to compete with Citizens (now just Consumers) for jobs? Not the Conservatives, no it was the Liberals & Progressives.”
-dee-
Gotta call bullsh*t on this one, Dee.
It’s true enough that big business Chamber of Commerce types like immigrants pouring in.
But they are in an unholy alliance with your “Liberals & Progressives” to KEEP them pouring in.
And the States that have finally seen the disaster presaged by unsustainable immigration trends, and tried to do something about it at the State level – Arizona, Georgia, Alabama come to mind – these states have all been “conservative” led.
And these States have all been catching Hell from the liberal Democrats and their ACLU and SPLC and La Raza allies – and from the Obama DoJ.
Dee,
Please try to remember that RW authoritarians are invariably the VICTIMS of the very death-cult world they’ve built, so you mustn’t take that single note from them. There would no longer be any music to lighten their shriveled little hearts! (It was kind of a monotone to begin with, but hey, Johnny One-note needs his dose too, y’know. ;o)
Happy Tu Bishvat!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/tu-bishvat-2012-environmental-kabbalistic-seder_n_1260538.html
That’s why they Patriots are just the Pats – we don’t deserve the full name.
Here’s one for those who slavishly worship at the altar of the Golden Yardstick of the Intellect.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30467.htm
Me? Bah! A pox on ALL their vermin-infested craniums.
Hey BS, I posted a link to “White Bird” months ago? Don’t copy my shit !! Haha, only kitten! Great song,! RT
Well what the point? You don’t believe that women abuse men physically just as often men abuse women. You don’t know and you don’t want to know.
When a woman who helped start the shelter movement for women proposed a shelter for men suffering domestic abuse, she was deluged with death threats, but you don’t want to know since it doesn’t effect you. That doesn’t make you bad, just typical. It’s that attitude that sunk as with immigration. No one cared when the People along the border complained. No one cared when millions lost their jobs. It’s only when it started hitting the White Collar that anyone with a voice cared.
And women all over America cheered and laughed hysterically when a wife cut her husband’s penis off. You find it funny too no doubt. You have no idea that effect this is having on young girls. Not only the arrogance but they think it is their duty to hate men – or else they just aren’t cool.
You don’t believe the media is having an effect? I worked with an otherwise smart woman who believed that women were just as strong as men. Years of female action shows showing women beating up men created this – and she’s far from the only one.
Thanks Q – although a bit more elaboration may be in order to usurp our resident sidewalk polisher 🙂
I missed that RT, but compliments on your taste!
“Well what the point? You don’t believe that women abuse men physically just as often men abuse women. You don’t know and you don’t want to know.”
-vlad-
Just like I said to another poster a couple of weeks ago, we’re in different worlds, Vlad. I’ve got the confidence (arrogance?) that flows in my veins, and will never leave me. I was raised as a male, and a white male, and a Christian male, and a Southern White Christian male. In my mind, nothing can beat me. And I’ll be scratching my head – later on tonight – when/if other posters attack me for being born male, white, Southern, and Christian. Any attack spell envy, and nothing will change my mind about this.
I never have self esteem issues.
I never worry about getting abused by a female.
It’s just impossible to fathom for me how any male could. What’s wrong with a male who is repeatedly physically abused by his significant other? Seriously, how does this go on?
And I know you will point me to a website with heartrending tales about abused males. And I’ll try to look at it with an open mind. But the whole time I’m looking at it, I’ll be thinking to myself – – – What the Hell is wrong with these guys?
=================
This is not to argue that bad domestic violence doesn’t happen. About 1978, a close family friend was shot and killed by his wife – with the man’s own shotgun. She was drunk. Violence is not a new thing to me, Vlad. But persistent abuse of a male by a female is simply incomprehensible. Truly incomprehensible.
I also have Jefferson Airplane CDs as well.
==============
William Strunk Jr famously advises:
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
My big thrill on Super Bowl Sunday was reading the back and forth trash talk between Boston and New York talk on the Craigslist Rant and Raves section. In the midst of this, however, I was distracted by a “Chinese vs. American Women” post. And much to my amazement, I recognized our very own Vlad Krantz as the poster. I guess a Boston boy just can’t help himself:
http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/rnr/2836608283.html
The Court has ruled against Proposition 8 – denying the will of California’s Hispanic majority. As America goes Hispanic, it will become more socially conservative – a conundrum that the Hispanic’s White Liberal Enablers cannot fathom. They’re not very smart you see.
So the Hispanics are good then? No their levels of crime, poverty, and welfare are through the roof. But they cling to their Catholic beliefs in spite of all that.
Most White American Catholics are Liberals first. Not Catholic Kennedy’s but Kennedy Catholics. Horrible people, Obama worshipers.
Me too actually but I listen and feel my brother’s pain, which is what being a citizen is all about.
I wouldn’t stick around for that kind of crap either. But what if there were children involved? Would you want to leave them alone with a crazy bitch? Single mother families are very dangerous for children. And you can’t defend yourself physically since the Court automatically locks up the man on the woman’s word.
A friend of mine warned me: he brought his date home and didn’t want to come in. So she refused to get out. He pulled her out and she just started throwing herself on the hood as he tried to drive away. Finally he called the cops and he got a good one who didn’t arrest him. His mistake was touching her at all – he should have just called immediately when she wouldn’t get out.
Perhaps you enjoyed the last hurrah of the old Southern culture of gentility and chivalry – which didn’t just write a blank check for women but expected them to live up to a high standard. In others word, to be worthy of the esteem paid them and not just be thieves and users.
Beyond that, men are very needy unfortunately. A work friend once yelled at me angrily when I told him that I had broken up with women – he never had. He didn’t have it in him although he had been broken up with many times. Men typically lose touch with all their friends and their wife becomes their “only” which is sad and unfair to her as well. But some wives encourage it and try to break up male friendships. Some men even have curfews! We should become more selfish, look out for our own needs more just like women usually do. My Mother didn’t and she regretted it later.
Sometimes less is less. You can drive without hub caps but they bring such beauty. The moral? Sometimes more is more.
Well lets look at facts:
‘Who opposed the “liberal” immigration policies that lead to illegal immigrants being brought in to compete with Citizens (now just Consumers) for jobs? Not the Conservatives, no it was the Liberals & Progressives.’
1965 Immigration act…ole warmonger LBJ!
Amnesty 2 or 3 Clinton.
Anyone else care to cite facts?
From Elaine Supkis:
BBC defends decision to censor the word “Palestine”?.
Can UK be a part of Eurabia?
asia/antisoak –
There was no mention of illegal immigration in the 1965 immigration law because the 1965 law was a law and illegal immigration is – wait for it – illegal, and thus OUTSIDE of the 1965 law.
Most of the Hell that is waiting for humans on Earth can be traced to the policies of President Ronald Reagan – and so it is with “legalization” of illegal immigrants.
Reagan did it. He did it in a big way.
Part of the reason he did it was to get new Republican/conservative voters among the growing extended families of the newly legalized.
Vlad’s right. South American immigrants (and they are NOT all Mexican, we’ll probably wish they were before too long) do tend to be fairly faithful Catholics, and they do tend to be reliably conservative on “social issues.”
If we had enough fossil fuels left for a US of 400,000,000 people – this might all work out OK for all of us.
But we don’t.
Join these groups.
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/
Or find better ones – and join those.
A woman head-butting a man, whether a joke, a commentary, a meme, or a zeitgeist, is significant, when broadcast at $1.2 million for 30 seconds, to all corners of the globe, a male audience.
Heres what I read: I read the expansion of what female roles are. Advertising describes social roles, believe it or not. The housewife of the 50s was a role in which people aspired to and believed in.
Is the ‘dumb man’, the ‘patsy’, the Elmer Fudd, Homer Simpson type dominating the media for at least the past decade, just a joke? Or is it truly a description of who we are? I think it is. Its a chicken and egg thing, guys. For women, absolutely the same deal. I fully expect husbands to get head-butted literally and figuratively because of these ads.
Kids watch too, and unlike adults, they don’t even pretend to have functional bullshit filters. Bet there are 9 year olds terrified their gigantic primary school teachers will rip them in half if they so much as wiggle during another boring lecture.
The is the clusterfuck thesis: that these things, media, politics, economy, and architecture aren’t indicators of our psycho-social reality, they ARE the psycho-social reality.
“Here”s what I read: I read the expansion of what female roles are. Advertising describes social roles, believe it or not. The housewife of the 50s was a role in which people aspired to and believed in.” -bj-
Those are some good ideas, bustin.
And here is the overriding question.
Are these themes that we see in advertising and TV
-like the dufus male and the head butting female;
1. Are these things a creation of brilliant minds in the elite PTB, designed to destroy Western Civilization, by destroying the will-to-live of the males IN Western Civilization.
OR
2. Are these things a creation of brilliant minds that just want to win praise, win stock options, and-above-all-else-forever-and-ever –
SELL MORE goddam’ DANNON YOGURT!
I lean toward idea #2, myself.
This is American Style Free Market Capitalism-
Doing what it does best!
Whatever that might be?
And no matter what it destroys.
By the way, BustinJ – (or anyone else)
This advertising driving culture thing does NOT have to be subtle, by any means – not any more.
http://www.kansascity.com/2012/02/07/3415859/republicans-hear-a-political-note.html
“Republicans smelled something rotten in the elaborate production and its lofty talk of a resilient U.S.A.”
-comment on the Clint Eastwood Chrysler ad-
Flyover country didn’t vote for a LIBERAL Republican.
Romney lost in Missouri, Romney lost in Colorado, Romney lost South Carolina and Romney lost in Minnesota.
Romney keep on losin’ Romney not gonna be the Republican candidate.
While it has disappeared from most news, the war continues and our soldiers continue to kill and be killed in a dishonorable and immoral occupation.
U. S. Marine Corps Sergeant William C. Stacey, 23, of Seattle, died January 31 in Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from an improvised explosive device. All screaming id, no brains, no honor. Semper Fi.
You merely regress the question: Why does a woman head butting a man sell yogurt? Sure there is tension between the sexes and women like to get over on men but doesn’t there need to be balance? Not men head butting women but positive images of men. It’s just not there in advertising. I admit that women do most of the shopping so it makes sense to play to them but again, why does this work? Surely it wouldn’t have a hundred years ago. They have brought women along step by step until we have come to this pass. Show me a commercial where White Men aren’t made too look like fools in relation to women and Black men. Coincidence? Just to sell things? (Why does it work?) I don’t think so.
Bustin is right: it’s monkey see monkee do out there. I remember a movie in the 90’s that showed young guys lying down in the middle of highways right on the line as a dare. Kids saw, kids did, kids died.
Yes but if ya bring in alot of people legally
[1965 law and anchor babes] you invite illegals as we no longer have a country but a collection of dis united peoples w/i our borders.
Another term fer this is DIVERSITY
Or Muli lingual ism
or Multi cultural society
the rainbow coalition etc.
You know, Asoka, it’s one thing to generally condemn a war; it’s quite another to specifically single out an individual military man.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, perhaps your last sentence was a condemnation of the Afghan war in general. But your mention of U. S. Marine Corps Sergeant William C. Stacey occupies a compositional proximity with the last sentence that reads as very deliberately placed . At any rate, your post could easily interpreted as extremely insensitive, if not completely without class. It sure made me cringe.
Would you cringe if I named the people murdered by a USA soldier? They have families and loved ones, too. And they did not travel thousands of miles to come here and occupy the USA. If they did, I would condemn them by name.
Or do you not think that military personnel bear any responsibility for their actions? You think they are just “obeying orders” or “doing their duty”? Didn’t Nuremberg take away that excuse?
It’s just an “abstract war” for you, and you cringe when it becomes concrete and personal. I don’t suppose you cringe when Obama names individual soldiers to give them commendations, even if it is posthumously.
The entire idea of “OUT INNOVATING” or “OUT EDUCATING” the “competition” (who ? Germany ? JAPAN ? South Korea ?) so as to create “new sectors” and new “jobs” is based on two false premises: one that Novelties, High Tech Companies and New Services can create all of these new fangled jobs and two that even when and if they create them, they can create them by the hundreds of thousands.
First, since there are only a handful of really game changing new technologies available, and it is simply not realistically possible to create and invent completely new sector creating and industry creating technologies every ten years (like Automobiles were, or Jet Airlines were or Computers and Software and Internet were, etc.) we have to exploit the technologies that we have, until something else “really new” comes along to create “really new industries”, and exploiting the technologies we already have means optimizing, perfecting them and using less labor to activate and use them in the end, as we become more expert and precise in “cutting waste and excess manipulations (hence jobs) to use and apply technologies” (think mergers and acquisitions and economies of scale, etc.). So in the meanwhile jobs are being cut and fewer new ones are being created in place of them, and the relationship is essentially for every ten jobs cut by technology you may gain maybe three new jobs in “other sectors” (notice Odumbo and others never specifically state what sectors, what concrete activities, what jobs etc. they like to remain vague and abstract like innovation and education never specifically saying what is needed, since they don’t know and nobody knows and it is just an excuse to make believe that “somehow and in some way the jobs will be there”, etc.).
And even when jobs are created by Innovation and Education only a few are created since the very idea of Information Workers is to use the huge economies of scale that top notch Information Workers and Innovators and High Tech Specialist can produce: point in case to design the IPHONE you maybe need at most 1,000 top notch Information Workers but to produce them in China you use hundreds of thousands “Low level and low paying” (250 dollars a month pay against maybe at least 3,000 dollars a month to the Information workers ?) workers in all the component and such factories.
So that is the deal, you can only give out Free Salaries to all and cheap rents. Amen.
Also, other examples of game changing technologies were Skyscrapers since in the last 120 years they became another standardized technology used all over the world, creating ever greater numbers of them with ever more floors, etc. Another technology that gets perfected and applied and optimized continually. Also Genetic Engineering creating new drugs and such, another game changing technology but here progress is slower because it deals with quirky biological material which is hard to predict and control…
The entire idea of “OUT INNOVATING” or “OUT EDUCATING” the “competition” (who ? Germany ? JAPAN ? South Korea ?) so as to create “new sectors” and new “jobs” is based on two false premises: one that Novelties, High Tech Companies and New Services can create all of these new fangled jobs and two that even when and if they create them, they can create them by the hundreds of thousands.
First, since there are only a handful of really game changing new technologies available, and it is simply not realistically possible to create and invent completely new sector creating and industry creating technologies every ten years (like Automobiles were, or Jet Airlines were or Computers and Software and Internet were, etc.) we have to exploit the technologies that we have, until something else “really new” comes along to create “really new industries”, and exploiting the technologies we already have means optimizing, perfecting them and using less labor to activate and use them in the end, as we become more expert and precise in “cutting waste and excess manipulations (hence jobs) to use and apply technologies” (think mergers and acquisitions and economies of scale, etc.). So in the meanwhile jobs are being cut and fewer new ones are being created in place of them, and the relationship is essentially for every ten jobs cut by technology you may gain maybe three new jobs in “other sectors” (notice Odumbo and others never specifically state what sectors, what concrete activities, what jobs etc. they like to remain vague and abstract like innovation and education never specifically saying what is needed, since they don’t know and nobody knows and it is just an excuse to make believe that “somehow and in some way the jobs will be there”, etc.).
And even when jobs are created by Innovation and Education only a few are created since the very idea of Information Workers is to use the huge economies of scale that top notch Information Workers and Innovators and High Tech Specialist can produce: point in case to design the IPHONE you maybe need at most 1,000 top notch Information Workers but to produce them in China you use hundreds of thousands “Low level and low paying” (250 dollars a month pay against maybe at least 3,000 dollars a month to the Information workers ?) workers in all the component and such factories.
So that is the deal, you can only give out Free Salaries to all and cheap rents. Amen.
Also, other examples of game changing technologies were Skyscrapers since in the last 120 years they became another standardized technology used all over the world, creating ever greater numbers of them with ever more floors, etc. Another technology that gets perfected and applied and optimized continually. Also Genetic Engineering creating new drugs and such, another game changing technology but here progress is slower because it deals with quirky biological material which is hard to predict and control…
One thing that cut so close to my heart was reading that young men dying in war cried out for their mothers. And water.
The thought of my son being sent to kill or be killed for the profit of the rich alternately brings me to tears or enrages me to potential violence.
I believe that that is why they stopped the draft.
The ruling overlords don’t want to try to take my son for their nefarious designs.
Because you don’t mess with a pissed off mother.
That’s why they go for the stupid ones. The ones bred for the military, with their little camouflage pajamas and play machine guns. The ones whose mothers proclaim their pride that their beloved sons died for the good of the country (read: military-industrial complex).
Dumb as rocks.
U.S. soldiers in wars have a duty to themselves and their families to protect themselves. If, in self-defense, innocent people are killed, it’s the fault of the U.S. leaders who put the U.S. soldiers in such a situation. U.S. soldiers in such circumstances have nothing to feel guilty about.
I watched the head-butting commercial and cringed.
It looked like potential head injury to me. But people will fight over food.
As for cat litter, it is mined in an environmentally wrong way.
http://www.petproductnews.com/web-exclusives/litter-and-the-environment.aspx
And to all the assholes who pontificate about the Green Party, distorting our principles, lying about our goals: your lack of research and your casual disregard for the truth shows the depth to which the dominant paridigm of our make-believe society allows its citizens to sink.
Just because the ruling overlords lie with impunity doesn’t mean that you can do it convincingly.
You’re just acting the fool.
US soldiers sent to invade and occupy other countries are self-righteously indignant when the people they are occupying and killing fight back.
It’s not “self-defense” when you invade someone else’s home and they shoot at you, and you kill them.
And, guess what? US soldiers with morals do feel guilty.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8
Mass hysteria has broken out in Le Roy New York – teenage girls with too much time on their hands just like the witch girls of Puritan Salem. Too bad the girls wont be able to get people put to death. The parents are screaming at everyone and a witch named Erin Brockovitch is inciting them.
There is a mysterious illness named Morgellon’s Syndrome where very painful “hairs” grow out of the body. The hairs don’t seem to be completely organic in nature and are unlike anything ever seen. The only references to it are in the old Witchcraft trials in Europe. Perhaps due to environmental pollution? But why did it occur in old Europe?
From:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178111
“OP no two things can be in the same place at the same time,”
Not exactly: Nothing at all (no ONE thing) can be in the same place and at the same time because time is always flowing and the thing is always changing position.
“THERE ARE NOT TWO OBJECTS INVOLVED.”
There is not even ONE object involved since you cannot pinpoint it down in time and space to infinite precision.
But, the very fact that we can use these approximate principles means that we somehow “format” reality, we “translate it” we “decode it” into something else, we “Digitize it” into some kinds of ONEs and ZEROS and act upon it. How can we, when if we are made up of matter and matter itself doesn’t even contain ONE entity that can possible exist and is the same to itself ?
We are some gadget looking at the world from Outside of it, we are in some abstract world, we are outside of the universe looking in and formatting it according to our Man Brain. And it works for us and it is ok, and all is well, we don’t need precision.
But the real properties of the world and universe, by denying the very possibility of the Identity Principle deny the possibility of any possible logic and non contradiction, hence the Universe is totally contradictory and totally incomprehensible, is totally disjoint from us, a total absolute unknown, has nothing at all to do with us, zero relationship with us, we are aliens here…
Of course, we will keep on using logic and mathematics and physics and such because it works and it is “good enough” for our uses, etc. But something is deeply wrong with our Man Brain, hence design a new one, create a new Man brain that operates on pure contradiction and kills all logic and Identity Principles and Non Contradiction…(granted, not an easy task… maybe an impossible task ?).
Anyone having trouble with the Post Office? I sent an important package to be signed for and with insurance. The mailman at the other end just stuffed it into an unlocked box in an apartment house. Also they don’t seem to do return to sender anymore. Got some personal letters for the previous owner and I gave them to the Post Office – they just sent them back to me.
As Heraclitus said, “You cannot enter the same river twice”. But yes and no: the river is always changing in that it’s different molecules of water going by but the rate of change is more or less constant – and the molecules are identical. So the more it changes, the more it stays the same.
Things are always changing, but they do so in accordance with the Laws of Nature – which don’t change.
Better to mistake a rope for a snake at sunset than mistake a snake for a rope.
A cat will never jump on a hot stove twice. True -but he will never jump on the stove again at all -it’s just “bad” from then on. But can the cat conceptualize “stove” and stay off all of them from then on? Can we?
For another view on the Madonna half-time show-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN21Qkl1bxM
It doesn’t look to me like Madonna is shriveled, tottering or half-dressed. Was there another half-time show that I missed?
Pucker, you cannot blame it on “the leaders.” Each member of the military has an obligation under the UCMJ and the Law of Land Warfare to refuse unconstitutional orders to deploy.
The refusal to obey unlawful orders is the soul of American patriotism, as patriotism is defined as fealty to one’s country, not one’s “leaders.”
Only Congress is constitutionally-empowered (Article I, Section 8) to declare war no war was declared against Iraq or Afghanistan. Any order to deploy to Afghanistan is therefore unconstitutional and can be refused.
Lieutenant Ehren Watada refused to deploy to Iraq. In June 2006, Lieutenant Ehren Watada became the first U.S. Army officer to publicly refuse orders to Iraq. After almost three years of intense political and legal struggle, he won his discharge from the Army on October 2, 2009. He never did a single day in jail.
Pucker, you cannot get away with blaming “the leaders” … Each individual soldier has a moral duty to not participate in war crimes.
CORRECTION
Each individual soldier has a LEGAL AND MORAL duty to not participate in war crimes.
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Yes, a soldier only has a duty to obey “lawful” orders. But if he/she is defending himself/herself, and the enemy is using a civilian as a shield, then it is the enemy that is perpetrating the “war crime”, and not the U.S. soldier.
If a police officer confronts a bank robber who is using an 80 year old grandmother as a human shield and blows away the grandmother by mistake (or not by mistake, who knows?) it is the bankrobber (if he survives) (and the bankrobber’s accomplices) who will be charged with murder. The U.S. soldier is in a similar situation as the police officer.
Pucker, hundreds of veterans have testified in “Winter Soldier” hearings about the war crimes they committed. They did not involve civilians beings used as human shields.
Among those testifying at the hearing was Cpl. Jason Washburn, a former Marine who served three tours in Iraq. Washburn served in some of the most dangerous parts of the country, including Najaf and Iraq’s Western Anbar Province. A squad in his unit was responsible for the massacre of 26 civilians in Haditha in November 2005.
Washburn told the gathering his commanders encouraged lawless behavior.
“We were encouraged to bring ‘drop weapons’ or shovels, in case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent,” he said.
“By the third tour, if they were carrying a shovel or bag, we could shoot them. So we carried these tools and weapons in our vehicles, so we could toss them on civilians when we shot them. This was commonly encouraged.”
Another former Marine, John Michael Turner, tore off the medals he earned during two tours in Iraq and threw them on the ground.
“Apr. 18, 2006 was the date of my first confirmed kill,” he told the crowd other veterans. “He was innocent, I called him the fat man. He was walking back to his house and I killed him in front of his father and friend. My first shot made him scream and look into my eyes, so I looked at my friend and said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen,’ and shot him again. After my first kill I was congratulated.”
The AG said:
The Green Party’s essential flaw–in fact, the entire progressive movement’s essential flaw–is that they hate the white working class and want them displaced by Third World immigrants.
************************************************************
Working people can’t be romanticized. They’re the guys with 90 and 100 IQs who do all the dirty work that is absolutely necessary in every culture on earth. They’re not great conversationalists. They’re the beer and Cheez Doodle people Jim is so fond of pillorying. They’re tough to love but if you grow up around them you develop a respect for their resiliency and how they do the crummy, filthy, and dangerous jobs which hold up every country.
I think you’re absolutely right about progressives. Despite their lofty rhetoric, progressives actually tend to come from HIGHER income families and their social lives are like the debutante’s ball … well-scrubbed, lily white, cork sniffers. You won’t find many progressives at, for example, a working man’s tavern. You’ll find a few anarchists and iconoclasts but progressives at a working man’s bar are as rare as blue-collar cork sniffers at a wine-tasting event.
Moreover, many progressives are GUILTY and CONFLICTED because during the boom, they weren’t averse to doing all of the greedy little things that members of the RENTIER CLASS do … like hiking rents 10% more than inflation, flipping houses without making improvements, or gouging buyers because of the alleged “market price” which everyone, even progressives, knew was bogus. I live in a “progressive” town. I’ve seen it with my own two peepers.
The illusion going on here is that there ARE progressives and by that I mean people who fraternize and befriend all of the classes they’re allegedly trying to “save”. Indeed, they do not “love” the working class because it’s generally very alien, distasteful, and frightening to them.
E.
Not a single reply to or acknowledgement of deni’s great comment. You’re wasting your time here, deni. JHK is the worst kind of unthinking conservative (compare with Guy McPherson, who really has put his money where his mouth is) and his blog accordingly attracts unthinking conservatives of every stripe, such as Vlad Krantz, the only person I have yet met who boasts of having read Robert Anton Wilson, while eagerly demonstrating that he hasn’t understood him at all. And all the other shrill dickheads busy talking past each other here. My advice? Find another blog. This one is chock full of nutters.
And the other conservative cunt I forgot to mention, who has the temerity to describe himself as the anti-gnostic, meaning that he is opposed to the tiny minority of people who realize that this life isn’t worth living. Opposed. Hey, anti-gnostic, too bad you missed out on your life calling, which is to be a concentration-camp guard. They’re not hiring. Yet.
Hey guys,
I’m a progressive and I’m dead set against illegal immigration and H1B visas to import low income engineers above our own graduates.
I think by now you know I’m against globalism and outsourcing our jobs. I’m against undermining the American work force. I’m pro union as I don’t ever want to see the kind of working conditions here that we see in China for slave wages.
So please don’t stereotype all progressives.
What makes me a progressive is that I’m a Keynesian who believes in people paying taxes according to their ability to pay them and of course the rich 1% should be paying way more than they do.
I also believe in a demand side economy and an economy that serves the workers to build up a large tax base and economic determinism for a strong military used way differently than our military is being used now. War and armaments shouldn’t be our biggest export.
We shouldn’t be fostering the shock and awe of disaster capitalism to level other countries for the good of transnational corporations.
Well, I won’t go on and on. I think most of you know what I think.
ps I do love sipping wine.
martin, i can only speak for myself, but i generally only repply to a direct question, or to ask a clarifying question of my own; or to engage if/when i disagree with part or all of a statement: sorry, but i don t feel the need to turn this forum into a strokefest…that is to say that i agreed with deni and really had nothing to add; i don t think it helpful or true t tell him/her/it to find elsewhere- any valid poster has a place here in the discussion…yes, even you, vlad, although i find your attitudes and diatribes personally distasteful(to be polite about it) how about you, mr hayes, do you have anything positive to add to our discourse?
CFNers,
Please check the oil drum and Energy bulletin for some very insightful posts on the natural gas bubble. I came across JHK’s KunstlerCast #192: Arthur E. Berman, Petroleum Geologist in a round-about way, but if you’re posting on this site you should listen..
Reference:
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.com/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
Reference:
http://instantsingularity3.blogspot.com/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
well said, ell, and might i suggest ferrari carrano: worth the $80 if you can find a reason to celebrate…franzia, it aint! as for ‘our’ military, i ve long felt we would be MUCH better off if they were deployed to actually defend peoples around the globe who are being oppressed (often by puppets ‘we’ put in power), and as disaster relief; ‘twould go a long way towards making our country look as good in the eyes of the world as we ve always been told…!
Reference:
http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/102-general-philosophy/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
Reference:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63868-information-relationship/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
Reference:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63951-identity-principle/
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63952-a-few-technologies/
Ok, it no longer belongs in the Rant House…
“The illusion going on here is that there ARE progressives and by that I mean people who fraternize and befriend all of the classes they’re allegedly trying to “save”. Indeed, they do not “love” the working class because it’s generally very alien, distasteful, and frightening to them.”
Gee, like Progressives & Liberals are all clones or robots or something? Hey, guess what, we all differ, just like everyone else. Sure, there may be some Progs like you discribe above, but not all Progs are like that, just like not all Conservatives are RW Facist Nazis like Vlad.
Most Progs I knew were just plain old working class people but with, guess what, Progressive & Liberal Ideals.
But as I said before, we lost to the RW Conservatives, so, hey, you win, you can re-write history to lay all the blame for your fuckups on us, its ok, we are dead now anyway.
;(
No, I don’t think I have anything positive to add to the discussion, but thank you for asking.
unthinking conservatives of every stripe, such as Vlad Krantz, the only person I have yet met who boasts of having read Robert Anton Wilson, while eagerly demonstrating that he hasn’t understood him at all
==
That’s because he hasn’t read him. And I doubt very much that Vlad has read a single book in his entire life. Pretty much everything Vlad spouts is parroted second-hand propaganda from nazi blog sites. I caught him on this more times than I care to count. The guy is really a 7th grade illiterate and a malicious nazi. Everything he pretends know is gleaned nazi propaganda. That’s where all his “knowledge” starts and ends.
That’s really funny, Metuselah. Is it true? I’m willing to give Vlad the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t sound like a Nazi idiot. Some of the time.
On the other hand, your conspiratorial junk about the Vatican is pretty much on Vlad’s level of self-serving lunacy.
Test him and you’ll see for yourself.
It’s historical truth. The fact that supreme effort is and has been made into concealing this truth, doesn’t make it any less truthful but more so.
And to think I own a Silverado. Damn thing sucks gas like a Siv. But I got a good deal on it, and you can’t beat the XM radio. $42,000 truck for $28,000 cash, brand new …
A few observations on Amtrak trip south New England to Central Florida. Main observation: 500 miles of crumbling abandoned factories from New Haven to DC, some so large they must have employed tens of thousands of workers at one time, including derelict shipyards in Philly and Wilmington, DE. Seen from the window of an East Coast Southbound train it looks as if collapse has already occured. And it begins with the empty and graffiti covered Marlin and Winchester plants in New Haven. Jim says rebuilding the railroads should be job number uno and Amtrak is a good place to start. The trains run, and mostly run on time. The weather is great in central Florida, 80d every day, but the towns and streets are full of panhandlers and beggars from all over the US. Its wise keep a pocketful of change handy when you go walking about.
Interesting incident at Penn Station in NYC. Its not too big, about the size of two HS gymnasiums, but is heavily patrolled by at laeast a dozen NYPD officers, Amtrak police, and armed soldiers from an airborne division. At one point a comotion broke out, a guy yelling and screaming, and it was the soldiers who responded, not the police.
Florida from Orlando south is almost all Hispanic, including police officers, business owners and ermployees and staff everywhere. Those young Latinas are the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.
–WSP7
“Most Progs I knew were just plain old working class people but with, guess what, Progressive & Liberal Ideals.” -DJ
Yep, that would pretty much describe me, and your comments on the vast variety of all political striping, I’ve found to be true, even in the taverns. This is not to say that, personally, I find all political opinions to have equal weight, value and legitimacy! So mebbe I’m not so “liberal”, by that measurement? Well, tough shit fer me, then; perhaps I have more markings of anarchism than I’d like to admit and that M. thinks he sees incorporated in me. (Kinda proving your point.)
*************
LB,
I tend to take my wine in gulps, and usually from a box, or poured from a recycled beer bottle. (This is why we enjoy company so much; they tend to bring wine that comes in an actual wine-bottle and is of a higher quality. After that’s gone, the box doesn’t seem QUITE as old-soxy… because it’s THERE. ;o)
A few more things.
It seems not to many white, middle class folk are riding the trains anymore. They must be driving or flying if they are travelling at all. Most, almost all, my fellow travellers were black and Hispanic. Just an observation.
Just the same, for me, the Country is getting hard to recognize. The crumbling old factories, graffiti everywhere, grimy trash strewn streets in DC and Baltimore (for example) the US is definitely taking on a third world hue. It seems irreversible.
–WSP7
I waited for someone to attack your comment on evolutionary outcomes. no one did because it is irrefutable.
WSP,
Thanks for the first-hand report.
Your observations from the industrial “back-yards” (where the tracks run), run parallel to my on-going/on-rushing concept of The Great Crumbling. I think the “opportunities” that will arise from it will be alien to our present notions of what productive work looks like.
(I DO think that newspapers/broadsheets/ANY print media would be nice to have, although they’re a luxury in terms of distribution energy and pulpwood products. What will the texture of the future be? How far beyond food, water and shelter will the “pursuit of happiness” go?)
The study cited below leaves unanswered the question as to why ads generally seem to show disrespect to white males – but it hints at it. And it showcases “MUCH bigger” problems, in the author’s opinion – that being lack of minority representation on Madison Avenue.
My own feeling is that white males became a “safe target” for “humor” in advertising sometime in the late ’60’s or early ’70’s. Some of this had to do with the “perceived” cultural dominance of white males at that time – and the lack of safe targets for advertising humor OTHER than white males.
This continues to this day, even as society seems to slowly degrade the perception of power among “white males.”
From the study:
“The content analysis of the Super Bowl commercials was observed for recurring themes, the race and gender of the actors/actresses and the roles they played. The ads are often popular and entertaining for the general audience. Viewers may laugh at some images that are stereotypical and not understand that they may be offensive to some people in the group being stereotyped.”
“…offensive to some people IN THE GROUP being stereotyped….” ????
HEY, Dr. Lapchick at UCF – White males are constantly being stereotyped in commercials. Vlad (and many others) say that “white males” are tired of being stereotyped, too. What you gonna’ do about that, Dr. Lapchick??
http://tidesport.org/MadAve/MadisonAvenue2011_FINAL.pdf
Probably you will ignore it-that’s my best guess.
Political Correctness and all that, you know.
LEFT vs RIGHT
– http://goo.gl/pIUKy
The real divide
Okay, but let’s not forget that “selling shit to the rubes” (the advert bid’ness) is basically a sociopathic endeavor, as with any con-job. Find and stimulate the reptilian centers and devil take the hindmost; it’s how they get PAID. (“Just business”, you know.)
Hey WSP –
Glad you made it back home OK.
Your report from the rails is sadly accurate, and your conclusions are on the mark as well.
Asoka. keeps yammering on about the joys of poverty and third world living. More and more people in the US are going to get a chance to find out if he’s right or not – up close and personal.
And my sense is that America will bring its own style to third world living. We’ll keep the social isolation, intrusive government, big military, and the Cheeze Doodle lifestyle that we presently love in the US – and add to it a slow, grinding, and generally inescapable descent into poverty, for anyone (red, yellow, black, or white) who is not in the “elite,” in service to the “elite,” or in government work.
depressing. and now, unavoidable for most.
I know – let’s let in more immigrant “net contributors?” to share in the decline. Great plan? Not.
…and getting PAID is the modern measure of worth; social responsibility be damned. But you already knew that.
One more thing about TV and social change, and then I’m out ’till tomorrow. (Hi Q!)
TV in the ’50’s and some of the ’60’s reflected a very white male dominated society. And maybe they were joking about the male on female violence – but it was a long running joke that came from somewhere.
“one of these days, Alice.” shakes fist!
“One of these days. I’m gonna’ knock you to the moon.” -The Honeymooners-
And how many times did Ricky Ricardo put Lucy over his knee for a spanking? And I don’t think they were just being kinky for the camera, either.
No, the American soldier is in a similar situation as the bank robber.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8
Some people get it.
“They’re tough to love…”
And that is because they have a low IQ? Wow. The world is definitely a better place as a result of your brilliance. Thanks for that.
Jesus H. Christ, E.
You take an ignorant comment from some doofus on a blog, and extrapolate from it for your own prejudices.
You profess admiration for intellect, but you are going along with Karl Rove, who said “we create our own reality” and Roger Ailes who said “the “truth” is whatever people will believe.
Anti-gnostic, whoever that is, said something stupid, ignorant and wrong. You shouldn’t then take his statement and riff on it.
Don’t you have any respect for accuracy? For honesty?
Here you go. I’ll pull some assertions out of my hat, and you go ahead and comment on them, as if they were truth. Because that’s what you apparently do.
Republicans advocate fertilizing their gardens with dead Mexicans.
Democrats believe that Martians will come to Earth and save us from our folly.
Go for it, E. What have you to say about these policies, that I can tell you are absolutely true. Because I just typed them in.
“TV in the ’50’s and some of the ’60’s reflected a very white male dominated society.
And how many times did Ricky Ricardo put Lucy over his knee for a spanking?”
Ahhhh, you know Ricky? He was Hispanic. Not so much “very white male”.
Those young Latinas are the prettiest girls I’ve ever seen.
=============
It’s true Wide, those young Latinas are very pretty… but unfortunately their looks seem to have a short shelf life especially if they have kids, which many do.
They quickly take on a very blocky shape, something like a UPS Drop Box… and the children of these girls are often shaped like fireplugs with jet-black bowl cut hair.
I am thinking mainly of the Mexicans who pass my house on foot headed to a nearby park. Are Mexicans considered to be Latinas?
No, no one attacked his assertions because they were laughably ridiculous, and so were politely ignored, as if someone farted in church.
You really think that everyone on this blog believes his stupid racist ideas?
Grow up, Bossier.
By the way, I commented yesterday that the US engines that the world will hear will be the drone of drones. And Tom Engelhardt fleshes out that assertion.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/offshore_everywhere_the_plan_to_end_national_sovereignty_as_we_know_it_2012/
But Obama’s economic reporting agencies assured me that the economy was growing, jobs are back and the stock market is rising to highs last seen in 2006 during the economic boom… what could possibly go wrong..? Wait, there’s a knock at my door. I think they said “…something, something…homeland security”.
They don’t care about reality, lbendet.
They prefer to set up strawmen and gleefully knock them down, then congratulate themselves on their superiority.
It is very aggravating.
I did not say everyone believed it on this blog. I’m just saying it was hard to argue with it.
Anti-gnostic, whoever that is, said something stupid, ignorant and wrong. You shouldn’t then take his statement and riff on it.
==============
Above^ is Wage telling Eleut he shouldn’t “riff” on somebody else’s stupid, ignorant and wrong statement. So what does Wage do? She riffs on what she considers stupid, ignorant and wrong statements by Eleut. A perfect example of “do as I say, not do as I do.”
Just as I thought none of the liberal lecturers here gave a damn about the Clint Eastwood commercial.
We got white liberals fleeing to Whitopias where they can practice their white guilt in peace. We got White wing conservatives rushing along with Rick Adleson/Santorum to Armageddon to practice their christianity.
Then we got Clint Eastwood telling the remnant white men to come back to all the American Detroits or proto-Detroits, “because we can win this thing.” Uh huh.
I love Hollywood and Madison Ave.
For instance, one of the favorite memes of the self-proclaimed conservatives is that “real” Americans, by whom they mean blue-collar workers, are all conservative.
And yet, I’ve written about the blue collar workers that I know, here in rural fly-over country, and their politics.
All 3 of the carpenters who have worked on my house are not just liberal, but radical. The man who came to fix my washing machine recognized my voice from when I called into the Thom Hartman show. Because he listened to it. The man who was digging the ditch outside my house was a liberal. The electrician who changed my fusebox was a liberal. The guy last week who came to check for a gas leak was a liberal.
And ain’t they real Americans? Why, no, according to the conservatives on this blog, who insist, without any evidence, that they are either not real Americans, or are secretly conservative.
What a bunch of losers.
The militarization of American society is so thorough that even liberals like Rachel Maddow advocate for a parade for our “war heroes” ignoring the crimes the veterans have committed.
But the veterans themselves know they are not heroes, the veterans know what they have done, and many are so troubled they seek mental health counseling. Many just commit suicide.
The Veterans Crisis Line, launched in 2007, has fielded more than 400,000 calls and has saved more than 14,000 lives, according to the Veterans Affairs mental health website.
There is a suicide epidemic raging among those who are currently serving too. From 2005 to 2010, approximately one service member committed suicide every 36 hours, a CNAS study revealed.
Military members and veterans know the occupation is immoral. They know they have committed war crimes and they are taking their own lives out of shame.
What I can’t stomach is the white wine socialist condescension towards people they see as lessers ie the folk that “do the crummy, filthy, and dangerous jobs which hold up every country” as you say.
The “well scrubbed and lily white” think of themselves as awfully damned smart. They’ve read Dostoyevsky and Pushkin. They sport degrees majoring in who knows what from expensive schools. They know how to make an entrance and carry themselves handsomely. They’re articulate. They can bullshit the birds out of trees. And to be fair who knows some of them may have actually studied something useful.
But mostly they make me laugh. They have NO IDEA what they DON’T know. It’s true that the guys I grew up around can’t read three consecutive pages without getting a headache. But how many of the lily whites have you seen backing a tractor trailer laden with thousands of pounds of cargo into an impossibly narrow loading dock? How many have you seen suspended on scaffolding and harnesses hundreds of feet off the ground on the sides of office buildings or in the cab of a tower crane?
None you say? Neither have I. Book lernin is fine but book lernin goes only so far. “Progressives” see themselves as a force for “good”, that is “good” as they see it.
But I’m with you, the ones I’ve rubbed shoulders with are contemptuous of people they see as “uneducated” not realizing that they depend on the skills and labor of these “uneducated” for the food they eat, for their safety and well being. Progressives think their lessers need them but IMO progressives are one with wealthy conservatives in terms of class interests. What the working class needs isn’t for progressives to tell them how to live their lives. They need progressives to stop undermining them.
SOURCE:
Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide
(CNAS, 2011)
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_LosingTheBattle_HarrellBerglass.pdf
Where did you go to school? Harvard? It’s the only explanation. Don’t answer. It doesn’t matter. Wherever you went and whatever it cost it was a complete waste of time and money.
They don’t care about reality, lbendet. – WL
Neither apparently do you WL.
People can’t stand the crudity of the working class – fine, I get it. But then they pretend that they don’t know anything or have legitimate complaints – and that is appalling. And then they want to replace them with other people from other countries – and that is Evil.
It’s true that the working class is often confused and easily misled. Obviously. But they know they’re being exploited and destroyed. And no one can refute them. You don’t want to listen to them? Then stop exploiting to them and they’ll go back to sleep. They really do in live in their own world and are willing to leave governing to others – as long as their rights are being protected.
As Murray and Hernstein said in “The Bell Curve”, the problem has gotten worse because high IQ is now concentrated in the cities whereas previously, it was diffused through out the populace. But again, being unable to ariticulate their problems doesn’t make them wrong. To constantly presume moral superiority simply shows the Elite Establishment as the bigots they are.
Losing the Battle: The Challenge of Military Suicide
(CNAS, 2011)
http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS_LosingTheBattle_HarrellBerglass.pdf
The report was published in Oct. 2011.
If you care about the veterans, you might want to check it out.
Then, at least the veterans who have committed suicide will not have done so in vain.
Military members and veterans know the occupation is immoral. They know they have committed war crimes and they are taking their own lives out of shame.
==
This is not just limited to the military. The whole country is guilty of war crimes, and the whole country knows it. That is why the US is suffering from mass depression. Make no mistake about it. That which JHK chronicles and all that we’re witnessing, are classic symptoms of depression.
Boast of reading him? Isn’t that a little strong? I have read him, appreciate him, and disagree with his materialistic premises of a mysticism without Spirit.
His stuff on synchronicity is fun and interesting. His attack on Feminism completely appropriate and shows the strength of his free thinking. His refusal to take on the Blacks shows the limits of it. He knew about the incredibly low Black IQ as did Leary. He admitted that the attacks on the Bell Curve were hysterical and no one had refuted their data or their analysis of it.
Just as no one can refute that 40% of American Billionaires are Jewish and that they have influence far beyond even that would suggest. And at only 3% of the population? Incredible, no? They are an incredible people and they must assume much of the responsibility for America being in the state it is. And I’ll give the OWS credit for being some of the very few who are willing to talk about that. Of course there are millions of Americans who know on the Right, but we’re disenfranchised and don’t get a voice in the MSM.
Keep talking, you are amazing. Do you quiz everyone or do you have a special Liberal Yellow Pages?
Were they White? Did you time their signature?
When are you going to take on the Israelis? Where’s your backbone?
“Then, at least the veterans who have committed suicide will not have done so in vain.”
Blow me
I’m full up to here with high IQs. I’ve had a lifetime of their bullshit and I’m choking on it. Look at the mess we’re in. Who’s doing is it? The pundits, the thinkers, the perfumed, the glitterati, the preeners, the people with tall foreheads….
How can the terribly smart redeem themselves? Hmmm… let me think. OK, when I see a high IQ learn how to operate a backhoe with finesse or when one of them can work on a drilling rig without getting themselves or someone else killed, then I’ll be impressed. Until then, in my books, they don’t have any basis for calling themselves “superior” morally or otherwise.
Atta boy xhalor.
Check out the “Unfair Campaign” in Duluth, Minnesota. Pictures of Whites with writing all over their faces to the effect that they are guilty for living while White. And people think that this is going to help race relations! It is dehumanizing and will just empower minorities to attack us even more.
Certain aspects of the Left have a strong Maoist aspect in terms of confession of guilt and public shaming. The whole “White Studies” and “White Privledge” movements show this.
http://unfaircampaign.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Un-Fair_Poster_8x11-1.pdf
Maybe the suicides are related to the amount of time and number of deployments. These wars have been on going for ten years and with an all volunteer force the same guys have been deployed over and over. After all our combat operations in ww2 was 47 months. And due to the intense combat many who would have been disturbed did not make it back. Of course due to the lack of understanding of battle fatigue, many were just called crazy and ignored in those days. I do believe that when you are in that situation you are simply do what it takes to survive. I know I would.
Blind Militarism = Disrespect for Veterans.
Shame on you, Rhino and Xhalor.
(but please don’t commit suicide)
Nice reactionary attitude. The army uses IQ tests but cleverly doesn’t call them that so as not rouse the ire of the rabble rousers like you. They know that IQ is important even in many blue collar type jobs.
If I may offer a suggestion? Intelligent isn’t the same as intellectual and vice versa. I mean look at John Kerry – a dummy who poses as an intellectual snob. Likwise, some of the blue collar guys are quite bright but don’t read books. Strange? To me but this type often makes lots of Cash, so the last laugh may be on me.
Guys who install cable have to know alot and be able to make complex decisons. I don’t think a subnormal could handle it. Carpenters and Plumbers? Same. And the brighter someone is the more it will help – all other things being equal that is – skill with the hands has to be there and that isn’t measured on the IQ tests so I grant you that point. As I always have Cash.
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I don’t quiz people, I talk to them. I talk to everyone, unlike you and Rhino, who apparently only talk to the boys down at the Klan meetings, so as not to let reality interfere with your hate-filled imaginations.
I’m a political person, so it doesn’t take long for the conversations to turn political. Even if I’m just shooting the breeze with a repairman.
You make good points.
Many who signed up never read the “stop loss” fine print.
But we have lost the war in Afghanistan (as has every other occupier), yet we don’t get the soldiers out.
We just keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. That has to grind down our troops.
Bring them home now. They at least have a GI bill and can study without graduating $80,000 in debt.
you can’t be shocked by the fair campaign Vlad. Just another day in multi-culti paradise.
Wage said:
Anti-gnostic, whoever that is, said something stupid, ignorant and wrong. You shouldn’t then take his statement and riff on it.
*********************************************************
And then you continue to blither and don’t indicate one REASON why Anti-Gnostic is wrong. Gawd, the people on this site will tell you black is white and hot is cold and it’s so because they say it.
Progressives do VOTE for stuff that helps working people but that’s not what AG’s post or mine talked about. So it’s a matter of experience and after living in one of America’s most Democrat and progressive towns (Palo Alto), I have not ONE doubt that these people really do NOT like working-class people.
It’s the essence of the modern American Progressive … they’ll stump for the underdog but they really don’t want to have much to do with them. Get a hold of yourself, Wage, and try not to blow a fuse because you don’t think things through.
Look at what AG and I were TALKING ABOUT. Don’t extrapolate to the idea that Progressives VOTE against working-class people. However, in real life, they like to keep ’em at arms length because the DEMOGRAPHICS of Progressives has an inordinate number of well-to-do, educated, white suburbanites who haven’t a clue what a working-class life is really all about.
You can rant and rave all you want but you’re not SERIOUSLY going to tell me that, as social beings, progressives generally LIKE working-class people? Their social contacts are almost always in the same demographic of well-to-do, white, and educated.
E.
Rhinose “But I’m with you, the ones I’ve rubbed shoulders with are contemptuous of people they see as “uneducated” not realizing that they depend on the skills and labor of these “uneducated” for the food they eat, for their safety and well being. ”
The problem is that Rednecks think that this society is built around them.
Rhino said “What the working class needs isn’t for progressives to tell them how to live their lives. They need progressives to stop undermining them.”
Progressives “telling people how to live their lives”… a cute story. Damn Progressives like Jefferson, telling them they can’t have a 10 commandments plaque on the wall. Damn Obama, saving their jobs at the auto plant and keeping unleaded low enough to support their huge trucks and various motorized toys. Damn progressives setting aside federal land so they can do doughnuts in the dirt while bonding with their sons over aluminum-canned beer. Damn Progressives, with their minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, and generations that marched and demonstrated, shot at and jailed. Damn progressives, liberating the Negroes.
And then you, claiming they are “undermined” by progressives. Redneck hicks’ entire lives are circumscribed by forces they can’t control, and then they are not drinking themselves into a stupor, they grasp about for someone to blame, and usually grab hold of the wrong people for the wrong reasons.
I remember being admonished not to use polysyllabic words around my peers on the crew lest they feel inferior. That is the real problem. They hold on to pride, and it kills them because pride is not only deadly, it is fragile.
I know who is responsible. It was their redneck parents. Parenting is the process of infusing a blank slate with the bias and prejudices of the parents, for the parent’s self-fulfilment. But that is another, more universal issue.
Redneck culture is tolerated, because America is a tolerant society.
Now, there is a working class, of which rednecks are a minority group. I know lots of philosopher plumbers, gardeners, builders, contractors. I think the redneck class is getting nervous about the number of people with college degrees invading the skilled and unskilled trades, using their big words, not laughing at their redneck jokes, wearing non-redneck clothes, etc.
What is going to happen is that the rednecks that can’t compete will be kicked even farther down the socioeconomic ladder. They’ll be unprotected because of the gullibility of previous generations of Rednecks. They will compensate by resignation, and kill themselves slowly with cheap beer and all-you-can-eat buffets.
Redneck culture is easy to understand. Its a celebration of a legacy of stupidity. These hicks have no history, and their culture is simply pre-packaged nostalgia and outright fantasies sold to them.
There is a fatalism in that culture. Its a fatalism to strew clutter and garbage all over your lawn, to be an obnoxious drunk down at the bar 4 nights a week, to have a teenage son who is a “Juggalo” who was babysat by the TV his whole life.
Its a fatalism to pretend that you are too stupid to learn things, read a book, or walk in lockstep with whatever Republican happens to be running. It is also a fatalism to endorse Christian fundamentalism as some sort of ideal. Its a fatalism to be proud of symbols of the Old South, the confederacy, etc.
Progressives distinguish themselves from rednecks by imagining a world that doesn’t exist, but could be. Rednecks imagine a world that never was, and don’t have the capacity to imagine a different way of life.
Scientific advances, intellectual advances, facts and figures- these all bounce off the cranium. Rednecks are making adults with learning disorders look bad.
The level of redneck hicks’ personal development stops at the stage of destructive pride. I know people with sub-100 IQs who have union jobs, tough, dangerous jobs. No one persecutes them. They are protected by unions created by progressives. Their IQ is a definite problem, though. It makes them susceptible to being sweet-talked into bad mortgages, or voting against their interests, or pretty much any flashy lie that comes out of a TV commercial. It also makes them victims, of unscrupulous bosses who exploit their ignorance by sending them in to work at jobs where toxic gasses are being created.
BTW, Take a look at Randy Travis’s new mugshot. Yikes.
“Book lernin is fine but book lernin goes only so far.”
This sentiment pretty much sums up Redneck mentality: nothing of interest can be found at a library… an institution created by progressives for the benefit of all. Number of similar institutions created by Rednecks: none.
A-G said, “When the Kali Yuga breaks, there are going to be a lot of liberals who wished they had redneck friends.”
That is the ultimate redneck fantasy: that they are secretly necessary to have the engine of the economy functioning, and that their ATVs, guns, and diabetes will be assets in a more equitable future (where everyone is reduced to poverty and struggle).
A progressive might be defined as someone who thinks rednecks can be reformed, that they can be lured away from their stupidity and main-streamed into people who are aware of things in the world, and can have opinions that weren’t dispensed from the village preacher or the idiot Box. I’m not of that camp. I say line ’em all up in front of a pit and machine-gun them. bup-bup-bup-bup-bup. Oh, the humanity.
Vlad, thank you for helping to publicize the http://unfair.org campaign.
Gotta love social media for its ability to fight racism.
CORRECTION
http://unfaircampaign.org/
Thanks again, Vlad.
Gawd, the people on this site will tell you black is white and hot is cold and it’s so because they say it.
===============
And some provide factual information… and cite their sources.
And some rely more on books and peer-reviewed publications than opinions on the WWW.
“The people on this site” is a gross generalization.
Well, our realities are clearly different.
I AM a progressive and I mostly only hang with working class people, because I am one. Hence, the handle.
I live in the rural midwest, so that’s what I see. You live in Palo Alto, of course you know white, well-paid people. But I’m guessing some of the assholes are Republican, aren’t they?
It was the slander toward the Green Party that pissed me off, E, not the Democrats, for pete’s sake.
I don’t like Obamabots either.
Charles Hugh Smith keeps hitting it out of the park.
Check out today’s post, it’s a very creative approach on the issues of economics and the elite:
Social Fractals and the Corruption of America
http://www.oftwominds.com
lbendet, if you insert the http:// prefix, your URL will become a hyperlink, and more people will go read Charles Hugh Smith http://www.oftwominds.com
Yes the poster is appalling, disgusting, lib racist.
As far as Jews go, if they are 10M and Human total population is 7B, thats 1/7th of 1% of world population.
Quite a small slice of the pie.
All progressives are not smart, just all rednecks are not stupid. And there are nice guys and assholes on every block, whether they conform to your world view or not. I can guess at your category on the block. But then again you may just be trying to be earnest.
AG is right about hard times though. People with practical common sense will fair better than someone with a degree in sociology from harvard.
Let’s try this again, to get directly to Charles Hugh Smith’s blog, where we can read “Social Fractals and the Corruption of America”
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
All progressives are not smart, just all rednecks are not stupid.
===============
You make another good point, and avoid the gross generalization that people like E. often engage in.
I have worked in the blue-collar world as a carpenter and in adobe construction. I’ve put up and taken down many a scaffold, and have thrown 30 pound adobe bricks up to co-workers on scaffolds.
Yet I love my local public library because it has BOOKS, and I support unions and gun control and gay marriage (MARRIAGE not “civil unions”).
Doesn’t seem a contradiction to me to be both progressive and blue-collar.
The problem is that Rednecks think that this society is built around them. – BJ
Um no, that would be smart guys like you.
So where’s this attitude come from? You get mouthy with some guy? Some guy maybe without your verbal facility? I’ll bet you thought you were pretty clever. I’ll bet you made him look bad. And then I’ll bet he beat your sorry ass. I’ll bet it was tough explaining to your dad and going to school the next day with two black eyes. I’ll bet you never got over it. Did you?
When it comes right down to it BJ what are you and people like you good for? Seriously. I mean aside from bullshitting?
Know what? I think that if it wasn’t for the people you so eloquently piss all over you’d have nothing. Nada, no house, no food, no car, no nothing. NOTHING. Am I right?
You want to know why? No, no it’s really no trouble. It’s my pleasure.
I think this economy has been hijacked and wrecked by bullshitters. People educated and trained for the express purpose of bullshitting. People who have no other function in life. I have long familiarity with bullshitters, I’ve worked with them, I know how they think, their attitudes, even how they smell.
And aside from bullshitting do you know what they’re good for? Nothing. They are as useless as tits on a bull. Parasites. They eat, they shit, they fornicate and they produce nothing but BULLSHIT.
So BJ, are you a bullshitter? Are you of the bullshitting class, did you produce nothing but bullshit your whole life? You don’t have to answer me. But be honest with yourself.
Did you build your house, grow your food, raise and kill the chicken you ate? Did you have any function at all in doing any of these things? No?
Who do you think did all this stuff? Who got their hands dirty? Who cut the porkchops you bought? Your invented class of philosopher butchers, tradesmen and farmers? Or the people you shit on? Be honest.
I have worked in the blue-collar world as a carpenter and in adobe construction. – Asoka
And I have a pet pteradactyl in the backyard.
It is not a contradiction. I worked construction while doing my undergrad. Being around those guys was an education in itself. Many of those guys excrete more brains than many college grads I know.
as a righty, I am just as frustrated as Bustinj when it comes to science and deliberate ignorance. I don’t think it used to be as bad. I believe it is a product of elite policy to create a large permanent underclass. that is what equality of out comes is all about.
This might come in handy in TLE as well as in lessening the diabetes epidemic.
Mindful Eating as Food for Thought
http://nyti.ms/wOaPDH
When the long-distance trucking industry shuts down in TLE, and the store shelves become empty in TLE, making your food last might come in handy.
Got to hand it to those Buddhists. I just love their simplicity: sitting, breathing, standing, walking, and eating. Most people do these things every day. The Buddhists turn them into meditation.
The blue-collar guys I worked with were very intelligent. One guy, who kind of mentored me when I was an apprentice, said I had to learn how to become a mechanic. I protested that I wanted to learn to become a carpenter, not a mechanic. He patiently explained to me that he meant “mechanic” in the sense of a being able to analyze and solve problems.
When I worked adobe construction a guy told me there are 400,000 decisions that have to be made in the course of home construction. My little brain did not believe that until I experienced it for myself.
What people outside the trades don’t realize is that there is a whole lot of thinking going on all day long in construction.
My little brain did not believe that until…
==========
Please Asoka, spare us the disingenuous self-deprecation.
This is my seventh attempt at posting a response to your question, “What verse?” – just so you know I’m not hiding. I wanted to see if I would get another “Thanks for posting…” message.
The eighth attempt did not work either.
You have read Robert Anton Wilson to confirm your prejudices and come away disappointed. The other day I shocked you with my leftist sentiments. That’s what reading RAW, understanding him, and putting his philosophy into practice looks like. Awake, get a cup of coffee, and decide what ideology you’re going to parade before the void today, because that’s how much difference it makes to an indifferent world that doesn’t give a toss about the opinions of isolated misanthropes like me. Or you.
materialistic premises of a mysticism without Spirit.
That’s rich. What’s it going to be tomorrow, Vlad? British Israelism?
Some of the things I learned back then would probably be hopeless for me now. The first week I was on a construction job I was high in a pipe rack with the fitters and welders. One of them could tell I was freaking out over the heights. He grabbed me by the arm and said just stand there and get your bearings. You’re not going to fall.Since then I prided myself on never thinking I was better than one of those guys because I went to college. That’s why it pisses me off so bad when I hear someone disrespecting working men /”rednecks.” Even when I don’t hold with there point of view I try to keep that in mind.
…because that’s how much difference it makes to an indifferent world that doesn’t give a toss about the opinions of isolated misanthropes like me. Or you.
===============
Well I hope you two boys are having a grand time ’cause I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
Is R.A. Wilson the dude that makes all those balls and tennis rackets?
Does “a toss” = a fig or a shit?
RippedThunder, what you copy/pasted is not true.
The New York Times wrote about Phil Boerner, who roomed with Obama during his first year at Columbia. The article included excerpts from the Columbia student directory, showing Obama living during his junior year at 142 West 109th Street near Columbia’s campus in New York City, and during his senior year at 339 East 94th Street. Boerner recalled that Obama sometimes wrapped himself in a sleeping bag to keep warm in the chilly apartment they shared, and that some nights he would cook chicken curry for dinner.
In an article published in Columbia College Today, Boerner also wrote:
Boerner: I remember often eating breakfast with Barack at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway. Occasionally we went to The West End for beers. We enjoyed exploring museums such as the Guggenheim, the Met and the American Museum of Natural History, and browsing in bookstores such as the Strand and the Barnes & Noble opposite Columbia. We both liked taking long walks down Broadway on a Sunday afternoon, and listening to the silence of Central Park after a big snow. I also remember jogging the loop around Central Park with Barack.
Obama even published an article in a school magazine called the Sundial. A reporter for the conservative Human Events magazine recently called it “a wholesale endorsement of all sorts of leftist claptrap fashionable at the time.” The full article is available on the Web site of Politico.com. It was published in the issue dated March 10, 1983.
RT, the e-mail you posted incorrectly claims that ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos was a classmate of Obama. They were both students at Columbia for about one academic year, but Stephanopoulos was a year ahead. Obama received his degree in 1983, while Stephanopoulos received his a year earlier, according to a university press release. Neither of them were “class of 1984,” as the message incorrectly claims.
The message recycles — and exaggerates to the point of falsification — some attacks that were raised in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign. The claim that Fox News could not find any classmates who remembered Obama, for example, was published in a Sept. 11, 2008, Wall Street Journal editorial, which attacked then-candidate Obama for not releasing more information about his two years at the university. The message also makes much of Wayne Allyn Root’s statement in an interview that he didn’t know anybody who remembered Obama at Columbia. That appeared Sept. 5, 2008, in Reason magazine. What the message fails to mention is that Root was at the time a candidate for vice president on the Libertarian ticket. Root was stating that “[a] vote for Obama is four years of Karl Marx,” but even Root stopped short of claiming that Obama was not actually a student at Columbia.
SOURCES
“Barack Obama ’83 Becomes First College Alumnus To Win Presidency.” Columbia University. 5 Nov 2008.
Boss-Bicak, Shira. “Barack Obama ’93: Is He the New Face of The Democratic Party?” Columbia College Today. Jan 2005.
Cowan, Allison Leigh. “Recollections of Obama’s Ex-Roommate.” New York Times “City Room” Blog. 20 Jan 2009, accessed 14 Feb 2010.
Boerner, Phil. “Barack Obama ’83, My Columbia College Roommate.” Columbia College Today. Jan/Feb 2009.
“Obama’s Lost Years.” Editorial. Wall Street Journal. 11 Sep 2008.
Welch, Matt. “Wayne Allyn Root’s Million-Dollar Challenge.” Reason Magazine. 5 Sep 2008.
This is the Devil’s Kingdom and He is obviously against you. That is a point in your favor – against me?
I didn’t read RAW to confirm anything. Will you knock off your insane bitterness? Any second now I expect you to break out with your famous “Whites have treated me worse than anybody” – which is by definition if you grow up surrouned by Whites and not someone else.
Here you go, BuckStud. In an effort to humanize the war, read more about Will Stacey:
http://www.thefastertimes.com/politics/2012/01/31/the-tragedy-and-grace-of-sgt-william-stacey/
Bring them home, NOW!
(and I don’t care if Procon thinks they will only be flooding the job market … better living here than dying in vain there)
De Nada, Soak. You people haven’t a clue. Just keep talking and let people hear what you really believe. Ol’ Bustin above believes in the rat-tat-tat-tat of those Whites who would stand in the way of Utopia – just like the Bolsheviks believed.
I’m scaring myself by agreeing with you again. We have done all we can in Afghanistan. Five minutes after we leave it will be as if we were never there.
Prog and I would have plenty of work for them to do down on the border.
Why are so against the idea of Obama being gay? Is it homophobia – fear of gays?
Michelle did fake girl pushups against Jimmy Fallon.
The magnitude of the tragedy, what our country has lost and is losing each year we stay in Afghanistan, is revealed in the death of Marines like Will Stacey.
It is easy to use phrases like “the best and the brightest” or “cream of the crop” without actually putting a face on it. These are senseless deaths.
Will Stacey, RIP. Semper Fi … a la vida.
One further observation, this one about the young white dudes riding the rails:
1) He’s heavily tattooed, even and especially about the neck and skull.
2) He has an IPad.
3) He is invariably in the club car, drunk and loud.
That pretty much sums up whitey.
–WSP7
Jim, speaking of sporting events, you failed to mention the soccer match in Egypt last week where 70 people were killed, precipitating a national crisis. That puts the pseudo violence of our own Superbowl to shame. That’s a Super Bowl no holds barred, Arab style!!!
–WSP7
“I waited for someone to attack your comment on evolutionary outcomes. no one did because it is irrefutable.”
Or just too stupid to deserve a response 😉
Just like yours, but hey, I feel kinda punchy…
😉
Here is another bit of advice for TLE that I heard in childhood (from World War II)
Use it up
Wear it out
Make it do
Or do without
I’m still wearing shoes I bought in 1999. I am immune to “fashion” … though styles do eventually come back around.
And Q, glad to see you back under the name ‘Q’.
One question: Camden, New Jersey … WTF happened???
I’m just reading “Baseball in the Garden of Eden”, about the origins of baseball, and Camden is described as one of the Gardens of Eden.
How about now?
—WSP7
When I posted my initial response I thought about writing down what I anticipated your response would be, but, quite frankly, you’re a bit of an energy drain and so I declined. You’re also very predictable; your response was exactly as I imagined.
Like Vlad, your specialty is erecting strawmen as a pretext to thump your own ideological chest. On many occasions I have expressed disdain for the very wars we’re discussing but you choose to ignore that. But you’re right about one thing: the war in Afghanistan is an “abstract” notion for anyone who has not been in that actual field of battle. It goes without saying that includes you too, Asoka.
Here’s my bottom line: I don’t imagine you would have the guts to be so disrespectful and insolent to the actual family, friends, and fellow military comrades of the fallen soldier in real life as you have been in cyberspace. So that makes you a punk and a coward in my book… just another internet peacock tiptoeing safely among his droppings.
“I’m full up to here with high IQs. I’ve had a lifetime of their bullshit and I’m choking on it. Look at the mess we’re in. Who’s doing is it? The pundits, the thinkers, the perfumed, the glitterati, the preeners, the people with tall foreheads….”
Gee, sounds just like Fascism to me, let me check:
Yep, Fascism.
“How can the terribly smart redeem themselves? Hmmm… let me think. OK, when I see a high IQ learn how to operate a backhoe with finesse or when one of them can work on a drilling rig without getting themselves or someone else killed, then I’ll be impressed. Until then, in my books, they don’t have any basis for calling themselves “superior” morally or otherwise.”
Say, dude, I know plenty of very smart, people that can back a big rig into a loading dock, operate backhoes, and all that other stuff. Some even have law degrees. They just decided that doing all of the above was much more FUN than working in a great big corporate law firm.
So, next time you are talking to an oil rig worker, ask him or her what kind of degrees they have, Mr. Oh So Superior Hisself.
In the mean time, you can kiss my liberal & progressive ass.
😉
BuckStud,
Read about the experience of Will’s godmother going to Dover to meet the body of her godson.
http://miriamswell.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/devon-miller-duggan-writes-on-the-death-of-her-godson-in-afganistan/
Say, BustinJ, you said it so much more eloquently than I …
Thanks….
😉
The Green Party has made it abundantly clear on its website: America is for the world. Thus, the Greens have zero qualms about putting Americans in competition with the global poor for work and the global rich for housing.
You spouted off about all the radical tradesmen you hire in the tight, white Midwest. You think the vatos and his homeys who are casing your house while doing landscaping listen to the “Thom Hartman” show? Donate to NPR? Care about sustainable agriculture?
How the hell do you expect America will go “green” when we import millions of high time-preference Third Worlders every year? Where do you think your “living wage” will be set when Big Business can just import more and cheaper workers?
Naive fool. The Left can lie down in the violent, corrupt, polluted bed they’re making for themselves.
Asoka,
Are we having a problem understanding each other? Let me be more succinct. I would do everything in my power to prevent a loved one from serving in the military and fighting in these wars. Is that clear enough for you?
But you go to far in taunting a fallen soldier. If I was God I would send you back in time to learn the Code of Bushido. Pacifists such as yourself believe that George Armstrong Custer hated the Lakotas’ encircling him. I believe he stood in awestruck admiration for those about to kill him.
“Does “a toss” = a fig or a shit?”
-Q.
Q.,
It’s my opinion (derived from context, mind you) that “a toss” would be a handful of something resulting from “a wank”.
So, further, “a tosser” would be the same as “a wanker” with the addition of the wanking’s successful results.
If I’m wrong, I’m certain it will be pointed out without much delay. …By some fuckin’ tosser, no doubt!
;o)
‘Interesting incident at Penn Station in NYC.’
I would say its alarming soldiers are patrolling USA streets.
And yr description of the Homeless in Fla sounds like LA, or many places in the USA.
How can someone who is 82 on their next B’day be ‘quickly aging’?
Yes I agree if you go to my website Arthur Berman has a link. The last one under Corn Pone. JHK also posted the link to Arthur Berman’s website on the Kunstlercast episode screen.
The myth of 100 years of natural gas turns out to be just another flavor of Kool-Aid to calm the discontented and an excuse to do nothing.
A wise society would dig out of recession by putting people to work building a sustainable economy and infrastructure. Windmills energy efficient buildings and transportation. For when the only natural gas is that which comes from your a………..
Listen to the KunstlerCast #192 if you can.
Welcome to greenwashing!
I was chased down by a ‘Latino’ yday..I photoed him committing a minor crime.
Cant remember where I found this [sbpdl , maybe]:
Due to the ever-popular HB-1 visas, our nation is being flooded with English speaking people, who have absolutely no intention of actually integrating………………………………..
Gender-based selective abortions in the Subcontinent are so rampant that non-hospital purchases of ultrasound diagnostic imaging equipment have been outlawed……………….
Do you think that’s deterred American manufacturers of such systems from shipping them to India?
the HB-1 and student visas are a means for Hindus and Chinese to transplant their cultures to our country, nothing more. They form their enclaves and exclude Whites from buying property nearby. I saw what they’ve done and are doing to some of the nicer White towns east of Los Angeles. …….
Once, when their numbers were much smaller, they did a fair job of assimilating. I went to school with some of them. Now, they have reached a critical mass that enables them to live apart, looking down on us…………………..
I don’t think that there are nearly as many Hindus as Orientals here, but they are even less assimilable. They have no place in a free country.
Poor Los Angeles: Orientals on the east and south, Iranians on the west, and Mexicans in the middle. The beautiful White city is disappearing, carved up by squabbling foreigners!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gettin’ mighty Rovian in h’yar. Some seem to be doing a bunch of busywork rewriting history and pointing fingers at all the wrong people, which will turn out to be another definition of “trivial” in the longer run.
Good luck widdat, because the liars and the deluded jump first. Without fail. It’s gonna be the world’s largest lesson in human “selection”.
A very good martial artist acquaintance of mine – considered “The Man” in Ba Qua – who also spent a lot of time in Antelope Oregon with Rajneesh, once told me that so many “pacifists” are simply people afraid to fight. That in order to truly be a pacifist one had to first go through the tunnel of violence and come out the other side. At that point, the pacificism is a result of clearly seeing violence for what it is unafraid, as opposed to recoiling from violence as a result of fear.
It’s an interesting concept, but I’m not sure I buy it. Like so many esoteric concepts, it may look better on paper than it actually is in real life.
That’s Ok. Just buy a ticket to watch the Harlem Globetrotters make fools out of the all White Jersey Reds. It’s funny!
Asoka, Are we having a problem understanding each other?
================
Yes, from your very first cringe.
As a Thinker, I’m interested in the structure, the main points, the rule, the skeleton. As an Artist, you’re interested in the form, the details, the exceptions, the body. As this a conceptual venue, the advantage here is mine. You might find exceptions that don’t fit into my Rules, but that doesn’t invalidate them. And you are powerless to create conceptual structures of your own.
Charles Hugh Smith keeps hitting it out of the park. Check out today’s post, it’s a very creative approach on the issues of economics and the elite:
Social Fractals and the Corruption of America
==
Indeed.
“This dishonest, self-serving individual behavior is a fractal of what is happening in our society at large: dishonest and self-serving people are extending and pretending, and their complicity keeps the system going.”
Their complicity keeps the system going. But they pay dearly for it because they all suffer from mass depression.
Right. All Non Whites are automatically innocent in your silly little red book.
Kumar?
They are having a girlie fight.
“ As a Thinker, I’m interested in the structure, the main points, the rule, the skeleton. As an Artist, you’re interested in the form, the details, the exceptions, the body.”
Actually, Vlad, as a racist you’re most interested in “the form, the details, the exceptions, the body“. And as an artist, I’m most interested in “ the structure, the main points, the rule, the skeleton”.
Nice try, but the pebble is still in my hand, Grasshopper. So the next time you profess to be a thinker, try taking off the dunce cap first!
…and Camden is described as one of the Gardens of Eden.
=============
It is hard for me to imagine Camden was EVER a Garden of Eden. I grew up in Collingswood, NJ which is on Camden’s eastern edge so I’m quite familiar.
Here is a blurb from Wiki:
Vlad will not be surprised that the population is heavily black and Hispanic/Latino with 17.6% whites and a smattering of misc.
In 1940 I was born in Cooper Hospital in Camden. In 2005 I wrote a memoir containing these paragraphs:
I don’t know if having been born in Camden was considered a positive or a negative at the time – it was once the home of Walt Whitman if that counts for anything – but surely since then it would signal inauspicious beginnings. In my day its only claims to fame were its New York Ship Building Corp (the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier was built and deployed from there in 1961) and Campbell Soup (think famous pop art by Andy Warhol) that bought up a goodly portion of the Garden State’s “Jersey tomato” crop each year to make its best know soup.
Back in the 1950s a trip to Philadelphia from Collingswood involved traveling through Camden by going west on the Admiral Wilson Blvd past various used car lots and seedy go-go joints and then running a gantlet of dumpy black-owned row homes during the transit of which one prayed not to get a flat tire, on up to the Camden bridge (since renamed the Benjamin Franklin) that crossed the Delaware. The bridge toll was a quarter in those days and my dad told me that when the bridge first opened in 1926 the toll was to be temporary. As they say, “don’t hold your breath.” Today a trip over the bridge costs $3.00.
Some time later things got worse in Camden. Nearly all of the row homes along the “gantlet” and its environs were torn down and for years all that remained were dirt mounds, broken glass, rubble and a boarded up Sears Roebuck at the eastern edge that had been pilfered into non-existence. On top of that, Camden probably has had more politicians indicted for various crimes than even Newark or Atlantic City – two other sad and notorious New Jersey cities long past their heydays.
I like to think Camden’s downfall and pathetic state are punishment for Walt Whitman having stupidly written the words “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
actually, your friend is right…and that s pretty eloquent of him, too…
watch the Harlem Globetrotters make fools out of the all White Jersey Reds.
=============
Their shtick of making fools of whitey goes back about 80 years. I saw them in Philly as a young kid.
I love love love how you express yourself. I believe that I was born with a red pencil behind my ear. Shouldn’t the word have been “where” rather than “were”?
…too complex for the diabetic fat men to comprehend, and grossly misreported in the public arena, were Cable TV and newspapers work the levers of propaganda for one client or another.
On Superbowl Sunday, I and my youngest daughter went out to the local bookstore/cafe, had breakfast and read for a bit. Later that day we picked up my wife and eldest daughter, then spent the next couple of hours bowling (where my eldest daughter kicked my butt, sad to day).
At one point the bowling alley owner lowered screens to show the Superbowl, but after enough protests from the patrons, turned them off and let the few bowlers there concentrate on their games (I noticed a fair number of families there … hmmmm).
After that we had dinner at our favorite Thai restaurant, the one where they know our order better than we do. Again, they had the game going in the adjacent bar, but no one was watching. Finally we headed home, where my eldest worked on knitting a scarf (for a cosplay group she’s a part of), my youngest read a book from the Redwall series, and I went and worked on my own novel (The Jane Doe Project) and my wife wrote on hers (no name yet).
Not everyone is bought into the bread and circuses, and there are more and more of each us day that have decided that the first step to reclaiming your life is to not participate in the game.
I know, I know. If I could only be smart like you
If I could only be smart like you
============
Boss,
Years ago, while speaking about black culture with Charlie Rose, African American cultural (and jazz) critic, Stanley Crouch, noted the necessity for young black men to be “cool” while for Jews “it is OK to be just smart.”
Your sentence above has the words similarly arranged when I’m sure you really meant “If only I could be smart like you.”
Q, Thanks for pointing that out. Now I’m worried that really have a problem. It took me a couple of seconds to get it.
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And I left out I in the second sentence of this post. I will get my scheduler to make a doctors appointment tomorrow if I can remember.
Those blacks that sort and deliver yr mail Vlad!
‘Now, there is a working class, of which rednecks are a minority group. I know lots of philosopher plumbers, gardeners, builders, contractors. I think the redneck class is getting nervous about the number of people with college degrees invading the skilled and unskilled trades, using their big words, not laughing at their redneck jokes, wearing non-redneck clothes, etc. ‘
Clearly the truth in Santa Barbara is the Mexicans invaded and took those jobs.
SB is now 42% ‘latino’.
Well the lamestream media doesnt care about towel heads, does it?
[Scene from the 1996 movie “The Island of Dr. Moreau” starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer]
Dr. Montegomery to Edward Douglas:
“There is no way off the island. You must face the fact. Here…smoke this…and maybe you’ll start to understand.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_of_Dr._Moreau_(1996_film)
from:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=178113
There is also the “hard Work” theory where the idea is that if only everyone would work harder and harder more and more work would appear and be created and such. If only managers and enterprises would keep on inventing new projects and new goals ever changing you can create an infinite amount of work, etc. Maybe, maybe not as Man is the Infinitely Programmable Machine so anything goes and anything can go, etc. The theory doesn’t take into account a few constraints: resources are limited, the Technological Economy optimizes and automates work out of existence, Profits must be made, you just can’t invent and force any project and goal since the enterprise performing the work must make a profit and someone must be willing to evaluate and pay for it accordingly, etc., people and skill sets are limited, sometimes hard to find and People are Lazy so to say, etc.
Anyways, another limit and problem to all is that for many tasks, an enterprise may need a Specialized Information Worker only for a short amount of time and only to solve one specific problem and then not anymore, so that worker would have his work cut out for him for only a month or six months or such. And maybe that kind of specialization is needed only very occasionally and only in very specific sectors and for specific tasks and projects. But in order to become that specialized the worker must invest maybe a few years and money to get educated accordingly: so you have another contorted situation where the specialization requires a much higher investment than the amount of time that kind of work is performed in the future and the amount of money that can be asked for it. Anyways, the present Technological Economy is too complex and with too many contrasting forces to really have any real general solution to its problems. One thing I am sure of is that Work is Becoming Obsolete, there will be less and less work in the future no matter what. Even because the very definition of Information Worker – Services – Tertiary means one who “works smart”, works with Information and this has nothing at all to do with “Hard Work” or even “Time at Work” as in “More Time at Work Means More Production and More Result”, nay, it is the exact opposite, the Services and Information Economy and Innovation and “More Education Myth” means mostly a little smart work that generates huge economies of scale and huge amplifications, go figure.
But anything can be assigned anything, it doesn’t matter, Man will invent anything and any fake causes and effects and rules just because, so all of the above may be 100 % wrong. Amen.
Reference:
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.com/
Superbowl XLVI —
I was thinking about the number last year. Anyone here fluent in Roman numerals? Perhaps Eleuthero?
I say VLI (and VL for last year). I don’t see anything special about number ten in Roman numerals – it’s not decimal, so why couldn’t one subtract five?
(I thought that 1999 could be written as MIM, but I was corrected that one could subtract only numbers one order smaller, so MCMXCIX. But 5 is one order smaller than 50, so 1945 should go as MCMVL, not?)
HA HA!! Q-check, it looks like ya got some competition…does this mean that the exorbitant price of $1.67 per corrrection might start dropping…?
From The “Could People Get Any More Superficial?” Files
***********************************************************
Have any of you single old farts ever tried one of these dating sites? Hilarious. Are these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of women CLONES of one another. Their self-descriptions are almost entirely identical, essentially odes about how sexy, humorous, full of life, loving, cuddly, all-accepting, life-embracing, and gosh-darned wonderful they are. Of course, 99% (yes, I really MEAN ninety-nine percent) are divorced, often many times over, yet we’re to believe they’re a ray of sunshine for every possible suitor.
Months ago I was going to write a joke “profile” where I said that I was a five-pack-a-day smoker who couldn’t live without a fifth of Jack Daniels a day and that I rarely moved from my couch. Of course, the dating site rejected my fake profile as “offensive” to other subscribers.
These sites may appear to be a windfall to middle-aged people but, in the end, they just bum you out more because everyone blows several lungfulls of blue sky up your arse and they all want the same thing … to turn you into the person that the poor schmuck they divorced refused to be.
How many people of either gender are capable of living a serene, uncomplicated, modest life without all these pretensions to being Jet-setters, go-getters, and so on. The only ones whose descriptions implied they could just be happy without using jet fuel to see every monument and capitol between here and Tiperary were the “spiritual” types who, of course, think that their meditations will bring them cosmic consciousness.
Seriously, folks … if you ever want to spend about 20 bucks to do an experiment, join a dating site for a month and see the human race at its most conceited, most vainglorious, most unrealistic, and most wasteful. These people have a “carbon footprint” the size of Alaska.
An irony of modern life is that it is now quite common for people to not know their own town thoroughly yet they think that five days in Venice or Paris will make them an “expert”. Travel, like so many things life allows us in the modern age, is mostly like Andy Warhol’s description of sex … “The biggest nothing of all time”.
E.
Who whuz it again, that claimed to have slayed the Q-beast? Tonite is nothing, but more midnite jam sessions, for me (cleaning out my “hoard” room – 3 days so far, another 2 to go).
I found out about this artist in 1985, from a Chinese friend of mine (he was a child of UN ambassadors [they lived mostly in Belgium], and could speak fluently in German, French, Spanish, Chinese, and English – I used to listen to him talking to his Mom on the phone, and they’d just “hop” from one language to the next, without apparent reason).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsvKBvS6vNE
From:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63952-a-few-technologies
[quote][quote]View PostIronMan79, on 7 February 2012 – 07:57 PM, said:
I was noticing how the Technological Economy is really based on the discovery and use of only a handful of technologies that then lend themselves to constant improvements and refinements and such. Like Silicon Technology in Electronics and Integrated circuits and Microprocessors or the Internal Combustion Engine, or Jet Airlines, etc.
[/quote]
You are focussing only on end-consumer technology. You are (for example) forgetting the technologies used in industry…
Chemical processes in general have gone through a non-stop evolution of getting new, more efficient, cleaner, and better products. Multi-billion euro worth discoveries are common there. Take for example the strong fibre technologies like kevlar. Or take the composite material technologies. Or look at the gas cleaning technologies which make our cities liveable again. Or the drinking water technologies which means that water doesn’t taste like chlorine anymore. Maybe you don’t notice those, because you are neither their supplier or their consumer. But these things definitely affect the average guy on the street. I could extend this list into hundreds of examples, each worth billions.
[quote]View PostIronMan79, on 9 February 2012 – 07:21 AM, said:
Anyways, another limit and problem to all is that for many tasks, an enterprise may need a Specialized Information Worker only for a short amount of time and only to solve one specific problem and then not anymore, so that worker would have his work cut out for him for only a month or six months or such. And maybe that kind of specialization is needed only very occasionally and only in very specific sectors and for specific tasks and projects. But in order to become that specialized the worker must invest maybe a few years and money to get educated accordingly: so you have another contorted situation where the specialization requires a much higher investment than the amount of time that kind of work is performed in the future and the amount of money that can be asked for it.
[/quote]
Yes, some jobs are becoming obsolete. So what?
New specializations are emerging. And it’s just a matter of getting proper education.
I don’t know in which economic hell hole you’re living, but where I am (Netherlands), there is a shortage of scientists and engineers. You are talking about the technical world? And you’re suggesting that technical people will be out of a job? In fact, it’s the exact opposite. There is a shortage of scientists and engineers in this country. We import brains.
If companies require someone’s expertise for only a few months, then that job will be outsourced. It’s completely normal – in fact, even common – to temporarily hire some engineer to fix a problem. There are companies which are like a “Rent-an-Engineer”.
Your view is just over-simplified.
[quote]View PostIronMan79, on 7 February 2012 – 07:57 PM, said:
[…]so all of the above may be 100 % wrong.[/quote]
That’s the first thing I agree with in your posts. [/quote]
[quote]“Yes, some jobs are becoming obsolete. So what?
New specializations are emerging. And it’s just a matter of getting proper education.”[/quote]
Which ? Be specific. Do you need a thousand new Chemical Engineers ? a thousand new Composite Material Engineers ? A thousand new Water Processing Engineers ? So then what ? that only makes 3,000 Engineers hired (for 8 hours a day for years on end ? and making at least 2,000 dollars a month ?). But the USA and the EU and JAPAN have millions of unemployed: ok, I got it, they are stupid, aren’t educated enough, didn’t learn the very last top notch skills where they are looking for hundreds of Engineers, and most of all they are all Lazy Bumbs, and so blame the Victim.
Look, I agree, there are many things, and many sectors and many kinds of jobs, but the way it is set up today, with millions of unemployed looking for jobs and entire continents (China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and others) robbing work from the first world, I have a hard time buying into your mostly “dominating Right wing ideology” whee it is always the workers fault…
[code]You’re just ranting, aren’t you? This is just one giant complaint, which, I guess, comes from some huge disappointment. I’m guessing you lost your job?
Don’t blame the technology sector. Blame the financial sector for this crisis.
[/code]
Ever since I was a kid I have always heard of this myth of we need more scientists and engineers, etc. And in fact I became one (sort of), and have worked in technical environments, etc. The myth was also due to strong investments in Military technology and Space programs and such but I am now mostly convinced that something else is going on: this myth acts as justification to keep people out of work, to not distribute money, to always put the blame in something that is wrong with the “workers”, etc.
Of course there are other forces at play: cultural forces in that an environment of “hard work” ( ? an iffy concept today…) and research fosters dedication and ambition and so filters out many types of people that don’t exactly abide to certain models (think South Korea and how their strong investments in Technology has achieved them so much status – they have cornered the worldwide flat screen TV market and smart phone market) or even because they are not smart enough, educated enough, too lazy or whatever. So you have environments where you must fit in and abide pretty narrowly, and this may be the case of certain technical environments and corporations (but of course every situation is different and it is hard to generalize).
But the Technological Economy, by definition will always, by structure, kill more jobs than create them and even when they do create them and if they do, they will create fewer jobs than the ones killed and those fewer jobs will be harder to do because you have to be a very competitive and top notch Chemical Engineer or Process Engineer or whatever.
SO kill 1,000 factory worker jobs and create 200 top notch jobs: and another thing, the very fact that the jobs created are Education Based, Information Workers based, Innovation based means they are available worldwide, information and people can flow freely between continents, so you are competing against millions of potential top notch technicians educated in often completely different environments (South Korean Engineers studied 12 hours a day and such (if it is true?)) and with different (stricter) rules from a lot of places in the USA or EU (JAPAN is the competitor in this case ?).
Anyways, my solution is Free Salaries to all and Cheap Rents to all, check out all of my posts nameta9 on http://www.ilovephilosophy.com, you will learn the absolute and total truth in time…
An example:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=177908
“That is a point in your favor – against me?”
I will not judge another man’s servant – will you?
I agree with your comments about pacifism. Concerning General Custer there is an American Indian tradition that he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the batttle of the Little Bighorn. This story was related by the Englishman Archie Belaney, who lived amongst Canadian Indians and took the name of Grey Owl. He successfully impersonated an Indian and became world famous as a writer, documentary film maker, and lecturer on the subject of conservation. He worked as a guide at both Camps Wabikon and Keewaydin on Lake Temagami, in northern Ontario. He also live out west and knew plains Indians who had fought Custer. That is how he got the story about the Little Big Horn. He was finally exposed as an impostor by a reporter from the North Bay Nugget. He once gave a presentation at Buckingham Palace in front of the current QE II when she was a small girl. In my opinion his sources for this legend of Custer being a suicide are unimpeachable.
Mornin’ A, Like I said I did not check the info. I’m too lazy. I just tossed it out there. I get all sorts of shit e-mails. Thanks for the correction.
From:
http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/63952-a-few-technologies/
“Aha… so this is just one giant spam advertisement for your own website.
If that is the goal of your posts, I see no more reason to discuss. ”
“I don’t know in which economic hell hole you’re living, but where I am (Netherlands), there is a shortage of scientists and engineers.”
Take your choice, there is no shortage of “Economic Hell Holes”. Near to your home there are a few: Spain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Portugal… towards the east Ukraine, parts of Russia, Pakistan, towards the South most of Northern Africa, in the Americas, parts of the USA, parts of Mexico…
you get the idea…
They should all become Engineers and Scientists, that is the problem (or immigrate to the Netherlands).
Hey, Vlad, you’re right the white countries are the winners, it is all about race after all….
Fear and Loathing in the USA
Looking over the posts from last night two things struck me in the early light of day.
First, Mika: You responded to my post of the social fractals and I thought good, someone had a response to what CHS wrote. I would recommend checking him out every day and I sometimes email him a compliment on some of his observations.
He addresses the interplay of social ills, philosophical ills and economic ills of our moment.
Point is that people will hold onto anything they know for fear of the unknown. It’s not simply a matter of accepting all the bad as if nothing is wrong. It’s a question of pure fear–what if we let the banks fail? What becomes of all of us?
Could life be better for all of us if we let go of the system we have now? How long can this graft go on before it becomes untenable for the mass of people living in these conditions?
There’s always a tipping point when a system goes rogue, but what it is will most likely be when the energy issues collide with the inevitable bubble-ishish bursts again. Fear will be the driving force.
__________________________
E.
The dating sites are a bit like adoption centers with everyone trying to sell themselves to strangers. Let’s face it, it’s very commercial, coming out of a society that tries to get people to buy. Nothing personal, you know.
I think the social value system of the moment probably calls for well traveled-well heeled individuals looking for sophisticated same.
I have been out of the dating market for so long I never dealt with that, but I have friends who have. One even got married to someone she met through the service.
Most of the time, though I would imagine its just like being set up on a blind date…Oh, yeah I had a few real weird ones.–I could at least do a stand-up comedy routine about that!
I read it and while interesting the analogy with fractals does not work for me.
Fractal terrains like trees on a mountain ridge tend to look the same viewed close up or far away. Applying a fractal analogy to the common man and those at the top of society who lead assumes they are cut from the same cloth when they are not. Those who lead belong to a plutocracy of privilege. They are not of the same social class as the common man and the analogy to fractals thus fails. They have different standards of behavior and world views.
As more men follow than lead infection at the top does infect the rest of society. This true and unfortunate fact of life I’d compare more to the spreading of a disease than fractal behavior.
Social Fractals and the Corruption of America
Seriously, d00d, you are thinking too hard. Just watch what will happen in Greece, in the next few months…
Economy the size of Austin, Texas – virility the size of *MY COCK*… Oh, and yes – that fucking boner hits me up every day, multiple times… (bah!) *SUE ME*
Ix,
Do you really expect me to respond to that?
From:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174921&start=25
A = not A. That is the question. That is a “contradictory universe”. Where does this exist, how does this exist ? It does exist, but it doesn’t “do” anything. That is the point, it is in a metaphysical dimension of no activity, no further actions, no further relationships, it needs no other relationships, there are no further elaborations, no other interactions of this state of “existence” or “being” than itself. You are not going to use it to reach other new relationships, you can’t use it in any sense at all, because using it means plugging it in some kind of language, logic, some kind of “progression” towards something else, but it already contains, within itself, all that it needs since it doesn’t need anything else, it is total, totalizing and finished.
It especially has no relationship with “us”, with our mind, there is nothing we can do with it, there is no kinds of “Intentionality of Use” that we can apply to it. This is real metaphysics, real philosophy, that for which there is no further use, no further relationship, except these words or similar that describe vaguely how it relates to what we already know. All of our science, language, thoughts and memory are relationships defined according to what we already know, are new elaborations in an already given solution space, and these new elaborations and calculations bring on further new ones or apparently new ones, expanding the solution space as in the “progress of science and knowledge and the insertion of new bits in memory as a result”, that are “used” to generate others, in a “process”, a cycle.
But metaphysics is still, static, is frozen, doesn’t progress. Like when we stop to think about time, it is a constant present moment that divides that past from the future, but it isn’t the past or the future and the moment is fleeting, is intractable. These kinds of problems have no solution, these problems are absolutely new every time you look at them, there is no possible solution to this equation, there is no possible “progress” as is understood in terms of logic and science that can be applied to this, it will be always the same whether we look at it at 5 years old or after a trillion times, at 100 years old. There is nothing we can “do” with this problem, no further possible “understanding” by meditating upon it. And indeed metaphysics and philosophy at this level also has no social use, no one can help you on this one, you are alone with this, your mind is alone with this thought and no amount of social interaction, of “communication” will change this. And in fact real philosophy has no need to be communicated, has no use, has no social meaning, has no logical use whatsoever, it is simply the mind looking at impossible problems, taking a glimpse in a new universe of metaphysical platonic monolithic slabs of crashed mental “computer programs”.
Most problems in philosophy are completely new every time you look at them, no matter how many times you already looked at them, this is because the nature of these problems and the way our mind reacts to them is always like the first time, we repeat forever the same awe and feel the same distance from these problems, there is no possible progress in philosophy, it is always repeated the same and often, even the more you look at these problems “the newer they become”, the further you get from solutions, the worse it gets. All of our normal everyday logic goes out of the window when thinking about a “contradictory universe”, “time”, “existence” and other similars, the difference with everyday concepts, with science or even mathematics and physics is astounding, the problem of “existence” is so general and abstract, that all other problems become puny, irrelevant, for little boys.
Like the concept of “existence”. This is also a monolithic slab, for anything to “exist”, “existence” itself must already exist, but exactly where, in what way is something real, does something exist, is something true ? No solution, the further you think about it, the worst it gets, reverse progress, another characteristic of philosophy is that the more you “work” on problems the further you get away from any solutions, a concept or problem must simply be perceived, stated, and left alone, and your mind can simply wander, don’t use logic, it is useless, counterproductive.
One last thing, instead of “A = not A”, write, “= A not =”. What is = ? How can this be ? It is, but it is another monolithic slab. Write others, invent other concepts they are all real, what is the square root of the square root without applying it to numbers ? That is metaphysics, that is where things really exist.
The structure of existence, if something is true it must exist in all time and in all points in space simultaneously, otherwise there is a place where it isn’t. So if we are alive and what we see is true, then we must be alive in all time and for all points in space otherwise (but we were dead, and will be dead, and we are not walking on mars)… and we must be concentrating on the same information the same Information Relationship, Reciprocal Information Interactions and Reciprocal Mass – Energy – Matter Interactions, but if there are other Reciprocal Information Relationships, what makes the previous one still exist ? Memory ? But if you think of the previous one you lose the present one, so what gives ? We are contradiction, we are without any solution.
In theoretical physics, the most abstract theory of new universes has the same distance in our mind to the most concrete theory, they are all denotations, just Reciprocal Information Relationships, some are associated to measurements that somehow confirm the “reality” of the theory, but in all truth, they are all real, only some can be translated into some other language where instrumental manipulations can be used. But this begs the question, since we always essentially just talk to ourselves, we probably can invent a new instrumental relationship, and lie to ourselves and make any theory truth.
Reality couldn’t have been based but on Quantum Theory, it couldn’t have been any different, there is no way that an electron circling an atom could have been a rigid ball with an infinitely precise size, a monolithic slab, otherwise the world would have been completely deterministic and completely tractable and predictable, the three body problem exactly solvable (but there is an abstract universe where this is true, that abstract universe exists and is real just as much as ours given the nature of “existence”).
But reality exists exactly because the laws of physics don’t exist in some points of space, the probabilistic, quantum nature of reality reflects this, it is the non existence of any patterns and laws that make the existence of the patterns and laws of physics real. Just like philosophy states that something exists only because it exists in the background of its opposite.
Reality is the subtle string of the lack of the laws of physics that gives the laws of physics their reality.
I read it and while interesting the analogy with fractals does not work for me.
Those who lead belong to a plutocracy of privilege.
==
And? The corruption dishonesty and thievery is same at the bottom as it is at the top. I’ve been raging against the “willful ignorance” of Americans for years now. But it’s not ignorance at all. You all know what’s going on and your part in perpetuating criminality, but you continue to ignore it. That’s not ignorance.
People deserve the government they have. If you think you don’t, prove it!
What to expect if you are a central planner..
– http://goo.gl/Jjovz
“Ix, Do you really expect me to respond to that?”
Too ghad damned fast!!! Are you bloody reading this shit *ALIVE*!!!
Hahaha, too bad ,so (soooo) sad…
Hui Han Manchu
Mongolian-Tibetan
Naxi Kazakh Tujia Pumi Zhuang
Buyi Jino Wa ; De’ang Dong
;
Dai Yugu Bai Tu Jingpo
Blang ethnic Uzbeks Tartar Gate ; Aquarium
Yao Li Dulong
; Korean Hani
Bonan Oroqen Hezhen family Lhoba Gaoshan
Dongxiang Salar ethnic Russian Xibe Achang
;
Qiang Daur Uygur and Yi Lisu
Gelao Jing Mao difficult family Tajik Nu
Shes Kirgiz Lahu Mulam Ewenki
Miao
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith:
Self-Interest and the Pathology of Power: the Corruption of America Part 2
– http://goo.gl/9zV7x
“Point is that people will hold onto anything they know for fear of the unknown. It’s not simply a matter of accepting all the bad as if nothing is wrong. It’s a question of pure fear–what if we let the banks fail? What becomes of all of us?” -LB
********************
An added dangerous complication is that people not only hold on to “what they know”, they hold on to what they THINK they know. It’s very evident on this blog. If reality should intrude past the blinders of rabid ideology, it’s immediately labeled as something “bad” or driven by some evil ideology. (Predictably, one that is the [supposed] antithesis of the one held by the “Pure One”.)
In a sort of fatalistic way, I don’t find this much of a big deal in the grand grinding of the cosmic mills. A lot of “folks” are going to expire in a state of bewilderment that their sprawling vision wasn’t enthusiastically supported by “all thinking persons”, or by the gods that they’ve slavishly sacrificed their grubby humanity (integrated animal-nature) to.
Does this apply to me as well? Sure, but contrary to what E. had said about the uselessness of travel, it allows you to see more than a few ways of organizing a society. (BTW, there is a huge difference between tourism and travel, especially when you factor in the amount of $$$$$$ that can buy luxury, isolating you FROM the society you happen to be in the midst of.)
I’m more adaptable, and certainly not as prone to panic than most of the hide-bound I see about me whose big excursion “out of the country” is treating themselves to a resort vay-cay in Hawaii.
That, and patience, allow me to be more free of the prison of fear and hubris than those shackled to the status quo of the MIC.
******************
“There’s always a tipping point when a system goes rogue, but what it is will most likely be when the energy issues collide with the inevitable bubble-ishish bursts again. Fear will be the driving force.” -LB
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I believe this too. It’s the vacuum into which the Authoritarians will insert themselves to lead the deluded, stupid and fearful into their world of suicidal mightmare. Their only dilemma when it all shakes out is that they’ve exposed themselves and their agenda. That’s when things get really “interesting”. We’ll have to ponder whether the human race will be a viable concept after the coming iteration of bloody-minded megalomaniacs.
“mightmare”?? lol That’s a really weird slip…
Might make night?? ;o)
Good post and good advice.
Cc: Vlad as well
Buck,
Just as I mentioned to you couple of blogs ago: “there is no shortage of art “opinions” in this world.
Reading Thinker’s post and how he got it all upside down gave me a chuckle. Sure enough, a few scrolls down, your right-on-the money reply :).
LB said:
I think the social value system of the moment probably calls for well traveled-well heeled individuals looking for sophisticated same.
***********************************************************
Actually, LB, at the risk of sweeping with TOO broad a brush, a majority of the women want a GUY to come along and provide a “well-traveled, well-heeled” lifestyle. Yes, there is a sizable minority of women on these dating sites whom I would characterize as “rapaciously ambitious” and they come across as the biggest bores of all. But the self-promotion on these sites is just horrible.
I’ve corresponded with a few decent souls but, on the whole, these sites expose all of the greed, vanity, self-promotion, and cheesy wealth-clamoring that Jim writes about every month.
E.
You said it, lbendet, and so did Thomas Jefferson-
“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
However, Tom went on to say,
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security”.
As for the ruling class, I find it interesting that some of them are starting to feel some shame. Apparently, at Davos, there are conversations about the inequality we are living under, and how, just maybe, it just be righted a little.
Meantime, back in the working class, we can see on this blog that many of the most oppressed are arming themselves – not to kill their oppressors, but to kill those below them on the economic scale.
Monday, after my radio show, the next volunteer didn’t show up, so I filled in the next two hours with one CD (with 18 songs on it), talking in between to fill up the time.
I played Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues and then ranted about the prison-industrial complex, the millions of people unjustly imprisoned, the ridiculousness of the drug law, the complete impunity of the 1%, etc.
The next volunteer showed up, and while we played another song he told me that he agreed that there shouldn’t be so many people in prison, and that his wife, who has cancer, should be able to smoke marijuana. OK, we’re on the same page there. Then he says, why should we spend $50,000/year on prisoners when people don’t have food or housing? OK. THEN he says, we should just fry people and spend the money on other things. WHAT???
Then I, of course, told him that I disagreed, and he said that if people have been convicted of murder then they should be killed. Then I said that many people were convicted of murder that were later found to be innocent. Then he said, well, like Charles Manson. Then I said that Charles Manson wasn’t convicted of murder, or even charged with murder. Anyway, it went on from there.
Ironically, Democracy Now had a segment that day about 3 guys who spent 18 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement, for murders that they are now proved not to have done.
Our radio station plays DN at 6pm, so I hope he listened.
My point is that, although I usually have more affinity for the oppressed, sometimes I have to hope that our ruling overlords have more principles than some of us on the bottom.
Since I am logged.
I noticed quite interesting back and fourth redneck vs educated professional line of posts. Both have merit: There is no question that there are intelligent manual workers, in my early career they saved not once my educated ass, as well as there is bunch of white collars who are not afraid of power tools, again, I am one of them.
My personal dilemma is of different nature.
Blue collar workers, in general, tend to be more street smart. There is a lot: “Are you shitting me?” attitude toward any uncharted relationship. On other hand there is a lot of naiveté among white collars in ordinary daily life, ie. classic “spaced out” scientist, engineer or artist wrapped in his world, “funny” professor…
Now, when it comes to political life first group is easily led by Power elite, which with almost comical tricks make them to vote against their own interests. They would spot a shill on the street in a second, but sleazebag politician has a lifelong free pas with them?
When you see a Vietnam veteran on numerous on and off freeway ramps, mentally screwed, poor and not cared for after he’s not needed any more really means that whoever is sending you to fight their battles is not really thinking of you highly.
To die for the country is one and honorable thing to do but to die for the sleazy corporation which has an eye on “enemy’s” goodies is totally different. And, yes, CEO’s children in the mean time are in Harvard studying how to screw rest of us including veterans who returned home alive… Mostly, blue collars tend not to see that.
You ain’t gettin’ it. There’s intelligence that cannot be measured on IQ tests.
Yet the people deemed “intelligent” – especially by the liberal intelligentsia, no fuck it, never mind the ideological labels, the intelligentsia of whatever political stripe – are people with only certain facets of “intelligence”. As Vladdie so astutely noted there are measures of intelligence that IQ tests don’t capture, the people that possess these types of intelligence are often misfits in the classroom, they don’t read well, mathematics is not their shtik. And they are looked down on, they are sneered at as “rednecks” because they come home every night grimy and sweaty.
The ability to operate a backhoe and back up a large vehicle, make no mistake, takes intelligence, the type that the perfumados have no idea about. Why? They’ve never done it, it’s beneath their station. Heaven forfend that they get some dirt under their nails.
“So, next time you are talking to an oil rig worker, ask him or her what kind of degrees they have, Mr. Oh So Superior Hisself.” – DJ
So you and Bustin are inventing out of thin air a class of degreed philosopher butchers. Pathetic and delusional. Apparently the only intelligent people that you two balloon-heads can conceive of are those on campus. Morons.
One thing that is very clear is that you lack the kind of intelligence measured on language IQ tests, since you persist in asserting your prejudices, even when corrected by others.
Why don’t you go out and drive around on a forklift, instead of coming onto this blog, which is totally language oriented?
Don’t you see the incongruity of insulting people who like to read and write, as evidenced by the fact that they spend all day reading blogs?
It doesn’t take a master’s in philosophy (like one of my carpenters had) to see that you are out of place.
they are looked down on, they are sneered at as “rednecks” because they come home every night grimy and sweaty
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Rhino,
How much intelligence does it take to know that you’re getting fucked?
I finally read the CHS you referenced.
Did you hear that somehow the Obama administration forced the hold-out state attorney generals to cave in on the robo-signing crimes?
The victims of the crimes, i.e., the people who were illegally thrown out of their homes, will get an average of $1,800 in compensation, while the criminals walk and keep their billions of ill-gotten gains.
Don’t you wonder sometimes just how they force principled people to their will? Threats? Blackmail? Bribes?
Something made Eric Schneiderman and Kamala Harris cave.
Why don’t you go out and drive around on a forklift, instead of coming onto this blog, which is totally language oriented? – WL
Been there done that. Why don’t you? You might learn something. I’ve had the privilege of working and living on both sides of the blue collar/white collar divide. I know through experience of what I speak. And I get smokin mad when I hear the high falutin act superior and talk shit. They’re talking shit about me and people like me,they’re talking shit about my dad and granddad and the people I grew up with. And it’s pretty obvious to me these tall foreheads don’t know shit. Like so many “educated” balloon heads they only think they do. They sit in an echo chamber and repeat what they’ve heard in this echo chamber as if it’s reality which it seldom is.
Speaking of prejudices I see you persisting in asserting yours about people and things you have no idea about.
“Why don’t you go out and drive around on a forklift, instead of coming onto this blog, which is totally language oriented?”
Again, blow me.
Atta boy, bravo, well said.
http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2011/08/25/why-iceland-shold-be-in-the-news-but-is-not/
“As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Here’s why….
In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent. The 2008 world financial crisis was the coup de grace. The three main Icelandic banks, Landbanki, Kapthing and Glitnir, went belly up and were nationalized, while the Kroner lost 85% of its value with respect to the Euro. At the end of the year Iceland declared bankruptcy.
Contrary to what could be expected, the crisis resulted in Icelanders recovering their sovereign rights, through a process of direct participatory democracy that eventually led to a new Constitution. But only after much pain.”
Both the Greeks and the Italians are realizing that the solution to the crisis is bankruptcy, not “austerity”. When the people understand that it was the nature of the Babylonian system itself that has brought all nations into financial slavery to the few, they will revolt. Bankruptcy is really a biblical Jubilee in many ways.
This system was designed by the few to gain power over the many. Their weakness is in the fact that they ASSsumed that they could retain power by military or legal force–that the military or police would enforce the enslavement of the people. That will not happen when its all said and done. They have overplayed their hand. No one wants them as world rulers.
“Don’t you see the incongruity of insulting people who like to read and write, as evidenced by the fact that they spend all day reading blogs?”
Bad companions [ blogs ? ] corrupt good morals.
”He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.” -Joost Meerloo
“If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Joseph Goebbels
“We are not ensnared or enslaved by guns and clubs – we are ensnared by words. Those who don’t respect their dictionaries as much as their firearms, have little hope of being free. Those more willing to shoot than to speak out are similarly condemned.”
http://adask.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/words/#comments
ever tried one of these dating sites?
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E, I got a real kick out of your post. The link below that someone posted here a week or so ago I think would make a fantastic spoof date ad. I was in tears reading it. It kind of sums up my own sentiments. You MUST check it out.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/im-more-of-a-breast-man-and-completely-worthless-h,27152/
Seriously though, those cyber meat markets aren’t ALL bad. Mt eldest son met his wife on such a site. Individually they are two people you would wonder “does a mate exist anywhere on earth for this person?” but together: magic. They’ll be married 4 years in May and produce my first grandchild in just 7 more weeks if all goes well.
Both the Greeks and the Italians are realizing that the solution to the crisis is bankruptcy, not “austerity”. – MD
I think you’re right. IMO it isn’t even an issue anymore of whether the Italy and Greece have the fiscal capacity to pay, the point is that the national debt in fact won’t be repaid. May as well cut to the chase. These aren’t problems that tend to get better with time. The longer they fester the worse they get.
Someone made a good point on the telly: people are debating about refloating the drachma, the issue being whether it would do any good seeing as Greece doesn’t have a lot of exports. But the Greeks are also competing for tourist dollars with far lower cost jurisdictions in Europe ie Albania. So refloating the drachma and the consequent probable devaluation/revaluation might enable Greece to compete for the tourist bucks which is something thay’re having trouble doing straightjacketed as they are in the Euro.
The problem is the Greek populace doesn’t want a currency run by Greeks. They trust Greek politicians as far as they can throw them. For now they’d rather have a currency backstopped by German productive capacity even if it means hardship at home. Maybe they figure the alternative is worse. I guess we’ll see how long the sentiment lasts.
I think on balance though it’s better to have a national currency. That way there’s no excuses. They can’t blame far off bureaucrats at some central bank somewhere. They would have monetary sovereignty/control. And any blame for bad monetary policy would fall on their own.
Redoubts and underground capsules and remote/overseas enclaves lost their allure when we thought about disgruntled ex-Army Rangers, Molotov cocktails, local gangs and dry ice…
North American seekers of order and dependable victuals would be better advised to assure methodologies aimed at Societal & Commercial Coherence. Maintaining comprehensive and ubiquitous US Postal Service is part of the solution set.
Really important is understanding of the whys and wherefores of the July 1838 Act of US Congress: ALL railroads are considered “Post Roads” in the context seen in Article I section 8 of the US Constitution. The Congress of today believes in pavements not railways, apparently without clue as to the ramifications of ever more difficult problems maintaining rubber tire transport.
If the 1911 book by Frank J. Cannon (first US Senator from Utah) “UNDER THE PROPHET IN UTAH” is any indication of current modus operendi of Mr. Mitt, then we may see at least an understanding of the need for robust and balanced transport mode policy. Otherwise, what are all those Mormon farms and victuals warehouses and trucking firms and Class I railroads for?
Don’t you ever just appreciate the beautiful prose of Bustin J, simply for what it is? I know I do. The same with Vlad,and even though I don’t agree with a lot of what he writes, I certainly like the way he writes, the HOW as it were.
Mark Twain extolled William Dean Howells:
” In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities–clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing–he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.”
Reading the “high falutin” prose of William Dean Howells doesn’t make me “smoking mad”; it transports me into an aesthetic wonderland:
“In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked FACCHINI; and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and encountered looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder–or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden gloves that tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty–beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.”
Ferraris Falling Out of Fashion in Italy as Police Snare Tax Evaders
– http://goo.gl/o2bWT
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Interesting. Must be that the ultra rich are now vacationing in warmer climates.
Don’t you wonder sometimes just how they force principled people to their will? Threats? Blackmail? Bribes?–Wage
Must be the ‘ole black hand of death–Does it every time.
The Fracking Song
http://youtu.be/timfvNgr_Q4
My Water’s On Fire Tonight
When I was young, it wasn’t elites or professionals or rednecks, it was blue collar and white collar. I came from a blue collar family. My father worked in warehouses or drove trucks. He came home very tired every night and just wanted to relax or rest once he was there.
My upbringing was very blue collar, so I interacted mostly with blue collar individuals. I always did very well in school, so when I graduated college I entered the white collar world. I’m describing my background somewhat because I’ve been in both worlds.
What my experience has shown me is that both groups have many intelligent people, but blue collar workers didn’t have the energy to be big thinkers. Hard physical labor tends to take a lot out of one, not leaving the energy for serious intellectualism. I know some on this blog are blue collar AND are thinkers, but I believe they’re more the exception, not the rule. Being tired negatively affects one’s results on IQ tests, which is just one more reason I’m sceptical about IQ scores (as an example, a black cotton picker in the earlier parts of the 20th century couldn’t score too high on an IQ test if he or she was exhausted from backbreaking labor).
Many white collar individuals, on the other hand, DO look down on blue collars. I’ve seen them act so haughty with regard to the working class that I want to bitch slap them.
What these sub-classes don’t seem to understand emotionally is that each group needs the other. All white collars are not useless, wealthy pricks and all blue collars are not dumb beasts. The class issue seems to be inherent in human behaviour, though. I apologize for using 1950 terms, but we need to use different terminology sometimes to clarify what’s going on here.
Blue collar, white collar and now for the decimated and forgotten —- no collar.
Dogs need collars. Hard to be a proud dog without one.
What these sub-classes don’t seem to understand emotionally is that each group needs the other.
==
And that they are being played against each other. Divide & Conquer.
The old Israelites just walked away from the whole thing. We need to do the same. They left the Babylonian priests/parasites to their temples, and the temples crumbled into history.
Other collars we need to be aware of are clerics collars with the Bishops’ war on women (Bishops are people who don’t even have a uterus). The war against women’s health services (Planned Parenthood) and women’s right to an abortion is now expanding to ban contraception, as if we need more mouths to feed.
Thanks for the laugh, Q. That was a hilarious article. What made it hilarious was its brutal honesty. Indeed, while you’re trying to get a little “something, something” 🙂 you’re supposed to write a bio on these sites that makes you sound like a combo of Albert Schweizer, Dr. Phil, and a rock star.
Since I’ve already corresponded with a few nice souls in just a few days, I’m sure it will yield up a few nice women. It certainly beats trying to be a lounge lizard at a bunch of pubs. Yeah, I’ve heard of a few success stories on these websites but even match.com in a commercial from a few months ago only boasted a rate of getting people partners that was something like 20% … not marriages but, basically just a companion for some unspecified period of time.
It sounded like a “true confession” but they made it sound like an incredible track record. Still, I marvel at both the self descriptions and the requirements for the man (I’m sure smart women look at the men’s descriptions and also cringe psychologically).
E.
“Other collars we need to be aware of are clerics collars with the Bishops’ war on women (Bishops are people who don’t even have a uterus). The war against women’s health services (Planned Parenthood) and women’s right to an abortion is now expanding to ban contraception, as if we need more mouths to feed. ”
Now would be a good time for you to come to the defense of the Taliban again. I mean, what could keep the birth rate down better than “honor raping” and nose snipping?
As I recall, that was “the laddie” describing his personal preferences to da woild and eva’body in it!
(A stroke of genius that likely snared him some fahn wimmenz with refined sexual sensibilities. ;o)
Again, blow me.
Rhino replied to comment from xhalor | February 9, 2012 1:25 PM | Reply
Atta boy, bravo, well said.
Rhino and xhalor, flaunting their intellectual prowess.
Heh, heh.
The Catholic Taliban, the Islamic Taliban, both are disrespecting women’s rights. I am not calling for the death of Catholic Bishops, nor am I calling for the death of Taliban. I am criticizing both. May be a difficult concept for you: something can be opposed without the use of violence.
You have ZERO credibility. And, you’re a woman trying to sound like a man through writing.
Or, we can look at Elliot Spitzer and that IMF guy for alternative take-outs.