JHK’s Three-Act Play
How hilarious is the Federal Reserve’s cattle drive of cash money (i.e. “liquidity”) into the stock markets? I’ll tell you: if that cash is outflow from bonds that pay ZIRP interest rates, then this attempt to stampede investment into the stock market is only going to succeed in ravaging the bond market and by extension the credibility of the dollar, the US banking cartel, and then the world financial system as a whole.
If bond-dumpers rush into stocks, then who are the next bond buyers at ZIRP? The USA can’t keep going without continuous bond selling. Somebody has to buy the darn things. The Federal Reserve is now buying around 70 percent of US issue — a lot of it via secondary market pass-thru shenanigans involving “Primary dealers” (a.k.a. Too Big To Fail banks, who get to cream off a premium when they flip bonds to the Fed — tidy little racket). If the other 30 percent of issue can’t find willing buyers at ZIRP then interest rates will have to go up. If interest rates go up, then interest paid out on bonds (that is “debt service”) by the US government will go up catastrophically, because the aggregate debt is so colossal and most of the debt is short term, meaning that in a post-ZIRP world the interest rate ratchets up automatically every 13 weeks as bonds roll over. The US will then only be able to pretend that it can service the debt at higher interest rates. Everybody in the world will recognize this — surely only increasing the velocity of the stampede away from bonds. The question is: how long can pretending to service debt go on before it is just called by it’s real name: default? Or, if countered with additional furious computer “money” creation: hyperinflation? Either way, of course, you end up broke.
This cattle drive into stocks is strictly a political gambit. The cattle are being driven to the slaughterhouse. It’s discretionary strategic national financial suicide. They’re driving up the stock markets for cosmetic purposes, to make it appear that an economic recovery is going on, and with the aim of setting in motion a self-reinforcing financial feeding frenzy in this rush to “equities.” By the way, in case my manner seems didactic today I am attempting to define my terms as I go along because most other financial bloggers seem to assume that ordinary people understand all their jargon, which I am quite sure they do not.
Returning to my point… the Fed and their auditors on Wall Street and in government, are jacking up the stock markets in the hopes of stirring up “animal spirits,” as the financial psychologists say, to put over the story that it equals a vibrant economy — which is nonsense, of course, to anyone who shoots a casual glance at the economic wreckage all around them. Anyway, since the stock market action these days is dominated by high frequency trading robots running on algorithms, where exactly would animal spirits even factor in? If anything the absence of real animal spirits in this action also implies the absence of its counterpart, animal survival instinct, of which human intelligence is an order. What can come of stirring up animal spirits among robots? A train wreck is exactly what.
Now, I ask you: at a moment in history when vast interlinked global financial markets have never been so unstable, so primed for unintended consequences courtesy of the diminishing returns of technology, so ripe for a massive, cascading “accident,” is it a prudent thing to fuck around with such crude PsyOps?
One other factor outside pure financials assures that US economic performance will remain impaired (that is, the kind of economic activity we regard as “normal” (suburban sprawl building, credit card “consumer” spending): the price of oil, which is inching up to the $100-a-barrel hashmark. Apparently that shale oil bonanza we hear so much about has not left the USA swimming in cheap oil. As a general principle, it’s probably safe to say that an oil price above $80 crushes the US economy. It drives up the cost structure of just about everything we make, do, or sell here, but of course the primary things that go up in price are food and motor fuel.
Hence, it’s tragically ironic that — getting back to official financial PsyOps — that one of the primary motives for the Fed keeping interest rates super-low in the first place (apart from enabling wild fiscal irresponsibility in government) has been to promote the housing sector — because in the reality of our time “housing” translates into building more suburban sprawl. How smart is it to promote more suburban sprawl at a moment in history when there’s no more cheap oil?
It is this kind of stupendous foolishness that is putting the USA on the path of an epochal systemic collapse.
Superbowl addendum:
Did anyone notice how violent and psychotic the Superbowl advertising was this year? An Oreo commercial that depicted a mob of nerds destroying a library — huh? The Doritos spot where “Daddy” and his male buddies transform themselves into an insane clown posse of cross-dressers. The Fast and Furious 6 trailer featuring the destruction of every vehicle known to man and a few office buildings, too. The third-quarter power failure was a neat harbinger of things-to-come in the Most Exceptional United States of America. Party on, peeps!
The Kunstlercast podcast is back online all y’all! This week: interview with Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth.com
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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
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:
Book 1: |
Book 2: |
Book 3: |
Book 4: |
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The Superbowl is the perfect, penultimate symbol
of everything that is wrong with America.
…Which is why our TV is off that entire day (and most days).
Jim, hope that the third installment of World Made By Hand is coming along. Also, really enjoyed your recent podcast with Nicole Foss. Thank you!
I thought it was interesting that the Super Bowl had to halt for 30 minutes for a power outage that seemed to impact the momentum of the game. Sign of things to come?
The Dow at 14,000 again. Just like Kunstler predicted. Smirk.
I think the Superbowl power outage deserves its own post. A country that developed the Internet and used to routinely put men on the moon can’t keep the lights on at its biggest annual party–and if anybody in NOLA knows why the stadium went dark, they ain’t talking.
I’m so glad to have completly avoided the Superbowl. Watching herds of brain-damaged leviathans collide with each other is boring. Double so when they play an inferior style of football. Go Roughriders! Woo-hoo. I just read that China and Saudi Arabia are spending time alone on the front porch. I wonder what they might be talking about? Probably a realingment of the global reserve currancy away from the zombified US dollar to that new upstart the Yuan. Go Yuan! Woo-hoo.
The Mall of America here in Minnesota continues to show signs of weakness. The first thing to go was the entertainment/restaurant area on the 4th floor. Now Bloomingdales has thrown in the towel, with no replacement. It is accessible by light rail, but only one train line. And it is self-heating in the winter, due to the person traffic. It would make a good massive farmer/community market someday. Heck a couple wind turbines could provide its electricity.
One question, as it pertains to the death of suburbia: What about Detroit? The city dies and its suburbs are outlasting the urban part. Is it that in the USA, we don’t even know how to die in the right order?
We are living in the days of “peak wealth” now, where down is the only viable direction. In spite of all the attempts to find a new way out of the maze, we’re getting a lot farther from the cheese that we think is at the end. Those who can adjust now to reality are going to be far better off than those who pretend reality doesn’t exist. Visit the Leibowitz Society at http://leibowitzsociety.blogspot.com/2013/02/robot-road.html for more information and thoughts on our coming Dark Age.
Talk about cattle drives, the housing market ever “recovering” in the context that this usually gets discussed is wishful thinking to return to 2005 bubble blowing days. Ain’t gonna happen.
http://alttransbikes.blogspot.com/
Hmm well maybe Teabag Gov Christie and the NJ Legislature might want to pay attention to how the Mall of America is doing in its home Minnesota as they have thrown over $100 Million of our NJ State tax dollars at them to try to revive the disastrous “Xanadu” Mall. That Mall was supposed to have indoor skiing in NJ – how does that fit in with Peak Oil and Climate Change? Until this latest cold snap the existing ski outfits in the Poconos and Vernon, NJ were in imminent danger of collapse as it is when they could not even make snow with temps of 40 degrees.
How will people get to this new Mall in the Meadowlands when Route 3 is already a traffic disaster? The Mall owners are proposing the NJ State further subsidize them by running the Meadowlands Rail on a regular basis from Hoboken/ Secaucus. Which per usual helps New Yorkers but does not help anyone from West of the Meadowlands which is most of the population of NJ. This while existing trains have been cut 40% to Hoboken which run through existing Main Streets with their real downtowns and small businesses.
But of course they do not provide $20K bribes, er, “political donations” to supposedly fiscally conservative Republicans…
I knew you couldn’t resist the power outage at last night’s game; it was too symbolic not to mention. As for the commercials, I must have missed the ones you saw. Now I’ll have to catch them on YouTube. On the other hand, maybe you missed the Dodge Ram commercial with the Paul Harvey audio essay about farmers. It’s the kind of thing you might actually have liked.
I also knew you couldn’t resist the stock market after reading last week’s comment about the Master Meme. You may not have mentioned Dow 14,000, but you articulated all the reasons behind it, as well as what you think the unintended consequences of them.
Over at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News, I marked the return of the markets to six year highs by referencing last week’s essay as well as two articles about how the stock analysts abused math in the service of greed. It’s at the top of the front page now. I also had some fun with the Super Bowl, including my comments on Hipcrime Vocab’s “Are you ready for no football?” Personally, I think the answer is no; Americans are quite clear about their screwed up priorities, and they will do anything to keep their entertainment coming. Speaking of which, I commented on the sex in the commercials, not the violence. Of course, that’s this month’s theme–sex and love.
I also wrote about animal auguries, not just for the weather but for the game. By the way, the animals called it for the Ravens. Also on last week’s agenda was how the National Park Service is struggling to return Yosemite to a more natural state, in part by removing cars and visitor services. I have mixed feelings about that. Earlier in the week, I wrapped up a month of blogging about energy by describing the latest in local gas prices.
Happy Motoring–for now–from Detroit!
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/
You’re not the only one who noticed the violent and frantically hysterical advertising, James.
I noticed it, too. I cannot watch those ads anymore. There is something deeply unsettling about them. Watching them is like an involuntary tour of an insane asylum.
I thought the commentary today might be called “Power Out”……
Because the irony or symbolism of the power outage was so strong. Here is the big circus, the big coliseum of Rome, and with all of the pomp and circumstance, we can’t keep the lights on. Like the hurricane Sandy recovery in NYC where some are still without power. The core falls apart, it rots, and it is in little moments like last night, where we get a glimpse beyond the charade. We can’t even keep the lights on in the Superbowl, the super whatever……..
Nero fiddles
And what about pulling those kids out of Sandy Hook School and putting them on display for the whole country to see? Haven’t they missed enough school?
Aimlow Joe was here
http://www.aimlow.com
I’ll second TrE about the ‘cast quality. I found it sharp and succinct, and I’ve been recommending it to my tribe.
But slow down a bit, James. You say: “I am attempting to define my terms as I go along “ But before that (start of para. 2): “If bond-dumpers rush into stocks, then who are the next bond buyers at ZIRP?”I haven’t got that one planted in my brain, though I suppose it stands for Zero Interest Something Something.
As for The Big Party (“Super Bowl”), I think the power outage was a most excellent reminder—especially because it was in NOLA—of the fragility of the nation’s infrastructure.
How did I spend Party Time? Reading The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History.
As for the Mall of America, I missed that news, but then I’m in Nordeast Minne and never go there. Fortunately, the formerly Repub-dominated legislature didn’t go for state bonding for expansion. TBTF mall—apparently not.
Cattle drive, rat race, illusions on top of illusions. business school money grubbing mutant robots marching to the beat of more, more. Ain’t we got fun now.
“What about Detroit? The city dies and its suburbs are outlasting the urban part. Is it that in the USA, we don’t even know how to die in the right order?”
The city of Detroit is now showing signs of life, while there is a lot of quiet trouble brewing in the suburbs. The former is making news; the latter isn’t. I have lots more to say about the subject on my blog, although I haven’t written much about the subject this past week.
Senor Jeem sez:
“We don’ neeed no steenkeeng…”, no wait…
“Now, I ask you: at a moment in history when vast interlinked global financial markets have never been so unstable, so primed for unintended consequences courtesy of the diminishing returns of technology, so ripe for a massive, cascading “accident,” is it a prudent thing to fuck around with such crude PsyOps?”
No, it certainly is anything BUT prudent.
By evidence of your blog alone, we can see what dreams may come to the perpetually lied-to.
Those of us who have been peering around with the squinty-eyed, feral gaze of the untrusting see now what TPTB would have us ignore. Why do they suspect that it’s a good idea to [inevitably] gift this loss of faith to the entirety of the “general public”?? I just don’t get it. The massive hubris this concerted bamboozlement implies is another potion of “the unsustainable”.
Is it the final swindle before the last flight out? I doubt it; they appear to think this extraction/milking from the commonwealth can go on forever and ever, amen.
-Squinty-eyed Sam
JHK, good for you, for sticking with the essay you spent time working on. I really thought you would jettison whatever you had composed, in favor of making a statement about the significance of the power outage at the #$%&?! Superbowl… I am ashamed to say that I had the Superbowl on, on my TV, although I had the volume turned to zero because I don’t even know the names of any of the players on either #$%&?! team. I just glanced up at it now and then from my book, half-watching the commercials… anyway, good for you, for posting the thoughts that you spent time composing in your mind. It was sufficient to make a brief comment about the Superbowl at the end, as you did.
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-02-03/perhaps-crumble-rather-collapse-–-part-two-three
“Even the eventual (some might say inevitable) failure of both the decaying barns and the global fiat empire do not represent the end, but rather the beginning of the end of this cycle, to be closely followed by the rebirth and renewal (but not necessarily the duplication) of the next. This has led me to think about the widely used term ‘collapse’ when discussing the future of the present day socioeconomic system. Collapse infers that there is an end point, a firm and definite finality, a full stop which in my opinion doesn’t properly sync with the fact that life will carry on, even though the music and dance steps have (radically) changed. Thus the word ‘crumble’ seems more representative of the actual process underway.”
If interest rates rise just a few percentage points America is toast: http://youtu.be/zh1TZYn05dk
Uh, that would be “portion”, but “potion” gives it a nice magic-show, snake-oil feel too! ;o)
The present day situation is nothing new except for its potential to be even more catastrophic. Overpopulation and societies hell-bent on individual (family) gain have continually created war after war that ALL men were expected to participate in (I think the feminists forget this). And have created grim living conditions for many and yes, of course, great wealth as well. Societies based on individual land grabs, creating resource dependency and without the slightest hesitation to exploit through usury have always create a great wealth.
It’s interesting, this “preppers” consciousness seems a lot like the status quo consciousness in that the focus isn’t on the death and destruction that our system has caused so many for so long, but rather, how does one escape (oneself) the consequences of a system based on violence and exploitation.
The saying goes that the FED is at times to remove the punch bowl from the party, now its more like it exists to spike the punch with Everclear.
Denninger nails it today with his mini rant on QE, call it the middle class impoverishment act. So all you welfare state operatives you will have no pension after 30, you might in the end be worse off than the welfare recipients that you supposedly serve.
My vote for best SB ad goes to the Harvey ad, choked me up hearing his voice, but then again I’m a despised flyover country white man, so I’m not “cool.”
Please help me understand how the FED QE money winds up in the stock market. The FED buys bonds from the Banks. The Banks get freshly created money from the FED. Then what happens?
When I was a youngster I enjoyed watching football. But I don’t recall the need for massive inputs of power channeled thru byzantine electronic systems. Games were played in daylight, and scores, more often than not, were displayed manually – operated by teenage boys atop ledges at the base of the scoreboard. The quality of play seemed unaffected by the primitive logistics of yesteryear.
Lights out at last night’s game (as well as others – power outages at such events are more common that generally recognized) simply illustrates that Tasteless American Excess has its price…a price that will only inflate with time.
Worst half time show ever
Hey Kids!
Here’s an explanation of zero interest rate policy that will confuse even more of us rubes! Hurrah!
(Maybe Q can tell us what it really “means”.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy
Making some of it a BIT clearer, is this article about pensions and things ZIRP-ey:
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2012/08/31/why-zirp-may-mean-zip/
@pedal pusher: Heh, Tastelees American Excess, or TAE!
Says it all well, and the machine that grinds out dissatisfaction and promises excess to be the cure.
One more meaningful link, then I have to go to everyone elses…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSHr4ubuD64
Head ’em up, move ’em on…. H-yaaaah!
What awaits the dogies at the end of the drive? Oh no, that ain’t purdy.
Then the banks prop trading desks push these excess reserves into the equity markets.
Read ZeroHedge.com.
I must give credit for this term to my friend, Frank Goya, who dropped it during casual conversation in a Baltimore bar room some 25 years ago. It stuck in my mind and has been there ever since. I will say, though, that I like your definition.
The Super Bowl: Dionysus and Icarus Go To New Orleans
I live in Los Angeles. And I like the super bowl. It’s one of my favorite days of the year. Just about everyone seems to be indoors watching the game. One can go out and do things without the huge crowds that are usually present. There is even lighter traffic on the freeways. Yes lighter traffic. For those of us living in southern California, that’s better than a bag full of Haloween candy or Christmas presents under the tree.
So, the Mall Of America is starting to wind down. Walmart is next. Which of course, will really kill the battery powered cart industry. When you hear the word, “Walmart”, does a picture of a large tacky polyester dressed person, riding around the store in one of those carts, pop into your head? Yes, you know just what I mean, don’t you.
Jim, do you think the powers to be in Washington DC are aware of what is coming? Or are they so evil that they will ride our petroleum based culture all the way down to the inevitable finish? Is Thomas Friedman aware that his “flat earth” is already starting to curl up into a round ball again? Do you think our “leaders” know that in the not too distant future, words and phrases like “growth”, and “global economy” will be discredited and laughed at.
Good blog, Jim.
Oh great, now I have that song rattling around my empty bucket all day.
And everyone is trying to make nice about how well the economy is doing and how things are ‘recovering’. Last week, a wire-service scribe got all excited about the good news (for people who work in healthcare) that in New York State, nine of the 20 largest employers were hospitals or healthcare networks. Only one company on the list (IBM) actually makes things. That contrasts with the 80’s, when five of the top ten employers manufactured things.
http://moveforchangebkculturejam.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/new-york-doesnt-make-anything-anymore/
Meanwhile, the CEO of the Dollar Store chain noted that this was their worst Christmas in awhile, and they sold virtually no toys–people bought food. Whose tea leaves you’re reading depends on whose Kool-aid you’re drinkin’.
You’re most welcome; glad to be of help! ;o)
The movie, “Idiocracy,” was on multiple times this weekend. If one hasn’t seen it, watch. It is supposedly about the future, 500 years hence, when the average IQ has been halved by the over breeding of the moronic classes. In reality, it is about NOW. It’s just well disguised. It explains most of the problems we’re about to have.
I’m a product of the early seventies (you know, the era of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll), and I too, was appalled by the advertising – both the sex and the violence. I don’t remember which ad it was, but I found it disgusting to see cartoon kids in a school room with assault weapons shooting each other. WTF! Did we not learn anything from the Sandy Hook shooting? Guns don’t kill people – people kill people! There is an open assault on the value system of America…beware of the enemy within. I hope you all realize this. Our culture is dead. As for the Ram commercial with Paul Harvey – it brought me to tears. It was the best…by far. I come from a farming family in Southern Michigan. God bless the American farmer.
Ps. Any links or concise explanations of the wondrous magic-show that is ZIRP and all things zirp-ey would be much appreciated by us financial-shenanigan-challenged. Thanks in advance. (I’m happy to see that JHK gave it a shot [about the upshots, at least] today.)
Thanks pardner, let me pay ya with an on topic little diddy we like to call: Ridin’ for a fall……
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaF00HOhIuo
Peter Schiff gave a speech at the Vancouver resource conference where he made an interesting point I hadn’t heard before.
In the 00 decade the Fed cranked its benchmark interest rates down to 1% to stimulate the economy went wild.
Now we need 0% interest rates just to keep the economy from collapsing. If the Fed went to what used to be a hyperstimulative interest rate of 1%, we would go into at least a recession if not depression.
That to me is a very telling indicator about how fundamentally unsound our economy is today.
It’s far more likely that the power outage at the Superdome was the result of incompetent people rather than some forewarning of browouts on a national scale. Other than the French Quarter, New Orleans remains and an example of “Why would they put a city here?” Hot, muggy, and filled with miscreants. A lot of the latter came up here to Atlanta after Katrina to add to our indigenous supply. The post-civil-rights era of black “leadership” has led to the phenomenon of local-level secession, whereby the more-wealthy, mostly white neighborhoods decide to create their own cities rather than deal with the bloated, black-run political structure of Fulton and Dekalb counties. Sorry folks, in this case it IS all about race, something that doesn’t get enough discussion here. The dynamic of “white flight” has resulted in a highly segregated metropolis and incredible economic disparity. A lot of people are fed up with the culture of “job for life” entitlements that all levels of government practice here. I usually don’t mind a government worker having a job and an income, but the ratio of corruption and shear incompetence to any kind of valuable end product is laughable.
JHK is just ticked off because in the Fast & Furious 6 trailer they demolish the Jensen Interceptor he never got to own.
I’m ticked off too!
Seriously, too: what sort of weird pornographic impulse makes us want to see great cars destroyed on screen? Is the mob ready to start smashing them up in real life? Run…no..drive for the hills!
The Superbowl, what crap! Never watch it, can’t stand football.
The 100 year anniversary of the Federal Reserve System needs mentioning. Those who have become super wealthy creating nothing but skimming every single transaction will surely have the motherfucker of all celebrations. They don’t care what the price of oil is, as long as they get to skim it.
The Stooperbowl was Black mania run amok, otherwise a good game featuring the two best teams that played good fundamental football.
Beyonce can sing, but the the Mandinko pelvic thrust act, please, is this the highest culture blacks can attain in their post liberation world?
The ads are basically Madison ave. telling us they have few ideas, political correctness has won, we are stuck in the mud, the T-Rex of countries. I mean really, is there not any other idea besides “white males” acting dumb, effeminate or worshipful of anything other than their hideos self?
I live in Minneapolis. I call the Mall of America: ‘The Temple of Consumption’. Herds of unkept, obese or near obese slobs, roam the Mall every weekend.
The light rail makes it possible for the trash from North Minneapoils to hang at the mall. The movie theatre behavior is ‘ghetto’.
They have a bunch of over priced, theme resturants, that serve food from Sysco trucks.
A truely disgusting place.
Which raises the question, “what is the ultimate symbol of what is wrong w/ America?”
-Phut
The new immigration bill is intended to prop up housing prices. We shall see if it does.
Sysco used to be “North America’s Leading Marketer of Quality Assured, Food Service Products.” I always liked that rather ponderous tag line. I remember one time a waitress brought a Sysco product to our table and I exclaimed: “Oh. I see your establishment uses North America’s leading marketer of quality-assured food service products” much to the chagrin of the waitress and my dinner companion. Now it’s just “People and Products You Can Trust.”
How boring.
smokyjoe, don’t knock car crashing, the US entertainment industry’s prowess in destroying cars and other stuff in an artistic way is one of the pillars of our economy, and one of our most valuable exports.
Al Jazera Gores jet and selling his business to an oil state.
I heard that Detroit is about to get one of those new city dictators appointed by that great American Gov. Snyder (is that his name?). The dictator’s mandate, from I hear here in NY, is to sell off everything not nailed down to private investors, ie the govs.’ friends. Is that true?
Jay:
Gutsy to remain in LA, a city that will probably die from its own stupidity even if human civilization weren’t facing peak oil, etc.
I recommend Ron Howard’s directorial debut “Grand Theft Auto.” Has nothing to do with the popular video game. It has a very high # of car crashes, probably to make up for the most inept screenplay I’ve ever seen and heard. A good slice of 1970s, car-oriented visual culture.
Oh James,
Such righteousness, so on The Mark, yet so blind?
Do you not see the end game?
The financial’s are deliberately being destroyed so that the money can be changed… for our own good, to become an international currency… or electronic credit.
They will use the Lincoln option James, and tell the banks to go to hell. The treasury will do what Lincoln did, and emit US Treasury notes. Isn’t the Fed charter up this year James? That portends the end of the fiat game comes this year… and the beginning of the real game, the game of The Mark.
This has been thousands of years in the coming, and Islam plays a part James. How can we buy oil with money that no longer ‘works’? With paper the Arabs will reject? They will have their Caliphate when the dollar crashes, and they will lock down the oil fields. There will be only one of two ways to buy oil James;
Gold, of which the Elite have squandered.
Or… a demand for National Submission to Allah.
The White horse rode, as the Holy Roman Empire.
The Red horse rode, as the Kings under the church.
The black horse of democracies ride now and ends in the failure of money.
(The Pale horse was mistranslated from the Greek, it was a pale green horse. Thank you Catholics.)
The pale green horse rider that worships death and controls 25 percent of Earth, is mounting, and our Dear Leader is a Muslim lover. Islam has us over a barrel, of oil. If I were them, I would hit us over the head with it and win their Jihad in one stroke.
Green is the color of Islam, and the Gold headed statue on two legs of ideology, gives way to The Beast, as money becomes The Mark. The mother of harlots and her daughters, keep you divided as the ten toes, virgins and shofars of the lost tribes, divided by mind and emotions, the iron and clay, easily conquered by your own love of money.
Thus The Grail of the Gnosis, reveals the Truth, in a history lesson of ancient symbols which speak a thousand words.
Wait and see James… wait and see.
We shall all see.
Our mall in Vancouver WA is not doing too badly. They put in one of those restaurant theaters in there replacing a gutted out failed store.
Across the river in Hayden Island Portland there was an old fairly modest sized mall they tore down. I am now nostalgic for that old mall, it was an ecological marvel compared to what they have now, a huge expanse of parking lots with standalone stores like Home Depot, Target, etc. It made me think the mission statement must have been: What is the most butt-ugly ecological atrocity we could put in here to replace the old mall? How the political authorities in left wing Portland ever allowed that abomination to get permitted is a mystery to me.
Which is why we need to replace welfare as we know and love it with a guaranteed annual income for all citizens, a modest stipend to keep body and soul together during hard times. You may not realize that the folks who hate social workers, the real parasites of the welfare system, the most are THEIR CLIENTS, and with good reason.
Such a stipend would have nothing to do with how many children you have just like no worker gets a raise for extra mouths in his or her household. The stipend could also be paid to stay at home Moms (or Dads) as a modest public investment in good homes for our next generation of citizens.
Head ’em up and move ’em out!
In our little corner of the American Wetdream, two major employers are going bah-bah. One, a supplier of helicopters to support American hegemony went away at the end of 2012, and the other, a rather major lighting products company closes shop late this spring. Economic recovery? And then the really absurd goings on like the local school district being $10MM short on the budget and all that entails; discussions of layoffs, closing and consolidating of buildings. This while a brand new high school is being built. WTF??? Even the hard core cornucopian purveyors of forever economic growth are scratching their sand burying heads about that one. I thought the Superbowl halftime ‘show’ was just that; It showed how hopelessly mindless and mind numbing is our entertainment. I tried really hard to find any sign of….well….talent in ‘Bouncy’s ‘performance, but, alas it was, quite literally all smoke and mirrors. Perfect representation of the US economy.
JHK is intelligent, logical and a good forecaster (and of course this goes for all of his followers that are in agreement with him). The only key point is his timing is off.
The Fed can go on printing for a very very long time and the government can continue extending and pretending for a very long time before the gears start to seize up (look at Japan, they’re starting their 3rd decade… look at the EU peripherals, they should have gone under years ago but they’re still be kept afloat).
There is too much bad debt and malinvestments that need to be destroyed still (lots of deleveraging to go). And things are tight for the average guy and he won’t be spending much. Thus, the velocity of money is low and will continue to stay low for the time being (keeping inflation from getting into a faster speed).
I believe we’ll have stagflation for quite a while (slow creeping inflation and minimal to no growth) and the financial repression (ZIRP) will continue for a long time as well (it has to, as it is game over if those rates go up).
The USD is so deep into the coffers of all countries and so vital to trade. The USA has the biggest military, biggest economy, and the biggest circulating money supply on the planet. No other country can match it. No way the yen, yuan, Swiss franc, euro or pound could ever take over. Everytime there is a crisis you’ll continue to see the flight to safety destination will always be the USD/Treasuries.
No hyper-inflation will happen here. Only reason it happened in Zimbabwe and Weimar Republic and Argentina was because they didn’t have bond markets. The US has the largest bond market on the planet and the bond vigilantes won’t allow the printing presses to go “overboard”. The Fed knows this and will always stay within the limit.
Since 2007 so many have been predicting collapse. Hasn’t happened. The way these jokers and criminals are operating they’ll be able to take us up to a debt to GDP ratio of 300% and everything will still be humming along (granted your fuel and food will be costing a lot more).
I think there is still a lot of time before there is a paralyzing collapse. Relax, stop freaking out. Just quietly go about your business of making money and preparing for the inevitable… which will be here… but later than sooner.
As an American icon Larry Flynt said it, the left worships money, the right worships sex. You can always buy a lefty. Just think how many public servants Portland can maintain from the sales tax revenue from a mall?
You think a vast welfare state gets buy on magic pixie dust? I’m sure Cuba is some magic land of miracle socialism to most of the left, but then there is reality, no one wants to move there, its a fail.
John Hussman, a mentee of Joe Stiglitz, did some computations which basically show the following: The Fed is broke. They have $55B of capital to cover a $3T balance sheet which represents a 55-to-1 leverage ratio. Since July, interest rates have risen on the Fed’s portfolio by about 0.6% representing a loss of about $140 billion on their bond portfolio.
Hussman also shows that the “record cash balances” on corporate balance sheets are a fiction because for each dollar of extra cash balance, they’re issuing FIVE dollars of debt securities. So much for the illusion of corporate health. Debt is still growing because the putative increases in “growth” are from depressionary levels and average only a few percent and are not nearly enough to mitigate the need for massive debt issuance. In other words, corporate bonds are now in a bubble which might rival Treasuries.
Poor Mr. Hussman’s main fund, Hussman Strategic Growth, has fallen on hard times but, as is usually the case with guys who invest based on FACTS rather than statistical legerdemain, the tortoise ALWAYS catches the hare when the market’s meteoric rise is based on the artificiality of near-zero rates.
The Fed buys SEVENTY PERCENT of the Treasury Market. Does this sound sustainable to you given that they are fundamentally insolvent. QEinfinity is not working because it contains the seeds of its own demise. Rates are rising because of the myth of “recovery” even with MASSIVE Fed buying.
When the facts about corporate debt and Fed insolvency become even more obvious, via renewed layoffs, for example, we will have an environment where both stocks AND bonds will tank, especially CORPORATE bonds. Rising rates are a disaster for a recovery but they’re an incredible disaster for THIS “recovery”.
E.
What we need is a financial transaction tax. It would be one, albeit small, incentive to turn the exchanges back toward their putative purpose of price discovery. It would put the brakes on the algorithmic traders if they had to fork over 0.1% of the value of the trade against the pennies they plan to reap.
I agree, but, the political pressure to not have a deep recession on the mesiah’s watch is also a factor that we must keep in mind. So IMO this makes the fulcrum point, the sweet spot that much of a smaller target. I think JHK makes a valid point.
Many of you will remember when, in mid-2008, crude oil futures climbed above $147 a barrel. There was great crying and gnashing of teeth on CFN that oil would soon hit $200 and society would collapse. The long-awaited SHTF would finally be here. I called bullshit. I was then criticized as a “cornucopian” out of touch with reality. Crunch time was here! The end was near! I called bullshit again. Rinse and repeat endlessly.
So, now it’s over four years later. Today New York’s main contract for light sweet crude for delivery in February is $97.61 a barrel.
So not only did you CFN doomers get it wrong about oil going up to $200 a barrel. You got the direction wrong. Oil prices went down, not up.
I am claiming bragging rights here on CFN. You cannot even say “but the trend is up” because you got the trend line completely wrong. It went down.
I do get tired of having to speak so loudly, as it were, to the bloggers here who are so very hard of hearing, but what else can I do? I keep effortlessly proving myself to be right and the doomers to be wrong.
This CFN blog is much more interesting when I take the time to post here because I post in an erudite manner on a variety of subjects, usually with correct grammar, usually concise posts, and always with intelligent content.
Deal with it.
IM said:
I think there is still a lot of time before there is a paralyzing collapse. Relax, stop freaking out. Just quietly go about your business of making money and preparing for the inevitable… which will be here… but later than sooner.
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Read my post above. Corporations are creating DEBT five times faster than they’re creating cash on their balance sheets. Corporate cash “surpluses” are a TOTAL FICTION.
As for “paralyzing collapses”, I agree with you that the wolf isn’t at the door quite yet but I think you’ve got your timeframe wrong. The Fed is already insolvent because, despite their $85B/month Treasury-buying, rising rates since July have destroyed their $55B dollar worth of capital in a portfolio leveraged FIFTY-FIVE to one!!
The US economy is like a gorgeous house infested with termites that continues to stay looking beautiful right until, one fine day, you have the one extra termite feeding session that causes the house to crumble to the ground. Money velocity is lower than 2008 which shows that corporate “health” is an illusion.
Illusions die hard and horrible deaths. We’ve bought into them for two crashes in 13 years. The third is just a “when”, not an “if”. Enjoy playing Russian Roulette with your money. I’ll let everybody else enjoy their “gains” resting in the certainty that the stats I cited above will eventually unveil truth and truth for THIS market is going to hurt very bad.
E.
“Oh. I see your establishment uses North America’s leading marketer of quality-assured food service products”
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This reminds me of a spoof ad where a resonant male voice would importantly intone “We are the 6th largest carrier in the north western free world.”
Good column this week, JHK. I am glad you mostly ignored the Super Bowl. CATTLE DRIVE is one of your best metaphors ever. Very apt for the behavior we see in the financial sector.
ZIRP would not be necessary at all if only Congress would make investments in infrastructure and research that put people to work. Of course, at the same time Congress should continue reforms like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (thanks to Elizabeth Warren!)
I just hope Congress confirms Richard Cordray’s appointment rapidly, so the CFPB can begin to function on our behalf. We need protection from the banking shenanigans you have so eloquently described for us over the years.
Good post. I would have added to your statement:
“God bless the American farmer”…
and damn factory farming practices.
How’s the weather in Arlington, Virginia today?
Shithead….
Football is a war game dressed up as a sport, where armored warriers crash head-on in the battleground to capture a few square yards of enemy territory. It is a perfect simile of America in its use of blunt force battering rams by colorful patriot soldiers, complete with the PTSD concussed veterans limping home.
The Superbowl is also a major economic event, with sponsors paying millions for 30 second propaganda pieces reminding us to drink their crappy beer and munch their deep fried fatteners.
Its all about the extraction of wealth and the refining of profits directly into the tax protected offshore accounts of the 1%. They long ago figured out that the optimum payout is not in a vigorous middle class, it is in expanding the total number of serfs who will then fill the WalMarts looking for their basic needs. You don’t even need to pay them a living wage because Government will subsidize everything from health care to unemployment to disability payments by printing more debt dollars. This explains why population control is unpopular and immigration is encouraged – the system constantly needs more consumers. Its a numbers game and, as the statistics for the last 30 years show, its working very well for them. For the future of the Nation, not so much.
Exactly right. Anybody can do it and the cabal of idiots shall be exposed.
“[The 1%] long ago figured out that the optimum payout is not in a vigorous middle class, it is in expanding the total number of serfs who will then fill the WalMarts looking for their basic needs.” -azgog
Further proof of just that resides in this little un-trumpeted figure:
The percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years.
2006: 63.1
2007: 63.0
2008: 62.2
2009: 59.3
2010: 58.5
2011: 58.4
In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.
This must be a good thing, ’cause nobody seems too worried. Buy arable land (and various “hard goods”) with those monies; “employment” is about to mean something other than cubicle-dwelling keyboard-clacking for the insurance companies.
Uh,…..one little adjustment to your remarks: In your first paragraph is “credibility of the dollar, the US banking cartel, and then the world financial system as a whole.”
May I suggest the order is reverse? That is, the US has ceased to be a sovereign nation, instead having become a colony of global finance in every sense and aspect.
As you’ve written numerous times, since our de-industrialization real-estate is all that’s left of our faux economy outside of the military-industrial complex.
That’s what so called “immigration reform” is all about (surrender really). Without the constant influx of Third World immigrants all the sub-standard inner city housing would plummet further in value, collapsing the rest of the market back to more realistic valuations.
Can’t have that!
That’s right, all this BS about “colorizing” and de Europeanizing America being cultural enrichment is just that, total BULLSHIT. More to the fact, it’s a dissolving of our nationhood, taking away self determination as an independent sovereignty.
Effectually, citizenship has been exchanged for status as human capital in the global labor pool.
So, rather than unlinking ourselves from the looming disaster of global overpopulation we’re entwining ourselves more in it.
Poverty, war, welfare, alcoholism, drug abuse, bread and ciruses, zirp, fiat money, inflation, disease obesity and illness continually rising, government intervention, central banks, privatized profits/socialized losses, socialism, fascisim, unions, psychiatry, pharmaceutical companies, cabals and conspiracies, corporate warfare and predation, peak energy, TBTF banks, currency wars, resource destruction, forest devastation, air and water pollution, etc. etc. etc.
What a crazy planet. And, we’re on it.
Hmmm… how do we solve this?
Tracedo said, “New Orleans remains and an example of “Why would they put a city here?” Hot, muggy, and filled with miscreants. ”
I have to disagree. Many incredible persons reside in New Orleans. I may be heading back there in April for a convention. Perhaps it has changed- of course it has- since I lived there.
The cultural history of New Orleans is fascinating stuff. For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people
But your analysis is accurate to the degree that dilution by non-natives is a real thing. Its why history is a changing tableau, and exceptional cultures emerge and disintegrate.
These things follow the law of desirability. When a place is desirable, people go there- until it is no longer desirable, and so on. It is a global averaging.
New Orleans remains, in its decay, authentic in the sense that it illustrates all of our problems, all of the time. Corruption, vice, stupidity, ecological irresponsibility, mass industry, artistry, culture, architecture. Mardi Gras is something to see even if it may be a fraction of its prior grandiosity (before temporary immigrants aka tourists ) turned the event into another commodified excuse to get shitfaced.
One day New Orleans will be our haunted ruins, set in a sprawling, permanent swamp, as the hurricanes become more and more frequent, and sea level breaches the sea walls and the delta disintigrates into the dead zone.
http://coastalscience.noaa.gov/news/coastal-pollution/2012-gulf-of-mexico-dead-zone-size/
Its global warming to the rescue. As the midwest turns into a desert from lack of rain the result is a cessation of nitrogen pollution from our corn and pork fossil water abusers. But don’t call it a reprieve. America won’t change its ways with the Rep/Dems in charge.
Thanks, that was nice. But it doesn’t quite have the burdock burr stickiness the Rawhide theme has.
(Unfortunately, I also infected myself when passing it on! Ewwww, like a “carrier”. ;o)
To Prog re your reply to me from last week:
I think that you’ll see some of the melting pot remaining. Some populations will merge together into a greater whole, some may not.
Picture an America that is large geographically and population-wise but hollowed out economically and financially and trying to live with oil that is priced at well over 100 bucks a barrel. I think that this is an America ripe for rupture. Maybe not formally with secession votes in state legislatures. But rather defacto as financial and political paralysis cripple Washington.
How long before Congress and the Presidency are themselves hollowed out shells? Can you picture the President as a glorified Hamid Karzai, exercising power only inside some narrow confines around DC.?
How about congressional elections where numerous districts don’t bother holding votes because nobody wants to run and voters can’t be bothered to vote? Or the Senate and House as pretty much vacant chambers, littered, dirty, dusty, rat infested and seldom in session?
I think you saw the opening shots with Arizona trying on some powers that the federal government is unwilling or unable to wield. I think you may see more of this happening as states and localities act to take care of themselves to fill a void vacated by Washington. Or maybe openly defying dictates by Congress and the President.
These may sound like Mad Max scenarios. But look at history. It’s stuffed full of calamities that no reasonable and sane person living at the time would have thought possible. Yet they happened.
So what about the splits? Or how does a fractured and messed up America re-configure itself? Along what lines? Regional, racial, political, ideological, linguistic, cultural?
I don’t think that there is necessarily a permanent divide between hispanic and non hispanic as I said in my earlier post. I think the odds are reasonable that over time the English language and mainstream Anglo American culture will get the upper hand.
But there are some major problems. I’ve read a few times that the academic performance of Latino kids is lousy, that the Latino prison population is disproportionate. Too bad because IMO it didn’t have to be this way. I think the roots of this are cultural but also economic. If your One Percent weren’t so hell bent on offshoring everything last thing that’s not nailed down this population may have had some decent prospects. It’s not too late to turn things around IMO. But you’ll have to act and soon. You cannot afford to indulge people whose financial interest it is to have a class of coolie laborers. Or a class of liberal ideologues whose career interest it is to promote cultural and linguistic division.
As far as politics goes there’s a whole lot of nonsense being paddled around about how the Democrats have a lock on the Hispanic and non-white vote, about how Republicans are a doomed party of angry white men on a demographic downslope. Pure silliness IMO. Propaganda concocted by over confident Democrats and their paid liars. For one thing I think that these propagandizers misunderstand and/or misrepresent the nature of the regional cleavage in the US. It has really deep, centuries old roots. At least that’s how it looks to me. A Democrat President with a pretty face that talks nicely may move the dial a wee bit. But he won’t pull up those roots.
I keep seeing non-white Republicans and Republicans with Latino surnames. Like Bobby Jindal, Susana Martinez, Nikki Haley to name a few. All from the south. I think that Democrat prospects are drastically over estimated. I think that Hispanics and non-whites will get with the dominant views and dominant group in Republican strongholds. I really don’t think there will be a replacement. I seem to remember that some guy called it the “founder effect.” I’ve seen it in other places.
OK, so imagine Jeb Bush as presidential candidate. Or someone like him. Jeb Bush with his university degree in Latin American studies, fluent in Spanish, bandying his Mexican wife and brown skinned offspring on the campaign trail. Or imagine someone like Marco Rubio either as presidential or veep candidate. That last election could have had a radically different outcome. Electoral prospects for the Republicans or the Democrats are not cut in stone.
And this gang that the Democrats hang their hopes on – the young, the hip, the cool – won’t be young, cool and hip forever. They’ll age, their mommy and daddy won’t be around to pay their bills and sooner or later they’ll wake up to their diminished futures. And the starting to sag, no longer quite young, no longer quite cool, no longer quite hip will start to ask some questions. Like what the fuck was Obama doing when he nominated Mary Jo White? Why did too big to fail become even bigger and more prone to failure? And, most importantly, why can’t I find a fucking job? And the new crop of youngsters coming up through the ranks will especially be asking that last question.
Ask any Latino mom and pop what their major concerns are and I’ll bet they’ll say decent paying work, healthcare and some hope for success for their kids. Just like everyone else. The party that realistically addresses those concerns is the party that wins those votes. Ask them about same sex marriage and they’ll look at you like you’re out of your mind.
The more the Democrats go wandering off the main road of “it’s the economy stupid”, the more they decline to prosecute their fat cat friends on Wall Street, the more they do absurd things like hiring a lawyer like Mary Jo to police the same Wall Street banks that she made a fortune defending, the less credibility the Democrats will have with Hispanics and everyone else.
The Black/White divide? Much harder nut to crack IMO. A real mess. Three hundred years of bad blood. Good luck with that.
I has the unique experience of watching the Super-Duper Bowl with my two teenage daughters who commented on the commercials at least as much as the game itself. Their favorite was the old people at Taco Bell and their least favorite was the long close-up kiss from GoDaddy.
As representatives of our future we talked at length about our reliance on electricity during the 34 minute delay because of some mysterious “power surge” that shut down half the lights and who knows how many of the other electronics needed in this high tech game of “rock’em sock’em.”
If you are more interested in seeing a positive and realistic vision of a future we can feel good about passing along to future generations please order a copy of my novel “From Here to There.” Copies can be ordered at http://www.fromhere-tothere.org
I would not be too sure there. A ride through certain neighborhoods in a lot of cities could surely make a case that America will begin to look more like Tijuana all the time.
It is a testament to my respect for JHK that I actually signed up so I could comment.
I noticed a news article that seemed to go away fairly quickly – the public transportation in Naples has stopped because they ran out of gas? Did anyone else see this? And the Hess refinery in the northeast is closing down at the end of this month. Also, Greeks can’t afford to heat their homes because of huge increases on heating oil taxes, and they are chopping down every tree in sight to burn in their modern fireplaces (which don’t work for shit) and in general are desperately trying to stay warm.
I know JHK says he is ‘allergic to conspiracies’ and there is another great quote by Robert Hanlon – “never ascribe to malice what can be blamed on stupidity”.
Now, having said that, just because a quote sounds right doesn’t necessarily make it so. So to all of the actual critical thinkers on this site – what do you all think of this? I think it is pretty clear at this point that we are looking at a ‘crumble’ rather than a ‘collapse’ – but is a ‘crumble’ or ‘collapse’ the goal of the elite or merely a by-product of their greed? And what the hell can we really do about it, protesting and voting don’t work anymore.
I think one point that hasn’t been made yet is this: The founding fathers couldn’t foresee the rise of corporations of the size that they have become. Jefferson couldn’t predict the attack on democracy by corporations the size of countries themselves. How can we stop this? (Besides by being ready to live in a world made by hand!)
JHK – YOU DA MAN!!!!!!!!
Perhaps some problems of the clusterfuck could be better addressed if people on government computers spent more time using them for work and less time on blogs.
No offense to the gentle soul who’s activity generated the following. Your particular activity is unknown to me and may be of an innocent nature.
Asoka – what do you make of an article like this?
http://www.cnbc.com/id/100431822
So just because gas prices go down for 6 months, that means that peak oil never existed and will never happen? After all, it only took a global depression to drop gas prices by 40 cents for a few months…
JHK’s point is that peak oil is inevitable and is not going away. The referenced CNBC article seems to support that view.
Please, please, Mr. Genius, can you give us your typical ‘erudite’ (LOL) response to that??????
Another public domain winner:
Perhaps we are:
testing testing 1 2 3………………
A bit more of dirt flying between the legs shows this address.
Now I’m going to Google Earth it just for fun.
And those Hispanics you mentioned are rich White Men. They rule in Latin America and they mean to rule here as well. They are no different than the rich Whites here – in fact, America is becoming like them, not vice versa. They are at odds with the Mestizo majority in Mexico and they will be here as well. But they intend to maintain control in any case. The Mestizo invasion was a way to turn the United States from a White Republic into a Latin American Third World Nation – in other words, destroy the White Middle Class.
Devon444,
Careful! Speak of the deb’bil, and he will appear! ;o)
Other than that, welcome to the Clusterfuck messi-logue. Care to join the brawl?
Just to recap, Corporate America doesn’t care where the money comes from to keep buying their Bud, Doritos, pharmaceutical drugs, Bushmasters or Coca Cola – in fact they prefer Gov benefit debt dollars because then they have lower salary costs. Its a money laundering Ponzi scheme where future taxpayers are left holding the bag (of shite) while the 1% solidify their already dominate positions. It is well disguised welfare for the rich.
They are already practicing War Games in American Cities. I’d say they are going to kill the dollar to get out of debt – and anyone who doesn’t like it can go fish in a FEMA camp. But before they do, they’re going after retirement funds. Just a bit more milking to do…
Dawg,
What specific area of the stats are you accessing to find these revealing things?!? (“Recent visitor activity”, or what?)
He’p!
Regarding puppetry, I thought you might like this (among some others):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zce-QT7MGSE
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Hello Radu.
I am filled with disgust and contempt for the White Race that has allowed their nations to be invaded. Our Leaders and Institution have virtually all sold us out for a mess of pottage – such is money. They already had plenty. They were already on top – so why did they need to do this? To answer my own question, the Revolution was from above; the Nation taken over in 1913 with the Federal Resever Act. Any who didn’t play ball with them would be forced down into the dying Middle Class. But what I said before does apply to the Political Elite who turned our Nation over to the International Bankers. There was no need whatsoever for that. That was betrayal pure and simple.
“The Mestizo invasion was a way to turn the United States from a White Republic into a Latin American Third World Nation – in other words, destroy the White Middle Class.” -guy with a new Slavic handle, aka: little laddie lederhosen
Yessir, Dawg, syntax and subject matter will always tell, eh?
(Somebody must have had just about enough and banned Skeeter Swizzle-Stick Dick for a brief, but highly relieving moment.)
Precisely correct. Unless some totally unexpected combination of highly improbable positive factors emerges, perhaps ala Kurzweil’s singularity, we will go down. Timing however is highly uncertain.
you forgot to mention the 85.5 billion being printed every month to prop up your perspective of a thriving economy.
I’ve upped the game. I’m taking the IP address from the StatCounter log and am now dropping it into other tools.
Here, lets get my IP to demonstrate.
50.135.213.9
Embed it in this URL and you will see I am a real dog.
http://en.utrace.de/?query=50.135.213.9
I have a degree in software engineering but know next to nothing about networks. Goes to show dogs can learn new tricks.
Simply dropping an IP into the Google search bar and pressing enter reveals much.
Oops, apologies, thought my previous comment was in response to Inquiring Mind.
In other words, you disagree? That hello didn’t sound friendly.
If I were to be an official watchdog all racist comments on the blog would come to an end.
It does not take a genius to figure out it is Radu. As David Icke is incapable of expressing himself without extreme elliptical metaphor so is Vlad/Radu incapable of expressing himself without racism.
He is incapable of seeing us all as one big happy family. He would evaporate if he did.
So in other words, though you hate the Upper Class, you approve of them when they hurt White people? That’s the mentality that has destroyed us. Congratulations, you are doing exactly what they want you to.
I’m confused, help a dog out. I don’t know how just a simple:
Can be seen as being friendly or unfriendly, it’s a simple hello.
Perhaps you can explain?
As Buddha said, Struggle there must be. All Life is a struggle of some kind. The word Arhat or Liberated One also means “Foe Destroyer”.
Life is War, Dog. How have you not realize this yet? In fact, you do believe it. You believe in Class Struggle – with the Neo Marxist hate Whitey added on. If only those Whites could be gotten rid of, the whole World would be a Multi-Racial paradise like that underground city in the Matrix.
Relative to the Super Bowl
1. I’m surprised no one mentioned the possibility that the power failure was the result of sabotage. Say, for example, it came to light that Iran had caused the outage as a demonstration of what they are capable of. Whenever I have occasion to (nervously) pass through the Lincoln Tunnel I can hardly believe that tube is still in one piece. It seems such an obvious and easy target.
2. The man-cave in which I vegetate each day has, in addition to my laptop, 2 TVs. One is a rear projection 50 incher (Hi-def, flat screen) and the other is a very cheap Phillips 20″ TV. Years ago Costco had a giant stack of them piled near the door selling for $99/ea if I recall.
So anyway, here is how I handled Super Bowl Sunday: Both TVs and the laptop are turned on. The ‘puter is mainly on CFN but when no fresh posts appear I look elsewhere…like the Fred on Everything blog, the aliensinthefamily blog, my email (I continuously stay on top of the Inbox and purge the Spam folder)…or when really desperate, play Solitaire.
The big Akai TV is tuned to channel 2 where the SB will appear (actually, it’s on 702 to get it in Hi-def) but I have it muted because I cannot tolerate all the audio distractions of the pre-game hype and activities. In particular I hate the singing of the Star Spangled Banner because, inevitably, the performing artist will NOT do a straight-forward rendition but rather – especially if the artist is Black – will go into all sorts of vocal flights of fancy that relate in NO way with the sense of the lyrics. I noticed that the artist this year was Alicia Keys who appears to be a very pretty light-skinned Black woman. I could not help being curious how she would deliver this song so I un-muted the TV. Sure enough about half way through she began to murder the S-S-B. In the trade, singers who perform in this manner are said to be song “stylists.” As soon as I was assured musical murder was being committed I resumed mute mode.
What little interest I had in this year’s contest was the result of two things: My son-in-law is obsessed with the 49ers (why I don’t know…they are 3000 miles away) so I try to give emotional support and (2) Ray Rice, Ravens running back, played right down the road from me at Rutgers which is one of my two Alma Maters.
This year I decided I’d find out what all the hoopla was over two shows, Downton Abbey (on PBS) and Girls (on HBO). Both are shown in prime time. I had missed last Sunday’s episode of Downton but played catch-up when it was re-broadcast at 8PM. Then at 9PM THIS week’s episode played. Finally,
at 10PM Girls played. I juggled these two shows plus the SB on the two TVs, always with the SB muted.
I think you can get a clearer appreciation of the crassness of American entertainment when you watch a SB halftime show with the sound off. Beyonce and her crew of look-a-likes did not fail in this. The (as someone upthread called them) “Mandingo” pelvic thrusts may have raised a woody for me 54 years ago but now, well… it’s a national embarrassment. I am beginning to understand those Saudi morality police.
And continuing on the theme of crassness, the contrived dances and other histrionics (again, mainly by Black players who score a TD, or even just make a nice block) are hard to take coming from grown men. What ever happened to penalties for “excessive celebration?”
If you are aiming at the Equanimity of Spock or the Buddha, I salute you. I was going on our recent coldnesss – instigated by you of course.
I’m a great Lover, like Paul Harvey, deep down. But it must be based on the realities of blood, soil, and nation. I’m fine with people of other bloods, soils, and nations – as long as they know that I’m for my own just as they are. Of course, the current situationis unnatural in that they are colonizing my former nation. So I’m cast into a position of subjugation which I naturally resent. But I can seperate my general feeling from the specific situation and person to some degree. I don’t put all this on any random non White in other words. That would be unjust. On the other hand, I don’t give them friendship – that would be unnatural given the situation. In any case, more and more of them see us as beneath them now, so it’s ceasing to be an issue.
Did David tell you about my interest in Buddhism when he met me last week? My profile has been expanded I see.
One would thing with the government deficit being as it is they would not be spending money following people around who’s only crime is that they think too much. Much less employ them on blogs.
I think therefore I am dangerous. Is that it?
… while the 1% solidify their already dominate positions.
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dominant
Can’t you see that in trying to curb the exuberance of the Negro, you are comparing them unfavorably to Whites? Shame on you for your racism.
Two TV’s huh? How many Ham radios and cadillacs? Or are you a rolls royce afficionado (and some people think I’m anti Hispanic!)?
“Alicia Keys who appears to be a very pretty light-skinned Black woman”
Amazing and we needed U 2 point that out.
OOps bad grammar.
Amazing, and we needed U 2 point that out.
Thats better.
You met David in person? What’s he like?
You think I’m an agent of chaos? I thought you were over that. You’ve alluded to Buddhism on several occasions. And even if you hadn’t, I’m into it so I might reference regardless of your inclinations. The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.
Remember the Top Criminal in Get Smart? He used to have a Globe on his desk to smash with his enormous prosthetic hand. When his underlings forgot to replace it, he would break the desk instead. I sometimes feel like breaking worlds but I can’t.
Not to worry; the partial blackout last nite in NO was simply a chance for Joe Fan to score another helping of wings and cold beer from the kitchen. Just like the upcoming meltdown of the Dow and S&P will be construed as a ‘buying opportunity’.
It all good, as the now say.
Amazing, and we needed U 2 point that out.
==========
I had heard the name Alicia Keys before but had never actually SEEN her. When I googled up a picture she was so light skinned I was unsure of her race. The bio that accompanied the pic was no help either except that it mentioned her husband’s name (who is also a celebrity of sorts) who I saw via google was unquestionably Black. Thus I concluded odds were that Alicia was not only pretty but “appeared to be” Black.
The whole thing comes down to my assertion that Black singers of the Star Spangled Banner tend to render it unmercifully with Black culture “stylings.” I did not want to make this point and then discover that Ms Keys was as white as my daughter.
Capiche (sp?) Dog?
People would rave about Bing Crosby the same way they do about Harvey, and yet, Crosby led a double life. His public face was amiable and gracious, but his private face was that of a monster, beating his wife and children to a pulp when he got home.
This is Carol Newquist. Good Day.
The Star Mangled Spammer is a terrible song. In fact, it’s not even a song. It’s a defecation. People pretend to be respectful when it’s obligatorily recited at various official events, but one look at the faces reveals that most everyone can’t wait to get the ritual over with, and get on with whatever the event is.
Considering that, no one can ruin what is already a pile of dung. It’s already a terrible ode. Alicia, or any other entertainer, whatever color they may be, can’t mess it up, and they can’t make it any better. Sorry, but in this case, tautology is necessary. Crap is crap, and the “National Anthem” is crap.
“Janos Skorenzy”
GO AWAY. That’s what having your accounts banned multiple times means, VLAD, that you should not be making a new one just to post here. It is like going back into the bar in a Groucho Marx moustache and glasses disguise, once you’ve been black listed. JHK doesn’t like you, obviously. Others here find you and your posts obnoxious and annoying and your debate tactics contentious and unctuous, which was why you were kicked in the first place. Now do us all a favor and leave for good. You’re not wanted here.
“But it must be based on the realities of blood, soil, and nation.”
Sounds like something straight out of Mein Kampf. Why am I not surprised?
The millions of illegal aliens in this country have violated our sovereign border and immigration policies to gain advantaged over what would have been their prospect in their home nations. That’s a “given” in the minds of most US citizens who’ve born the costs associated with this invasion.
Costs such as undercut wage floor for our own citizen work force. Costs such as entry level and part-time job market overfilled — no longer available to our own aspiring youths seeking early job experience critical in building career path. Costs such as physical infrastructure overwhelmed beyond budgetary outlays. Costs such as social services (“safety nets”) overwhelmed, leaving citizens despairing. Costs such as education funding, facilities, administration and staffing forced into “short-fall”, due to rising burden of special needs education (English as second language) for children of the illegals.
You’d think they’d be disposed to say “thank you”, then return willingly to their nations of origin, grateful for having gained all the benefits and services available during their occupation of our First World nation. Additional, the knowledge, skills and work experience would go homeward with them, amplifying that advantage they’ve gained over their fellow nationals who didn’t violate our sovereignty.
Instead of a “thank you” they’re now pressing for “representation” as a legitimate political force.
Worse, both major political parties are surrendering to them (amnesty and the REAM Act) for political advantage in future elections. Essentially, a cynically craven selling out of the citizenry and national sovereignty to purchase the favor of the new voting block that is instantly being created (think scab replacement citizenry) upon document signing, which then grows toward fulfilling its projected dominance in determining outcome of future elections.
In support of this fiat (hijacking) of representational democracy from the citizenry is the self proclaimed Liberal, Progressive Left. With haughty sanctimony it accuses as immoral all objections to this de facto invasion. Primary to its self-righteous argument is skewing of the 14th Amendment. Accordingly, framers of the Amendment are interpreted to have intended a virtual, perpetual impunity to foreign nationals choosing to ignore our immigration laws – simply by act of birthing children here.
To wit, Obama has granted official sanction of his Presidency to the “anchor baby” tactic. Doing so amounts to arrogating upon our citizenry the obligation and role of surrogate parent to the children of the illegal aliens (“nanny state” by extension).
“Too traumatic adjustment for the children if they are forced back to the parents’ nations of origin” (paraphrasing the moral justification argument as insisted by the Left). Left out of this “moral” calculation is any accounting to parental obligation upon the actual parents, thereby excusing them (dismissal really) from the appropriately responsible task of counseling their children through transitional adjustment (assimilation) back to nation of origin. Instead, charged to the American tax payer is obligation to “assimilate” the children here.
Handily dodged by this rhetorical smoke screen is any placement of onus upon the illegal alien parents to bear the consequence of their action in violating our national sovereignty. Then too, the Left keeps the atmosphere of public discussion stifled with PC correctness, insisting that questioning of its arguments is inherently racist.
The reality though of the Left’s sub script (“stealth” message) is this: The United States is too white and too European to be permitted self determination as an independent sovereign state.
Two TV’s huh? How many Ham radios and cadillacs? Or are you a rolls royce afficionado (and some people think I’m anti Hispanic!)?
============
I won the 50″ TV about 7-8 years ago when I rec’d an advertising email from Oasis Ford. At the bottom of the ad it casually asked recipients to fill in a brief questionnaire and submit it as entry to the contest. Lo and behold, I won.
I have zero ham radios or Caddys and no interest in RRs.
BTW, what’s up with the new name? Banned AGAIN? I’m going to have to start an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the handles you’ve posted under. This latest I see is a character from The Night Stalker who “is a vampire that terrorized Las Vegas.” Your various screen name selections could be subject matter for aspiring psychiatrists.
Agreed. I recently came to the conclusion that the American flag is also ugly, a visual counterpoint to the National anthem. It’s a cut and paste looking thing that lacks visual balance, harmony, or style. The Union Jack is pleasing to the eye, as are the Canadian, German, Italian, French, and many, many other flags. In terms of visual appeal the US flag ranks near the bottom.
Mike
“Your various screen name selections could be subject matter for aspiring psychiatrists.”
Amongst many other things.
His public face was amiable and gracious, but his private face was that of a monster, beating his wife and children to a pulp when he got home.
=============
Whenever there’s a news report that so-and-so (the most unlikely famous person you would ever suspect) is a wife beater, I say to MY wife “she probably deserved it.”
That should be CHAOS Kyooshtik. They always capitalized it.
Beyoncé
LOL!
I’m sure that spices up an otherwise uneventful evening!
As a buddy of mine was wont to say, “Turn the crank, Frank!”. (As in, manually starting an engine, or winding up a spring-driven mechanism. Something’s going to happen; it might not be good, but it’ll happen!)
Very well said, how long did it take you to write all that?
Just who in the fuck are you to say he can’t be one here, you’re just as big a pain in the motherfucking ass as he is, worse even, at least he isn’t some cock sucking liberal trying to run his own country down the crap hole.
Head em in and move em out. Keep those doggies rovin.
Agent provocateur activities raise ethical and legal issues. In common law jurisdictions, the legal concept of entrapment may apply if the main impetus for the crime was the provocateur.
That from Wikipeadia.
I’d think that a Resident Impediment or Resident Racist on a permanent basis would intensify the ethical and legal issues since it introduces ‘grooming’ into the equation. An individual with a negligible propensity to commit a crime could over time be made into something truly dangerous.
Sorry, but in this case, tautology is necessary. Crap is crap, and the “National Anthem” is crap.
==========
Calm down Carol!
Are these harsh opinions based on political feelings such as “we stole this land from the Indians, therefore…etc?” or are you saying that the words make for lousy poetry and the music makes its singing very difficult?
I’m guessing you immensely dislike America as a nation.
All those Olympic medals ceremonies every four years must be very painful for you.
In public derision of the littlest laddie:
“This latest I see is a character from The Night Stalker who “is a vampire that terrorized Las Vegas.” Your various screen name selections could be subject matter for aspiring psychiatrists.” -Q.
I’d say that’s just about perfect; can’t get much ‘whiter’ than a bloodless [hopefully, Caucasian], parasitic vampire, now can we? WoooooooOOOOoooo.
**Cue Theremin music.
My Superbowl gathering was very nice, although we were disappointed by the 49’s loss. During the power outage, a newscaster mentioned that one of the Ravens had been involved in a double homicide! Did I hear correctly?
Fratman and Barbie had a SB party next door. They put orange cones on the street in front of their house and part of my house prior to kickoff, and then a huge truck/trailer rig, filled with video games for the kids pulled up. Their knuckle dragging friends, who drive small penis vehicles, took up most of the street parking, making it difficult for my band of Prius-driving Presbyterians to park.
Sweeeeet; now we’re getting a picture of what they’re doing with our “numerals” every day.
(Although I really can’t figure why they’d bother; their own agents are far more dangerous to them, as they have the keys to the inner sanctum.)
That should be CHAOS Kyooshtik. They always capitalized it.
==========
Thanks for the clarification. I had completely missed the connection. BTW, when informing me per ^above^ you should have said “That should be CHAOS, Kyooshtik.”
My, my, we do get cocky when we get nervous.
TY
Yes Mike, the flag is an ugly accompaniment to the horrible “National Anthem.” Perhaps some concerned citizens (alas, there aren’t any left) can propose and push for a new anthem. This one will do just fine.
Burning Down The House
Wouldn’t it be a treat to see Whitney Houston doing a rendition of that?
During the power outage, a newscaster mentioned that one of the Ravens had been involved in a double homicide!
===================================
So? What’s the big deal? Don’t be a party pooper. Poop happens. Be in the moment and don’t worry about what came before, or what comes after the biggest event in this great country of our’s.
They are spending our money all right but not going after the right people. We are not getting our money well spent, that’s for sure.
Somebody got paid to watch me for a month. Tax dollars at work.
Their knuckle dragging friends, who drive small penis vehicles
=========
I want to make sure I understand what you’re alluding to here…the vehicles would be Hummers, Land Cruisers and maybe some Harleys, weather permitting, etc as male organ enhancers?
Agents should really learn to say say
Shhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppppple
instead of:
Shhhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooppppppppppple
That word actually pisses me off. I don’t like it.
Nice point about the Star Spangled Banner. The song shouldn’t be about the singer or a showcase for their vocal ability. Blacks typically try to make it into a Soul or Blues. The worst ever was Roseanne Barr: it was on purpose by a consumate Liberal Hater. She spat when finished to make her contempt even more clear.
Roseanne Barr hates Liberals? That’s the first I’ve seen that mentioned. You learn something new everyday. Her rendition was perfect, by the way.
So? What’s the big deal? Don’t be a party pooper.
===========
I think the player you and Mom are speaking of is Ray Lewis, a hell of a defensive line backer (especially at his age) but one of the biggest attention hogs in all pro-football. I think he was implicated in a double homicide…I don’t know any details. But if he’s Black he probably did it. ;O) ;O) ;O)
“Wouldn’t it be a treat to see Whitney Houston doing a rendition of [Burning Down the House]?” -Carol
Not only would it be a “treat”, it would be a stone-cold, necromancer’s miracle! ;o)
No, she is Liberal and hates USA is what radu2 is posting.
You’re a cadette carol. Hate Christmas too? They’re hiring at the FEMA camps btw.
Stop talking to it. Don’t encourage it.
You can joke about your class consciousness, but the reality remains. Only a very profound practice to the level of stream entry or insight can really eradicate it. It Christian terms, Love.
As many have said, race has become the great taboo in order to hide the Class Consciousness of the Mandarins (White Collar professionals and managers). With this strategy, the hostile Elite have separated us and eliminated any real threat to their own position.
Ozone I get the feeling that we are the only two real people who have made any comments in the last hour.
What do you say to that?
Okay, Carol?
I’m sure you’ve been following along for a time, and can recognize a certain character of perpetually “racist tone”, but in case you haven’t, he’s dreadfully a’feared you’ll take away his gawd-given right to goosestep upon the heads of brown-tinged and genetically inferior folks (and JOOZ, lest we forget) with his shiny patent-leather, hob-nailed boots, while dressed in over-tight, crotch-massaging lederhosen.
(Plus, you may be a WOMAN; his greatest terror. Please make every effort to keep this detail hidden, or trembling, sweat-and-urine-soaked nightmares will ensue!)
Exactly Kyooshtik. And especially gigantic trucks and suburban assault vehicles such as Fratman’s Denali.
Mmmmmm, other than Q., you may be correct. However, Mr. Kunstler will have to make the balanced judgement of disruption vs. entertainment value, in order to back-charge the gum’mint for the use of his blog-o-sphere space.
(Q. is just not disruptive enough, and writes far too well to be an agent for a decidedly dimwitted and unimaginative empire. Sorry, Q., if you were shootin’ for “disruption”. ;o)
You are right. It is all up to him. It is his blog.
P.S. Fratman’s Denali is a great mask for the man himself. Denali is the highest mountain in North America. Fratman is barely taller than I am. The Denali wilderness is remote and suited to folks that are resourceful and quick-witted. Fratman has a hard time remembering to take in his garbage cans and mow his lawn.
“Ozone I get the feeling that we are the only two real people who have made any comments in the last hour.
What do you say to that?”
Bwahahaha!!! (testing…) So apparently that status log only has data for the past 15 minutes? Have you set up a (PERL?) script yet, to download those stats every 15 minutes, save/concatenate/parse, then parse this page, then merge them given the ~5 minute offset?!?
FWIW, are the ‘asoka..’ and ‘asoka:’ the same guy? I really miss that Bay Aryan d00d from way back – would just *love* to hear his banter now/again (and see HIS IP address). I noticed the *real* ‘asoka..’ called someone a “fucktard” recently, lending credibility to my multiple alias sock puppet assertion (tsa-tsa/mistified/etc)…
Oh, BTW, Ozone always seems to be on my level, or sumptin’ (poasted that exact Rawhide video on my Faceplant page a couple weeks back – love the Bluez Broz version bettah:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdR6MN2jKYs
)
I have to say that I thought Radu would change his name once he found out that the late Mr Voda was also known as Radu Negra or Radu the black. One can never be too careful about these things!
“Teabag”? And Christian Evagnelicals are about to take over America too, right?
We are in the process of a Communist takeover – funded by the Bankers. And you want to talk about Teabaggers? Get a clue, Locksher.
You know about the Joosz too. Add Hypocrite to the charges levied against you. Your hatred of your own race is despicable. Now it has you shilling for the likes of Roseanne Barr. How low can you go?
Well, if Tupac can come back from the dead for a concert, so too can Whitney Houston.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGbrFmPBV0Y
The things they can do these days. It boggles the mind. This is what makes America great!!
Does Fratman’s wife, Barbie drive one of these? It would stand to reason.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7loP7OsLZ8
I don’t watch much TV, and I’m not a sports fan. I watched the superbowl with a friend, and we kept the sound on for all the ads, at least in the first half.
I found watching the superbowl and the ads one of the most depressing experiences of my life. Not because of the football (I’m from northern California, and I was (sorta) rooting for the 49’ers.) No, it was the whole package: hyped up commentators and announcers, ads that were “psychotically violent”, the excessive, mind-numbing graphics, and so on, and so on. What a complete bummer.
It’s important to keep a sense of humour in these trying times. Lord knows, it’s not going to get any easier. Some of these recent commercials are quite creative and can evoke a good belly laugh. Like this one for Cheese Nips. Watch this and try not to laugh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgIwLRCQyQQ
YIKES!!!
All those Olympic medals ceremonies every four years must be very painful for you.
==========
Not at all. The only Olympic event worth watching is Curling, and it also happens to be the most exciting. Where are all your medals there, Jersey Shore? That’s right, it’s one event where doping won’t get you a medal. Hopefully, the Olympic Committee does the same thing to all those “Americans” who won medals in the past, that the USADA did to Lance Armstrong. The cat’s out of the bag. “Americans” are cheaters.
Today, sadly, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the lovely Karen Carpenter’s death.
A stunningly beautiful voice, and a great drummer as well. Thanks for all the great music, Karen.
Rest in peace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47v7yYRfjA
Crap is crap, and the “National Anthem” is crap.
=========
I’m going to make a semi wild-assed guess right here Carol that you are the entity formerly known around these parts by the screen name Wagelaborer. Right??
The only Olympic event worth watching is Curling,
==========
I am quite familiar with Curling. I spent 3 years in the Air “Farce” in Duluth, MN. It’s a sport of unappreciated skill and its viewing fans are akin to people who attend Chess matches.
This video is better.
We miss you, Karen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdHyzGXAJPg
The Super Bowl is the favorite championship game of people who don’t have the intelligence, patience, or taste to appreciate the World Cup. ESPN has a Cup qualifying game on Wednesday, I’m led to understand – teams to be determined. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!
Not to have a Nation that protects our interests is an increasingly frightening reality. People raised on Coke Commercials and John Lennon “can’t imagine” how grim the reality will be. But they will and soon.
The Ray Lewis homicide case is an enigmatic one. According to Wikipedia, he and two buddies got into a post-Superbowl bar fight in Atlanta that resulted in the stabbing deaths of two other men. The investigation was apparently botched: it took eleven days for arrest warrants to be issued for Lewis and his alleged accomplices; the DA alleged that Lewis disposed of his blood-stained suit in a dumpster, but it was never recovered (so what the hell were the detectives doing to secure the scene and environs?); Lewis testified against his alleged accomplices and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice as part of a plea deal, but the other two were acquitted at trial, leaving Lewis as the only one with a criminal record from the episode. Even so, the NFL came down unusually hard on Lewis afterwards.
Is Ray Lewis a pompous shithead? Yes. Is he in a league with OJ Simpson? That’s harder to say. Offhand, however, I would say that Ben Roethlisberger, an accused rapist who gives off a rather thuggish and trashy vibe in interviews, is worse. At least Lewis picked on people who were able to fight back.
She was emotionally ill. She looked in the mirror and saw a fat girl when she was wasting away. Is it men’s fault? Yes, for coddling women and lusting after them at the same time – thus making them narcicists.
Anorexia is now hitting men as well now that they are obsessed with looking good.
There’s a disease in Southeast Asia where men think their penis is gone. In Africa this happens too – but there people think it was stolen by a witch.
Indeed, Iona! What an incredible talent who died way too young. Here’s one of my Karen Carpenter favorites from 1971. From the Andy Williams show. Only 21 at the time, unbelievably talented…
Thanks for remembering Karen Carpenter for us today!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3doTyoI80E&feature=endscreen&NR=1
It’s probably no coincidence that Naples and New Orleans have both recently been affected by infrastructure failures. Both have arguably Third World levels of corruption and mismanagement. A few years ago, garbage collection in Naples ceased for a number of days while the various stakeholders, mainly mobsters and environmental regulators, played chicken. The principles, I assume, weren’t living in the neighborhoods where their fecklessness and pettiness had caused sunkissed pileups of putrefying trash.
Meltdowns on that scale happen from time to time in many cities, but they’re especially frequent in highly stratified, corrupt places like Nola and Naples. The good news is that the squalor and disorder can often be escaped by moving elsewhere. The bad news is that the only option is to move. It sucks to be a New Orleanian or a Neapolitan, I guess.
The Super Bowl is the favorite championship game of people who don’t have the intelligence, patience, or taste to appreciate the World Cup.
===========
My watching of the World Cup was entirely ruined by those fucking incessant vuvuzelas. What is WRONG with those people!!
There’s a disease in Southeast Asia where men think their penis is gone. In Africa this happens too – but there people think it was stolen by a witch.
============
We now have the cure for that. Buy a Denali. Can’t afford one? Too bad. No Denali, no penis. Try stealing one if you need a penis that badly.
Oh, another aspect of the Super Bowl … freaking MAYA ANGELOU pimping for UNION BANK. A far-left-wing poet doing a commercial for a goddamned bank. If THAT is not an omen of how far off course we are, what is?
E.
My God, how I love Karen Carpenter. The arrival of Janos, suddenly, reminds me of this Carpenter hit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6inwzOooXRU
“Why do birds suddenly appear?” Indeed. Why do they?
CP said:
That’s right, all this BS about “colorizing” and de Europeanizing America being cultural enrichment is just that, total BULLSHIT. More to the fact, it’s a dissolving of our nationhood, taking away self determination as an independent sovereignty.
***********************************************************
If you REALLY want a bird’s eye view of that, move to Palo Alto, CA where the local high school now has more Asians than whites. Chinese and Indians have bought up enormous amounts of property and, of course, try to populate it with their own kind. Like most “striving immigrants” starting with the tech bubble, they’re here to get in on the recent property boom.
However, they’re not half as smart as they think and are getting in while it LOOKS like a bubble but, in REALITY the property is being bought in enormous tranches by hedge funds. These Asians are going to get their ass handed to them but since they’re mostly nepotistic/ethnocentric bastids to the extreme, I won’t shed any tears if I’m here to witness it.
E.
I take it there are no tax attorneys or IRS employees posting here since there hasn’t been any mention of that other great celebratory event on Super Bowl Sunday, the 100th anniversary of the 16th amendment to the US constitution. This granted the federal government the right to tax income and to more or less declare to every citizen “We own your asses now”. Previous amendments had been about the granting of rights to citizens (with a couple more on electoral procedure and state sovereignty rights). But Feb. 3, 1913 marked a new relationship between the governors and the governed as this amendment was officially ratified three and a half years after its initial proposal by the Taft administration in 1909. This was followed by the enactment of The Revenue Act of 1913 which imposed a maximum 7% tax on income over $500,000. The first tax return was three pages long plus one page of instructions. The original tax act was 27 pages long and was severely criticized by many legislators for its complexity and obtuse language. Today the tax act is over 70,000 pages long.
Anticipating America’s entry into the first world war, Woodrow Wilson pushed for a revised tax act, culminating in The Revenue Act of 1916 which upped the top tax rate to 77%. By 1918, the top 1% of earners were paying 80% of the income taxes.
In the 1920s, millionaire Andrew W. Mellon was appointed as Secretary of the Treasury. His efforts to roll back taxes brought the top tax rate down to 24%. Meanwhile the Mellon family had bankrolled the American Taxpayer League (originally named The American Banker’s League) which lobbied for the repeal of the 16th amendment. Roosevelt started raising taxes during the depression and by WWII the top tax rate was over 90%. Only a small portion of citizens paid the income tax for first two decades of its existence, but by the 1940s 85% of the working population were filing tax returns. The Reagan era tax cuts in the 1980s brought the top rate down to just 28%. It’s notable that during Reagan’s term the national debt went from $930 billion to $2.6 Trillion.
Abraham Lincoln was actually the first president to impose an income tax on the population. The Revenue Act of 1861 was passed to fund civil war expenses, although it contained a clause that nullified the act within ten years. One could say that Lincoln removed the shackles from the slaves only to slap them right back onto the population at large, forging the first link in that onerous chain that would eventually enslave everyone silly enough to trade their productive labor for cash. And isn’t slavery the compulsion, under threat of reprisal, to perform unpaid labor for a master whose authority cannot be challenged? Think about that this April as you spend hours fretting over your 1040 return, performing free accounting services to the Treasury Department, crossing every T and dotting every I properly for fear of retribution from the master’s cruel overseer, the IRS.
Speaking of fear, which of the following instills more anxiety in you?
A. A terrorist attack.
B. A mass shooter event.
C. An audit by the IRS.
D. None of the above. I never leave my cave and live on moss, centipedes, and stalactite drippings.
Remember, the wages of sin is death. Green is the new Red – and Agenda 21 is the Devil’s Work.
Remember, the Night has a thousand eyes. Patriots are on the move – the Folk are Awakening.
I just watched that. Yes, a beautiful voice but that face doesn’t live up to it. Things were better back then – a girl that homely couldn’t make it today. Perhaps a factor in her anorexia?
The sport that goes so slow they get down and blow and spit to move or lubricate the shuttle or whatever it’s cald.
Anyone here ever see the film “Black Sunday”? The plot involves terrorists hijacking the Goodyear blimp and flying it with a bomb on board into the the Superbowl stadium during the game. Robert Shaw played the terrorist hunter which seems a logical casting choice – he had hunted a big shark that got blown up in “Jaws” and in this flick he busts a big blimp bound to blowup. Pardon my aliteration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xknWZIAzBCc
The silliest part of the climax is the terror scheme’s success depending entiry upon Bruce Dern managing to light the bomb’s fuse with a Bic lighter (no cell phone detonators in 1970s).
The sport that goes so slow they get down and blow and spit to move or lubricate the shuttle or whatever it’s cald.
==========
They generally sweep in front of the stone.
Take a look at this link. I think you’ll be surprised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_curling_clubs_in_the_United_States
They call it a rock because it is made of granite and players don’t spit on it, rather they give the bottom of the rock a wipe to clear away any debris and brooms are used to smooth the ice surface to allow the rock to slide farther and more uniformly. I’ve heard curling decribed as the only game that combines boredom with housework.
Personally, I am lobbying for the winter Olympics to return to the acient Athenian tradition of contestants competeing in the nude. I’ll start with nude luge. I anticipate the doubles race generating great public interest, especially if they add a mixed doubles race.
Karen Carpenter had a great voice but her songs were so horribly schmaltzified by cheesy arrangements those male coruses – Shoo be shoo be whoa whoa whoa.
The numbers are just too massive to contemplate.
Why would a corporation pay millions for a stupid commercial during the Superbowl when the same amount good bombard us over the course of years (that’s the point, repetition).
Financial markets are not my concern. It’s definitely for a bigger brain (artificial). People that don’t work for an hourly wage.
I’m seeing a lot of young people fed up with American working life as defined by franchise restaurants and multibillion dollar global corps.
The burger flipper job is a meme that doesn’t coincide with being a star quarterback. Star quarter pounder with cheese?
Speaking of disks that Canadians tend to frequently toss on the icy ground, Canada has officially abolished its penny. Like the US penny, it costs more to manufacture the things than they are worth. Perhaps this is the first step towards the cashless society that seems to be gaining some popularity of late. I’m sure governments would love to force every transaction through some sort of an electronic exchange where taxes could be automatically collected. This would also nullify arguements in favor of drug legalisation to increase tax revenues. If every sale can be taxed regardless of its legality, then who cares, arrest the schmucks AND collect taxes.
It makes sense. Communism was a Movement designed to destroy Aristocracy and then the Middle Class. Once done – the new financial Elite shall reign free. Those who helped them, like the Revolutionary Blacks, will be rewarded.
Maya Angelou doing a Union Bank commercial? Wow!
I had no idea. The Super Bowl production lasts over three hours, and yet the TOTAL amount of time that the ball is in play clocks in at around 11 minutes!!
That’s a lot of sitting around and watching basically nothing. Anyone out there get good and bored watching the Super Bowl this year? That’s why, chums. All the best! Rest in peace, Karen Carpenter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjFoQxjgbrs
BR
Thank God I’m a Canuck!! These guys were great.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjFoQxjgbrs
Been a rather cold winter here in Winnipeg…3 sheets to the wind mateys!!!
BR
One of my favorite songs from the sixties…
One hit wonder band from Michigan called ‘Question Mark and the Mysterians’ You Yanks might call these guys Mexican-Americans. I call ’em great.
96 Tears
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7uC5m-IRns&NR=1&feature=endscreen
Another one from the sixties that’s fitting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUKB3PxG-0E
Janos has a hammer, and he’s hammering day and night. What a lovely white christian band they were. Too bad she got fat.
It’s hard to believe what he once was. This withering, fleshy stick that stands beside me, hands firmly grasping his Walker, is a mere desiccated husk of his former self. Standing now at six feet two inches and a hundred and seventy pounds, he once struck an intimidating pose at six feet five inches and three hundred plus pounds in his prime. He’s an apt metaphor for “America.” A meteoric rise, and an inglorious slide into unrecognizable oblivion. Perhaps that’s the nature of all things. Maybe not. Who cares? Not me. Not anymore.
What a great location for the Veterans’ Home. Government-owned land immediately downstream of the Nuclear Power Plant that attained criticality for its first unit in 1984. From the surroundings, it’s obvious that a sizeable acreage in proximity to the Nuclear facility was absconded by the Federal Government via eminent domain, and now a steady supply of Veterans who helped make it all possible, the Nuclear Power Plant and so much more, can now stew in the disguised and unannounced fall-out of their blood, sweat, tears and willful ignorance.
Visiting him brings back so many memories. For me it does, at least. Not so much him, because he has no memories. None of his family, at least. He does remember his glory days when he was a star athlete and many worshipped the ground he walked upon. It figures he would remember that, and nothing else. It makes sense. He was a narcissist, afterall, so the most prodigious protuberance of his neural networking would be dedicated to the encoding of his glorification. But I forgive him, even though he asks for no forgiveness. It’s what was expected of him. All he was doing was dutifully fulfilling those expectations, just as he’s doing now.
It’s difficult to gauge what Tom’s thinking and feeling right now. He never really had much of a relationship with Dad. Mom divorced him and left with Tom and Hank when they were very young, and considering they were the youngest of eight children, there was no chance for any kind of lasting bond, even if it was attempted, which, of course, it wasn’t. Tom’s always been about obligation, or at least, the appearance of such. Like so many others, he’s adept at managing perceptions, and engendering a perception of himself as a person who meets and upholds his obligations. The truth is something other than that, but again, who cares? Not me. Not anymore.
When I bring up various memories and shared experiences to Tom when we were all together before the divorce, he claims he has no memory. Like Father like Son, I suppose. His Father doesn’t remember anything either. Am I the only one? Why me? Why must I be the one to remember? Why can’t I conveniently forget? You know what? I don’t want to forget. I like the memories. They’re what make me, me, not some fabricated shell or mask with which to fool the world. I have nothing to hide, and I am not ashamed. I look at those experiences, and most experiences, as priceless, rather than something to be eschewed, or worse, precluded. I cherish the memories and will always hold them dear, Tom and the rest of them be damned.
This is a bit off-topic from JHKs theme for this week but not far from the meme of this site. The below link shows one of the devestating symptoms of our industrial world.
http://www.midwayfilm.com/
The Superbowl activities are the best example of excessive – discretionary energy consumption I can think of. And to think – there is a week’s worth of parties leading up to the big game as well.
Ok – so how and when will will the “reality” of finite petroleum resources ever begin to affect these kinds of games?
JK keeps penning missives that claim that by next week no one will be able to drive to work. JK says by next year there will be grass growing at the mega-plex and the Walmart lots.
We have seen that a hurricane – like Sandy – can get New York city to cancel a marathon. So if all that is required is a massive storm to influence public policy for a single city to cancel a single marathon – then how many storms and how much human misery must befall a region before an NFL football championship is moved or downsized?
How much catastrophe does it take to put the Long Emergency on Clusterfuck Nation’s collective public radar?
If the excesses seen at the Superbowl represent our nation’s collective “extra energy” – it seems certain that any public discussion of girding our infrastructure for an energy-less future are distant indeed.
What “kind” – and when do you think a national or regional catastrophe will affect a local government’s policy that results in energy rationing or the cancelling a professional sports activity?
C’mon JK – let’s really talk – you can’t “cancel” the suburbs without cancelling a few ball games first. Or am I missing something here?
Thanks Carol, beautiful writing. While reading it was easy for my mind to fill-in background imagery, giving the feeling of cinema.
Hey Vlad don’t you mean Otto Skorzeny?
And BR, Qmark and the Mysterians, weren’t they a Canadian Band?
I’d like to see a few of the talking heads on CNBC and Bloomberg take up the theme of JHKs blog this week. Instead, its happy days are here again, and Dow 21000 is right around the corner.
== CD
Well Donny, perhaps your smirk is really unfounded. JHK started giving his Dow predictions before the massive “Quantitative Easings”. Consider also that currently the Fed is buying up 70% of the bonds issued by the government. What does this mean? It’s called inflation. How about if we revalued the current Dow versus the Dow 3 or 4 years ago in terms of gallons of gasoline? Or gold? JHK’s predictions would look a lot less silly, wouldn’t they? Unfortunately, the federal government has resorted to increasing levels of trickery to mask current real conditions. Want another example? How about unemployment statistics?
Here’s one for you SJ mom. The Syndicate of Sound.
From San Jose, Calif. circa 1966
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA8tUUrSTIw
And from the same era, also from San Jose, playing on the Dick Clark Show – the Count Five.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBTT3VPriV8
Every breath is a struggle, and laying here, too weak to move very much, I can’t avoid being cognizant of that struggle. Nothing I do mentally is effective at mitigating the labor of my every breath. It all seems so vividly clear to me now, as though it were yesterday, even though it was twenty-five years, or so, prior. I was so convinced that Collapse was imminent, that it quite literally structured my life. Ah, but that was then, and this is now. The Collapse didn’t quite unfold like a thought it would. It let me down, and I had such high hopes. I anticipated it like Evangelicals anticipate the Rapture, but it never did materialize, at least not the way I envisioned it, and now that I can be truly honest with myself, I’m greatly disappointed that it didn’t, and greatly disappointed in myself that I allowed myself to be enticed by the power of prognostication. Nothing ever goes according to plan, well, not for me at least, not even Collapse, and yeah, I know, I couldn’t plan a Collapse, but the energy I devoted to its imminence was surely worthy of a plan, so in that sense, I may as well have planned it, because ultimately it’s had the same effect.
James has since passed on, and I miss him so. I didn’t appreciate him enough when he was here, and I regret that now. I remember my grandmother telling me when I was in my twenties that I should take the time to smell the roses because there will come a time when you will regret not doing so, and you know what, she was right. She was pretty much right about everything, and this is no exception. James was so understanding and patient with me, especially when it came to my obsession with Collapse. He had similar worries, but unlike me, he didn’t let those worries consume him. He had the ability to put it in context and hold the powerful foreboding at bay. I envy him for that, and I’m eternally grateful for his endless well of patience with me, but I can’t help thinking, what if he hadn’t been so patient. What if, instead, he had challenged me a bit more and assertively confronted my obsession. What would I have done? Would our relationship have deteriorated to the point of divorce, or would our bond have grown stronger because his challenge would have shaken me from my stupor? It’s hard to say, but I suppose it’s all water under the bridge now, and what I’m left with is regret in not cherishing him more than I did. He was one of the roses of which my wonderful grandmother spoke, and I didn’t smell that rose nearly enough…….
Deal with it. – College Boy
To paraphrase Kurtz: the bullshit, the bullshit.
All blue skies is it? OK let’s deal with it.
97.61USD
So here we go again. We went through this not too long ago.
Let’s look at a website called Inflationdata.com. Again.
They have a chart of oil prices going back to 1946. They have nominal prices and inflation adjusted prices side by side. Here it is:
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Table.asp
Now, we may require a willing suspension of disbelief given that these guys get inflation numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the government never lies does it?
But nevermind, let’s put these worries about compromised inflation numbers aside. What do we see? Let’s do some simple arithmetic.
The average price of crude in inflation adjusted USD:
1946 to 2012 – $39
1946 to 1973 – $23
1974 to 1997 – $48
From 1998 to 2012 – $55
So now the price is $97.61. Which is a whole lot higher than either $39 or $23 or $48 or $55. Wouldn’t you say?
So College Boy what you have is close to a sixfold increase since the historic low in the inflation adjusted price in 1998. Or an eightfold increase in the nominal price.
Or more than twice its 1946 to 2012 inflation adjusted average or more than four times the inflation adjusted average from 1946 to 1973.
Or about 1.8 times the inflation adjusted average between 1998 and 2012. If my arithmetic is off you will tell me won’t you?
Tell us College Boy, do you know anyone whose wages have gone up eightfold since 1998? Or sixfold? Or even 1.8 times? I mean regular folks and not One Percenters.
A real kick in the balls to the US economy wouldn’t you say? And especially to one whose One Percenters are offshoring every last possible job and nut and bolt of productive capacity.
Every breath is a struggle, and laying here, too weak to move very much, I can’t avoid being cognizant of that struggle. Nothing I do mentally is effective at mitigating the labor of my every breath. It all seems so vividly clear to me now, as though it were yesterday, even though it was twenty-five years, or so, prior. I was so convinced that Collapse was imminent, that it quite literally structured my life. Ah, but that was then, and this is now. The Collapse didn’t quite unfold like a thought it would. It let me down, and I had such high hopes. I anticipated it like Evangelicals anticipate the Rapture, but it never did materialize, at least not the way I envisioned it, and now that I can be truly honest with myself, I’m greatly disappointed that it didn’t, and greatly disappointed in myself that I allowed myself to be enticed by the power of prognostication. Nothing ever goes according to plan, well, not for me at least, not even Collapse, and yeah, I know, I couldn’t plan a Collapse, but the energy I devoted to its imminence was surely worthy of a plan, so in that sense, I may as well have planned it, because ultimately it’s had the same effect.
James has since passed on, and I miss him so. I didn’t appreciate him enough when he was here, and I regret that now. I remember my grandmother telling me when I was in my twenties that I should take the time to smell the roses because there will come a time when you will regret not doing so, and you know what, she was right. She was pretty much right about everything, and this is no exception. James was so understanding and patient with me, especially when it came to my obsession with Collapse. He had similar worries, but unlike me, he didn’t let those worries consume him. He had the ability to put it in context and hold the powerful foreboding at bay. I envy him for that, and I’m eternally grateful for his endless well of patience with me, but I can’t help thinking, what if he hadn’t been so patient. What if, instead, he had challenged me a bit more and assertively confronted my obsession. What would I have done? Would our relationship have deteriorated to the point of divorce, or would our bond have grown stronger because his challenge would have shaken me from my stupor? It’s hard to say, but I suppose it’s all water under the bridge now, and what I’m left with is regret in not cherishing him more than I did. He was one of the roses of which my wonderful grandmother spoke, and I didn’t smell that rose nearly enough…..
Deal with it. – College Boy
All blue skies is it?
OK let’s deal with it.
97.61USD
To paraphrase Kurtz: the bullshit, the bullshit.
So here we go again. We went through this not too long ago.
Let’s look at a website called Inflationdata.com. Again.
They have a chart of oil prices going back to 1946. They have nominal prices and inflation adjusted prices side by side. Here it is:
http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Table.asp
Now, we may require a willing suspension of disbelief given that these guys get inflation numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the government never lies does it?
But nevermind, let’s put these worries about compromised inflation numbers aside. What do we see? Let’s do some simple arithmetic.
The average price of crude in inflation adjusted USD:
1946 to 2012 – $39
1946 to 1973 – $23
1974 to 1997 – $48
From 1998 (the low according to this chart) to 2012 – $55
So now the price is $97.61. Which is a whole lot higher than either $39 or $23 or $48 or $55. Wouldn’t you say?
So College Boy what you have is close to a sixfold increase since the historic low in the inflation adjusted price in 1998. Or an eightfold increase in the nominal price.
Or more than twice its 1946 to 2012 inflation adjusted average or more than four times the inflation adjusted average from 1946 to 1973.
Or about 1.8 times the inflation adjusted average between 1998 and 2012. If my arithmetic is off you will tell me won’t you?
Tell us College Boy, do you know anyone whose wages have gone up eightfold since 1998? Or sixfold? Or even 1.8 times? I mean regular folks and not One Percenters.
A real kick in the balls to the US economy wouldn’t you say? And especially to one whose One Percenters are offshoring every last possible job and nut and bolt of productive capacity.
Tell us College Boy,
==========
You DO realize, don’t you Rhino, that you are speaking to colon not dot dot? Ya gotta pay attention.
They all sound the same to me.
Under Communism, personal tragedy will not exist. People will walk thru the factory where they work singing out, “This is mine, all mine”, almost as if they own it – because they do, as the collective. Marriage will not be encouraged, easily terminated, and any children will be raised by the State in either case. So how can there be family tragedy when the family as such doesn’t exist?
There will be no decaying, forgetful, hulks in nursing homes wasting money – they will just be terminated. You will have to get a new job, dear. How about Chairperson of Indiana?
Listen to Her. She has the Answers. All of them.
A dot here and there can make all the difference. On the Jefferson Memorial, they replace one of Jefferson’s semi-colons with a period in order to make him sound like he’s a liberal in favor of Black equality.
He wasn’t either.
The Collapse didn’t quite unfold like a thought it would.
==========
Carol, I’m trying to figure if the post from which I took the excerpt above and, more so, the post you made at 9:09AM are ordinary posts or the opening paragraphs from a novel you’re writing. I am leaning toward “a novel” because, as Cavepainter already noted, the writing certainly is good. And further, except for the above bolded word “a,” a typo, which should have been “I,” there were no spelling, grammar, punctuation or usage errors that I could detect. This is unusual on blog sites except when one is dealing with people who take writing seriously.
Getting back to your 9:09AM post…is Tom either your real or fictional brother?
Literature-wise, you have set us up beautifully at the end of your first paragraph with “Perhaps that’s the nature of all things. Maybe not. Who cares? Not me. Not anymore.”
They all sound the same to me.
============
That’s because colon is copying/pasting old shit from dot dot just to stir the pot pot…and you swallow swallowed hook line and sinker.
Yes, this week marks the 30th anniversary of Karen Carpenter’s death. And last week Sharon Tate would have turned 70. I wonder if Sharon Tate would be wearing mini-skirts at 70? The 1960’s and 1970’s were “Peak Pop Culture”. Check out this video of Sharon Tate interviewed by Merv Griffin in 1966 on London’s Carnaby Street:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DusGll6E5Mc
There will be no decaying, forgetful, hulks in nursing homes wasting money
=============
It’s husks Vlad, the singular of which was the perfect word used by Carol following its modifier, dessicated.
Check out this video of Sharon Tate interviewed by Merv Griffin in 1966
=========
How shocking, Merv the talk-show host nonchalantly smoking on TV. And Sharon Tate with ordinary breasts. Today she’d be sporting a 36 D-cup boob job.
What did Merv die of anyway?
Merv died from prostate cancer in 2007 at age 82
On the Jefferson Memorial, they replace one of Jefferson’s semi-colons with a period in order to make him sound like he’s a liberal in favor of Black equality.
==========
Please supply the words and punctuation from which you draw this conclusion. I’m truly curious.
Great article titled 10 Signs Wall Street’s soul sickness grows. Rally hides dangerous moral pathology. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-signs-wall-streets-soul-sickness-grows-worse-2013-02-05?link=MW_popular
Too big to fail meets the reality of a degenerating moral and ethical compass. God help us – the time is near when we all go back to a world made by hand. The question is how long will it take for our pill popping, reality TV intoxicated masses to realize they have been screwed by the 1% and try to take matters into their own inept hands. Its little wonder why the government wants to disarm the angry masses. Try to buy ammo lately at WalMart, Cabellas, or Bass Pro? Its non-existent. Nothing online. Somethings up. Prepare.
Dessicated hulk wouldn’t make much sense and neither would decayed husk. But I said decayed hulk which well describes certain old people who are like broken down old cars or certain old ship that will never go to sea again.
On the quote: many White Nationalists have commented at length on this but I can’t find them right now. Here’s a well known journalist:
http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2011/04/ultimate-statement-by-thomas-jefferson.html
Hey Otto Skorzeny here’s wishing you a Happy Black History Month, with a special emphasis on Rosa Parks, who, after all, has new stamp with her picture on it.
–CD
It was the climax of a visit that went well, and as expected, if not a bit awkward, but then, that was also to be expected. When Tom and I arrived, they were gathered around a table in the cafeteria. We dispensed with the obligatory around-the-table hellos, and then turned to face the Master of Ceremonies; Dear Old Dad. He had no clue who we were. It was obvious enough to me, and Tom indicated later that it was obvious to him, but with the added caveat, “he never knew me anyway, and I really never knew him, so it really doesn’t matter.” I wanted to say, “well, why did you come then?” But, I already knew the answer. At least he spared his wife and two sons the obligatory burden, and he managed to talk me into excusing my wife and two children. Mine were ready to go, and willing to go. They were curious about my Father, and from a purely sociological perspective, it would have been a fulfilling experience. Instead, they stayed behind at the hotel with Tom’s wife and children. Not next time. Yeah, right, as if there will be a next time.
After the initial greetings, we settled in for a crude version of Kabuki Theater, with each of us playing our little part and tip-toeing around the massive elephant in the middle of the room. I did my best to keep things moving along at a steady pace, careful to interject levity at just the right moments in order to mitigate the obvious. Well, obvious to some, but apparently not obvious to others. Steve knew Dad had no earthy clue who we were. He acknowledged to me later that evening that Dad pretends to know us because it’s expected of him. Since Marianne and Steve are the ones who secured a bed for him at this home, and are also the ones who see him every other week, he remembers their names and that they are his children, but only because they tell him they are. He goes through the motions for them, so he’s as much a part of the Kabuki as the rest of us. Marianne, on the other hand, doesn’t believe he has completely lost his memory, and instead, believes he is just being deceptive so as to avoid the onus of uncomfortable social interaction. Seriously, she really believes this, and there is no convincing her otherwise. She believes it is a conspiracy. A ruse. Dad is being surreptitious. The irony is, my parents always thought this of Marianne for the better part of her formative years. They were wrong about Marianne, and Marianne is wrong about Dad. Marianne was too clumsy to be surreptitious. It was Kathy, not Marianne, but in my parent’s eyes, it will always be Marianne. But who cares? Not me. Not anymore.
Kathy’s diagnosis of Dad’s mental state is, like everyone else’s, telling. She believes that he remembers some of us, because, of course, that “some of us” includes her. If she said it once, she said it thirty times. “Every time I come into town to visit, Dad remembers me. Isn’t it weird that he remembers me but not other people? I wonder why?” No you don’t, Kathy, you don’t wonder why. You know why, and you know what, I understand. You need to feel special, and if this perspective makes you feel special, then by all means, continue the lie. You might as well. Everyone else is, including me. Irony comes in waves, and Kathy’s diagnosis is yet another wave of irony following close on the heels of Marianne’s conspiracy theory. No one remembers the following but me. Imagine that. Not even Mom, but that’s not surprising. Unlike Dad, her memory loss is voluntary and selective. This memory didn’t make the cut. It just so happens that when Dad’s Father was on his death bed in the hospital after a short struggle with cancer that had metastasized to his brain, he allegedly called out for my Father at the very end, just hours before taking his last breath. This is indelibly imprinted in my memory because my parents talked about it incessantly after it happened. My Mother was as guilty as my Father of playing it up. “Can you believe that? He called out for your Father! It shows that your Father was always his favorite!” Narcissists, like drug addicts, have their enablers. The moral to that ironic story? Like Father, like Daughter, but don’t tell daughter that. Any of them.
As I sat there, going through the motions, playing Kabuki without the formal Kabuki attire, I couldn’t help but notice the surroundings. The inmates began to shuffle into the cafeteria where we were holding our theatrical family reunion. They were in varying states of physical and psychical decay, many much worse off than Dad. One fellow was just sitting there in his wheel chair in the middle of the cafeteria, smiling at nothing, or maybe it was something, who knows, soaked from the waist down in his own urine. Maybe that was the reason he was smiling. If it was, who can blame him? I’d smile too, if I, and my urine, were in his shoes. There’s nothing like a good piss for what ails you. This guy had it right. You get the picture of the scene. Like something out of The Walking Dead, if you’re not paying close enough attention. Heartbreaking, really. I wanted to ask them, was it all worth it? I’m glad they couldn’t answer. They’d probably say yes, and that’s not the answer I want to hear. What was most stark of all about this somber setting, was the view out the windows which covered the entire north-facing wall as if the wall were one contiguous window. Filling it almost entirely was the specter of the Nuclear Power Plant with its behemoth cooling towers releasing trace amounts of radiation and no one the wiser. If they were the wiser, I don’t think they’d care, so long as the electricity kept flowing. The lights must stay on at any cost, birth defects and cancer included. At one point, I stared at this veritable portrait so long, I swear I saw it glow. These poor souls. They’re not much more than guinea pigs. Set them up close to the Nuclear Plant in the winter of their years, and medically monitor them for any anomalies. Nah, they wouldn’t do that. Marianne must be rubbing off on me. Who am I fooling, anyway? We’re all guinea pigs of one sort, or another. How presumptuous to pity them, when we’re all occupying varying circles of Dante’s Hell.
A ripple of laughter snaps me out of my trance. The glow of the Power Plant dissipates. Dad’s hair and eyebrows gather my focus. My God, he has a full head of gray hair. His hair has never been this long, this dry, and this unruly. And those eyebrows. He’s an Andy Rooney double. He’s not alone. All the males, and even some of the females, wandering aimlessly about are Andy Rooney doubles. Hopefully, I can skip this circle of Dante’s Hell. Anything but Andy Rooney, except Rupaul. I’ll take Andy Rooney over RuPaul any day, but I don’t think I have a choice in the matter. These folks certainly didn’t. Or did they? Something to consider. Getting back to the hair on Dad’s head, something’s missing. Yes, that’s it, there is no Vaseline. I have never seen Dad without Vaseline in his hair. That’s probably what kept him from graying all these years. It was the Vaseline. Petroleum Jelly is the key to a youthful appearance, and it’s economical. Who would have thought? My Dad, that’s who. And to think, Broads pay top dollar for snake-oil cosmetics that don’t even work, when they could be slathering themselves in Vaseline and basking in the Fountain of Youth. Oh well, their loss. Or not. Who cares? Not me. Not anymore.
Did you ever meet a cat with a rough coat? I’ve been petting a homeless cat who doesn’t seem to have fur like other cats. It’s also very long – perhaps with some Asian blood. I thought he was feral at first, but that was just skittishness.
Yes I remember how our politicians did everything but bark and crawl all on all fours a few years ago at some kind of memorial for her. All this for a a mild mannered litte Communist lady. You know that she was a Communist agent, right? And that her riding at the front of the bus wasn’t spontaneous, right? They tried out two other Black girls first, but they started screaming obscenities and fighting in the rehearsal so they were no good for the victim role.
http://www.amren.com/news/2013/02/a-curious-madness/
‘Maverick biologist’ Rupert Sheldrake thinks there is a big problem in science, caused by those who employ it as a belief system, rather than using it as a method of inquiry. He thinks science is being held back by the former, and in his soon-to-be-released book Science Set Free (already available in the UK as The Science Delusion) he offers the “ten dogmas of science” that he thinks need to be treated with more suspicion than they currently are:
1. That nature is mechanical.
2. That matter is unconscious.
3. The laws of nature are fixed.
4. The totally amount of matter and energy are always the same.
5. That nature is purposeless.
6. Biological inheritance is material.
7. That memories are stored as material traces.
8. The mind is in the brain.
9. Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
The ‘science delusion’ is the uncritical belief in these dogmas, treating them not as beliefs but as truths… Science is much more fun, much more interesting, much more free, when we turn these dogmas into questions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0waMBY3qEA4
“power failure was a neat harbinger of things-to-come in the Most Exceptional United States of America”
Harbinger is a good word. I like harbinger, rhymes with derringer, and we got one last shot. Let’s waste it all on sports, pizza, porn, and beer. And go out there and do your civic duty and spend, spend, spend!
Interesting: some of these science can never touch at all, such as purpose. But some, like memory being stored in other than the brain, might just be amenable to the scientific method. So yes, having a wider set of theoretical assumptions would yield a wider set of testable hypotheses. We are in rare agreement.
SOCIAL LIFE IN A DYSTOPIAN PLANET IN THE NEW MILLENIUM
——————————————————-
There are a couple of cafe bum friends of mine who, like me, are chroniclers of the age and observers of the differences between this age and one or two generations ago. We all agree that the problem with this age for reasonably astute social beings is that we are forced to accept a decline in the quality of general discourse and interaction.
Palo Alto used to be a town where young and old alike came downtown to hear live music at night or to go discuss real ideas over a couple of beers at a tavern that, God forbid, actually catered to an older crowd of articulate bohemians. Now, every bar is “kiddie world” and the bartenders are women who bat their eyes for every male customer for tips. Females bartenders used to be as rare as hen’s teeth. When one hears conversation in Palo Alto now, it’s a bunch of Facebook guys or VC-funded start-up guys discussing business plans for their soon-to-be-extinct ventures.
It was a mere 16 or 17 years ago when discussions ventured from art history to the history of New England in the 19th century to fanciful astrophysics to theology. My cafe group had a physicist, a Unitarian minister, a kid in the Air Force, a disk jockey on a local radio station, and a few assorted engineers.
This is the sadness of the age that most people have lost their lust for anything but cash and interesting 35-year-olds became Sinclair Lewis’ “Babbitt” at 50 when the stock and real estate booms hit. Ideologically, the Bay Area still hasn’t recovered from the SHALLOWNESS OF CHARACTER created by those booms.
For those roughly my age (60), the existential crisis is that we all know that the last chapter of our lives is not going to be a renaissance of ideals and passion. This is the LEADEN AGE. And let’s face it, if our lives are a five-act play, we want the last act to be lighthearted, life-affirming, and problem-resolving. Instead, older citizens used to the more spirited social life of yore, must content themselves with solitary intellectual diversions and, if you’re very, very lucky, one or two intimates still not spiritually deceased.
The tragedy is not that we’re doomed (we are) or that life is going to get more entropic. The tragedy is that life has gotten STERILE and SOULLESS … an ending with a whimper, not a bang. That’s why I believe we’ll see a return of fraternal orders of one sort or another just so that we have kindred spirits to interact with in this grayest of eras in human history.
E.
The CSICOP.org and Skeptic.com and James Randi group all point ou that their views are not dogma, and that it will change when evidenced based results appear. Science understands that the current theory of today can be change or completely removed, IF evidence based results show that. The fringe groups, new age, anti evolution, anti vaccines folks are always claiming that Science is not free,SO untrue, explore read the journals of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, or Skeptic Magazine, go to their web sites and see that the scientific method does produce freedom,but those with the dogma view claim it restricts them. Science leads to the view, question everything,that there powers that hate it.
E. wrote: “That’s why I believe we’ll see a return of fraternal orders of one sort or another just so that we have kindred spirits to interact with in this grayest of eras in human history.”
What’s the plural of “We”?
Thanks.
I thank you for the great description of how I feel as a guy who got his AARP card recently for turning 50. I am an old time Liberal, and in the early years when Atari computers and sites ruled there was an awesome site were Consevatives and Liberals would debate the topics of the day, the sysop was a Conservative, but he demanded everyone to act like adults and present arugments, not the current standard of today,”Commie, Soicalist, Nazi, etc,etc”. I read and listen to the news but in my area one newspaper rules and the radios are are all Fox type want to be’s. But, not to worry most Americans today worry about honey boo boo, and Kim K and other shows of reality. Your post is awesome and a sad reminder of the lost age of civil debate and discourse.
Has Asoka been reassigned – or was he just loafing in his penny loafers, his hair bril creamed to slickness?
http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2013/02/05/study-americans-spend-up-to-80-percent-of-work-time-cyberloafing/
Thanks for the Sheldrake link.
The perennial traditions (Vedanta, yoga, Buddhism, etc.) teach that consciousness is primary and the material universe has evolved out of that. The current scientific paradigm teaches that matter comes first and that consciousness or life somehow evolved out of matter as a sort of cosmic accident. As a practitioner of meditation the current scientific paradigm makes no sense to me whatsoever. Consciousness is primary or as Yogananda put it, “Thoughts are universally, not individually rooted.” We are surrounded by consciousness, it permeates everything around us, the higher we raise our level of consciousness the more the universe does our bidding.
Thad
Magnificient video by Jared Taylor on how Liberalism promotes racism and violence against Whites. If you teach people that Whites are devils or “the cancer of humanity”, what else can you expect? I mean what else do you do with cancer except try to erradicate it?
http://www.wvwnews.net/content/index.php?/news_story/are_you_swine_happy_now.html
Thank you for your work, Jim, and trying to be a voice of reason. It is quite apparent that modern anti-culture celebrates de-creation and “the pleasure in our lives of affirming creation is inverted into perversities of destruction, pleasured in the pain of suffering and death.” It is likely that a mental evolution will eventually be inevitable. There are many people who do not want to evolve in their thinking and would try and shower a hurricane with bullets to try and stop it, but Nature has a way of staying on top no matter how physically powerful we think we are. Such a pity that our Corporations are really like an lonely old woman with her silver spoons, our Enforcers like clay men, and the Government like a wooden gun to the people themselves. Some people are just way ahead of their time and others just get stuck.
“Wheeze the People… of the United States of America….”
Get your sons out of the Boy Scouts, immediately. Least of all no more overnight camping trips. It looks like the Scouts are travelling the same road as the Catholic Church and the United States Navy. That road leads to Oblivion.
HI Jim and all :
No better manifestation than my home state of Michigan. The institutional rigor mortis of the Sate of Michigan is now to besiege the urban farm efforts of Detroit at the behest of deep out state pockets and hillbilly cravings for a return to serfdom . MY home town of Pontiac had joined – I was told – the list of Michigan cities under State intervention. In that intervention now demanded for Detroit- read ‘reform’- the fiefdoms to be established as Detroit is carved up can be seen more clearly in teh town of Flint. A truly ‘Escape from new York ‘ scenario. The defacto state endorsement of ‘intra’ genocide can be seen in most Michigan cities. The pathetic excuse for manhood by State leaders is that Michigan is now Honduras with snow .If the out state wardens have any thing yo say about it, the social destruction of all Michigan cities will make even Mitch McConnel a happy Col Sanders . Til around 200 I watched in chronic astonishment as the forces of suburban and rural delusion systematically abolished and demolished all remnants of civility and hope. In my home country of Oakland ( former home of the famed Pontiac car ) the real estate meltdown took nearly all by surprise : such is the intellectual anemia there. Some 14,00 forclsures brought home that the burbs were actually a energy stupid idea from their inception. And when the City of Novi ( Underground railroad station no 6 disallowed a farmer converting her acerage to senior farm community ( seniors actually doing their own farming ) I came to see that Oakland County and Michigan deserved nothing other than a economic and social collapse.
Where my late father lived near Traverse City- home to Micheal Moore these days- the rural roads are long car suspension traumatic. In it’s car / happy motoring myopia Michigan is as good as gone. The Canadians are likely to smart to consider buying it . Their Province Windsor casino was already laying off people as Detroit and the burbs began to bleed dry . Especially so as MGM casino came into Detroit vampire style. Over the voted objections of us who loved the City enough to defend it from being a dirty gambling hole for the burbie barbies and asphalt Kens.
When other states developing industrial parks and come to Michigan Colleges to take technical talent away they find little resistance. I have begged my own daughter to take her chemistry degree and feel AWAY from Michigan . No use wasting her skills and talents in a population where as much as 40% have little or NO health coverage. ( Oakland County / Ferndale. My friend Peter and I started doing post industrial collapse studies as far back as the early 90s. His blog at WSU may still be up .
As a theme park of Morlock America ( NRA endorsed) Michigan is now iconic of what NOT to do. ONLY the possible political amputation of the Upper Penninsula / lake Superior region offers much hope for Michigan. If we were to see the endorsed dissolution with the South I would have more hope . The burbs and South ( Georgia ) are clearly energy gangrene .
Health
Steve S.
I don’t think there will be bond bubble.I don’t think US economy (for elites) will ever crash.I don’t think there any chance of deconstruction of military-oil-financial-legal-prison-drug-Pharma-food-corporate-insurance-industrial complex.And i don’t think the citizen will ever protest govt.
Too bad nobody listens to jim.Some small town mayors should listen to his ideas and build some good communities.At this time,a single example of local-hand made-low energy -sustainable economy might serve as guidance for rest of the world.
Yes, JHK, there are huge financial problems on the horizon for the US. A interest rate spike and bond bubble collapse is long overdue.
But that’s not what is going to do us in.
Absent some triggering event, we in the US are destined to moulder further into a slowly degrading future – where our dollars buy less and less, while the real essentials of life cost more and more.
And we are going to be so hideously overpopulated that there will be no way to stop our descent.
If you and your readers value an environment that can support worthwhile human life in the US, post-oil, then pull up this petition, sign it, and send it. And find other relevant population initiatives and participate in those, as well. And then find other people of like mind and spread the word.
We’re done for, otherwise.
https://www.numbersusa.com/petition?uid=1246368
Mister Farrell outlines the pathologies well enough, but he’s placing completely unfounded hopes upon Mary Jo, the Bankers’ Bulldog. He seems to think that some asses will get a sound kicking now that a decorated former prosecutor is in the SEC regulators’ seat. I think he’s so far wrong as to be laughable.
Let’s take a short peek at some biographical notations:
“While Ms. White is a decorated prosecutor, she has spent the last decade vigorously defending — and billing by the hour — Wall Street’s biggest banks, as a rainmaking partner at the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The average partner at the firm was paid $2.1 million a year, according to American Lawyer; but she was no average partner, very likely being paid at least double that. Her husband, John W. White, is a corporate partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He counts JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse and UBS as clients. The average partner at Cravath makes $3.1 million. He, too, was a former official at the S.E.C. — he left Cravath to run the corporate division of the S.E.C. starting in 2006 just in time for the run-up to the financial crisis. He left in November 2008, a month after the bank bailouts, to return to Cravath.
It seems Mr. and Ms. White have made a fine art of the revolving door between government and private practice.”
Heckuva job in perception management, Mr. Prez’dint! (Make sure the foxes are perceived to be chicken-lovers before assigning them to the henhouse…. ummm, that should be chicken PROTECTORS.)
(Sorry, forgot the source, but this stuff is easily cross-referenced and confirmed.)
Oh, I meant to add:
Does the Prez’dint even READ the resumes before handing out these recess appointments??
(Maybe that’s it; no congressional interrogations, no questions asked, administration spin-control assured, foxes handily ensconced in hen-houses.)
“…the higher we raise our level of consciousness the more the universe does our bidding.” -Tripple T 3rd
Tell me, are you insane to be entertaining this kind of gigantic conceit, or are you toying with the idea of becoming a gawd of sorts? (Somebody will send donations to “continue the good work” if you will swath them in your “beliefs”, never fear.)
Should have been, “swathe”.
Thad, this fellow is an expert at explaining consciousness. But if he were as good at explaining the taste of a peach, one still would find it more fulfilling to gain the experience for oneself.
http://www.deepakchopra.com/video/view/486/ask_deepak__why_you_are_not_your_body_or_your_mind_
Sheldrake, a scientist himself, is all for what you suggest, pure science, but also recognizes that it is easier to settle into the dogmas of scientism than to continue to question. Maybe it is an unconscious desire to have what the religionists have, which is what the skeptic has rejected through questioning in the first place. It is human nature/weakness to fall back into what is easy, like attachment to beliefs and opinions. It is hard to sustain one’s inquiry into truth as this is a destructive process: the shattering of ignorance, delusions, and one’s ego-identity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5TxW1yKoDM
Let’s hear it for the Clean Air Act! Clean air, a rather important commodity wouldn’t you say?
Should it be taken for granted? Personally, breathing of sweet air is one of my favorite things.
Gone too are leaders like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard who treat their employees with grace.
Have you read today’s Mercury News? There’s an article about Bloom Energy hiring a bunch of Mexicans and paying them $2.65 an hour. The company was featured on 60 minutes as a wonderful green company out to save the world.
No surprise that the head of Bloom is a greedy, pushy guy from India.
harbinger, rhymes with derringer,
===========
You must have a tin ear Shak, har and der do not rhyme.
Oz,
Yeah, that Mary Jo, she’s a Pip, as my great aunt used to say.
Have you seen her photo? Really an imposing figure, like Daniel Webster or Elisha Root. I’m sure right now those Wall Street Tycoons are shaking in their boots!
==CD
Ront,
First, I hardly even consider biologists to be “scientists”. Only biochemistry and biophysics are “scientific”. Most biology is mere taxonomy. If Sheldrake was a physicist or a chemist, I might find those ideas more interesting. By the way, most scientists don’t really operate on ANY of the premises that he feels “hold science back”. I don’t think physicists or chemists even THINK about whether matter is unconscious or conscious when going about their daily duties.
What’s holding science back is UNTESTABLE THEORIES like String Theory. Indeed, an untestable theory is not a “theory” at all. By definition, a theory can be proven or disproven through the usual experiment/replication cycle.
Another thing holding science back are theories advanced as “science” but which are nothing more than quasi-religious fads. I can tell you as an “insider” that computer “science” is not a “science” at all but rather a bunch of ASSERTIONS about why certain paradigms like Object-Oriented programming are best even though the little bit of empirical research done on OO demonstrates that is has no observable advantage of old-fashioned procedural programming with a HUGE increase in complexity.
There are many other non-scientific “sciences” like psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Where did the term political “science” get its undeserved name? There are really only TWO sciences: Physics and Chemistry. The truth of their proven ideas have, essentially, given us ALL of our modern conveniences and techno toys and you either prove or disprove that something is true … you don’t just endlessly “theorize”.
E.
SOCIAL LIFE IN A DYSTOPIAN PLANET IN THE NEW MILLENIUM
==========
If life and conversation among young adults is as portrayed in the hit show “Girls” (and I suspect it is) it is a sad commentary…etc etc.
However, one must keep in mind that as we age there is a tendency for the world to appear to be going to hell in a hand basket. In what prior generation, I ask, did the oldsters not feel this way?
BTW, regarding your comment Title I would say either:
ON A DYSTOPIAN PLANET
or
IN A DYSTOPIAN WORLD
Thanks for the kudos, Rocco. Yes, getting that AARP card is somehow a signpost that you’re not a kid any more, isn’t it?! Once the first digit of your age is a “5” or higher, there are no more illusions about being a youth. It’s bad enough that your body starts failing in different, discomfiting ways as the ravages of age take their toll but when you live in the Age of Great Separation as we do, you feel that aging is also far more isolating than in the past when families, friendships, and communities seemed so much more cohesive.
Even when life was physically tougher and a lot shorter, say, early in the 20th century, it seemed like family and community bonds were so much less ephemeral and subject to fracture at any moment. We may be living longer but, as a culture, I think those extra years of life are starting to be a ball-and-chain rather than a great joy as they might have been a mere generation ago.
E.
There are really only TWO sciences: Physics and Chemistry.
============
Now hold on just a damn minute there big fella…what about the infallible science of predicting future stock prices from chart patterns? 🙂
This Harvey Sermon is more appropriate, and accurate, than the Chrysler Farmer Ad aired during the Superblow.
So God Made A Gamer
The myth about Farmers and Farming Families simply isn’t true. I worked with an organization full of them in my last job. They’re a bunch of stubborn, arrogant, back-stabbing, conniving creeps. There wasn’t an exception to that rule in the entire organization, from top to bottom. Not a one of them fit Harvey’s description.
Hi, SJM. Wow, really, $2.65 per hour? Well, you’re a fellow Bay Area person and I’d really appreciate your bird’s eye view of our balkanized region. Personally, I feel like we’re living in a sort of Asian “Yugoslavia” where foreign nationals (Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russians) are just huddling together in their enclaves which they form by buying up all the real estate in various neighborhoods in San Jose and up and down the SF Peninsula.
Web 2.0 has created a second phony “boom” and millions have moved here just to “sweep the gold off the streets”. Of course, most new tech jobs, like garden variety webmasters, only earn about 20-30% more than minimum wage so many aspects of the boom are absurd. The Bay Area is where people have to live with roommates until age 40 because wages have dropped but rents have risen.
You may find this assertion crazy but I think Sacramento has become a better place to live than ANY of the major Bay Area cities. It’s sprawled out and has all the diseases of suburbia but at least it’s not a place where a $1400 rent for a one-bedroom apartment is considered “cheap”.
Remember when the stereotype of the Bay Area was that of an intellectual mecca for bohemians of all stripes … scientific types, artistic types, activists of all sorts … you know, IMPASSIONED people!! The sort of “liberalism” now extant in the Bay Area is Orwellian, bureaucratic “liberalism”.
E.
Of course, the stereotype of all ages is the “old curmudgeon” but the “old curmudgeons” of yesteryear told their tales of curmudgeonry to their kids and grandkids and members of a real community.
The new American “family” is not the cohesive unit of old. Whatever may be archetypically true of old shits, it doesn’t mean that family and community are the same as they were even a generation ago. They aren’t. They’re fractured … by divorce, by less involvement with neighbors (I find that not really knowing your neighbor is now the rule, not the exception), and by “families” where the kids are spread out over the continent.
E.
aging is also far more isolating
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I got my first pair of hearing aids in my mid to late 40s and my hearing has continued to slowly deteriorate. Without even giving it conscious thought I find myself avoiding social situations because I can’t hear what the fuck is being said. Hearing aids don’t help as much as people think. And at the movies I miss half the dialog and have to have my wife explain things to me as we exit the theater. I don’t like being in restaurants with 4 or six people. Myself and one other (where I can focus on lip reading) is about all I can handle. Life’s a bitch and then you die.
“I don’t think physicists or chemists even THINK about whether matter is unconscious or conscious when going about their daily duties.”
I think you are right about the, El. It is not thought about nor questioned, but simply believed and incorporated into the way one observes the world.
Science will only take you as far as your limited senses permit. Curiosity of what lies beyond our outward oriented senses and prejudiced ego-identities will discover greater realities/disillusionments within. This is something that is found for and by one’s self. It is not to be given over on a silver platter for your intellect to relish adequately–to fulfill.
Science should be all about questioning. So why shouldn’t science be open to being questioned? Darned ego…
Yes, and Bloom Energy paid them in pesos. They worked 50 hour weeks and made about $135/week.
From my personal experience, I wouldn’t lump Russians in with the Indians and Chinese. Our new Russian neighbors (St. Petersberg variety) are fantastic. They moved from Cupertino because they didn’t want their son to go to Monta Vista High School because of the unbalanced competitiveness.
I’m not sure I could manage living in Sacramento. I’m spoiled by the Bay Area climate.
The strings are actually tentacles. Yogsothoth is coexistent with Space after all, thus he and his bretheren can NEVER be permananetly thwarted.
It’s also tempting (and soothing) to see the World as just changing without ever changing. In other words, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. One of my bosses was like this. He loved spectacle. He would talk of how Boston had gone Black and Hispanic, amazed and excited at the Change. He wasn’t an overt Anti-White, he just loved the pure magnitude of the Change.
I’d say that the World is going to hell in a basket – and has been for a long time. Thus our Fathers and Grandfathers were right too.
Fell for it? Whatever. And, frankly I don’t give a shit who posted it. Who was it that said repeat a big lie enough times and people will start to believe it?
Fact of the matter is that the increase in the price of oil is not exactly helping a hollowed out American economy. There’s no way to “blue sky” this situation.
Just in case people are delusional enough to think that the Fed’s free money policies are really all about “free money” look at how the price of oil compares when expressed in the currency of other countries. The example I used in past posts was the Swiss Franc and the Canadian dollar.
Whereas the price of oil rose eightfold in USD since 1998 it only rose sixfold in C$ or SF. The idea being that you have a gang of maniacs running the Fed. And the people selling oil look at debased USDs and they want more USD to compensate.
Don’t get me wrong, these other countries are only the healthier horses in the glue factory. But the lunacy in the US is unique in its magnitude. I mean, trillion dollar deficits? The numbers are mind bending.
When countries (including the US) resorted to money creation in the past to paper over financial problems the result was disaster. And you’re seeing an element of this in the price of oil. No reason that this current bout of insanity will have a better ending than previous bouts.
The Fed was blind in 2007 to the freight train barrelling down the tracks. So was pretty much everybody else that should have seen it coming. All those economics departments with all those PHDs and all those complicated computerized models. What the hell for? All as useless as tits on a bull. Those same geniuses are just as blind now as they were back then.
Another point: according to Felix Salmon, Bill Gross of PIMCO says that it the 1980s it took $4 of new credit to generate $1 of real GDP. In the past decade it took $10 of new credit and since 2006 it took $20 to get $1 of real GDP.
Kind of like pushing on a string, no? What can you expect when the US economy has been offshored? Create new credit? To what end? To keep Chinese factories humming? The Fed giveth, oil markets taketh away. No free lunches. No free lunches, that is, except for the folks on Wall Street. They’re special, they get to skim everything they can.
The Centre cannot hold. Diversity is a fatal disease. What can people talk about anymore – they have no common ground, not even pop culture. It’s become diverse and thus “too big” (even though very small) as well.
Look how Greece is rallying behind the Golden Dawn to close the borders and drive the invaders out. We can’t do likewise: we aren’t anything anymore except consumers. We have no identity to fall back on. The Change Agents have triumphed. When challenged, the People will defend their own chains saying, “I’m not racist”. The Victors have broadened that term to include being an authentic American proud of his Tradition. Thus no effective action is possible until the Enemy within is identified and fought.
The Chains didn’t begin as chains. As Buddha said, they start out as cobwebs, become strings, then ropes, etc. The Agents began their psychic warfare with the concept of a “proposition nation”. What can the members of such a set do, what recourse do they have? Once such a thing is accepted by the masses, the Nation is already dead.
Since Russians and Sacramento are being discussed, I ran across this interesting article. Read the comments, as well. Some of them (the comments) are actually quite intelligently articulated. Especially Number 16. Janos, did you write that comment? It’s definitely your style. If so, good job. You’re like Savoir-Faire. You’re everywhere.
http://slog.thestranger.com/2006/10/russian_immigrants_t
God,…..can it be any more obvious?
Global finance and the transnational corporations know that a global middle class such as that Americans experienced up ‘til the 1970s is impossible. How do they know? The global resource/population radio is getting ever more out of balance.
To have access to and control of resources on a global scale they’ve realized it necessary to split the global population into just three levels of living standard.
First: A very thin minority wealth class which acts as colonial government on behalf of the “global empire”, yet all the while maintaining appearance of legitimacy in purely theatrical rituals of citizen representation (faux elections and congresses or parliaments reduced to irrelevant procedural stalemate between tweedledee –tweedledum parties).
Second: A slightly broader class layer of technicians, professionals and apparatchiks (bureaucrats) to keep the stage lights on and the props in place.
Third: The rest of the globe’s population which will be the “human capital”, controlled and exploited like any other “resource”, all merged into one global labor pool. Nations will no longer function as separate sovereignties retaining independent self determination. “Citizen”, will thereby have become a hollowed out label, emptied of exclusive entitlement to democratic process participation in directing a national destiny.
Populations, no matter of what particular country or any particular country’s circumstance of population/resource ratio and/or whether backward or modern in 21st Century terms of secular/scientific grasp of reality, will be “market” forced to adjust standard of living to a “competitive” universal standard of desperation.
The first two levels will cooperate to protect their privileged status. The lower class will continue to cooperate from having been brainwashed (continuous media propaganda bombardment) to religious belief that the unfolding order is one of nature – immutable and ineluctable.
The “order” is known “global free market capitalism”.
Damn those Kulaks and their peasant craftiness! How dare they oppose the Dialectic and ITS chosen servants! They should be made to drink some Kulak Jim Jones Koolaid.
Farmers have been ruthlessly persecuted for generations now. They have born the brunt of the NWO’s war of attrition. It is only to be expected that they would trust no one now but themselves.
One often hears the subject in the U.S. news about the jobless rate being up or down some fraction of a percent. I think this is a terrible distraction among the many distractions set forth by those in charge of the “story.” What strikes me as worse–an utter abomination–than the jobless among us is: There are “millions of people who have jobs that leave them mired at the edge of poverty. Their ranks include legions of retail clerks at chains like Walmart, fast-food workers, dishwashers, customer assistance representatives, home health-care aides, factory workers, and farm laborers. Some 46.2 million Americans now live in families where someone is working but earning less than the poverty line…”
Why do we insist on asking God to bless America? Why would God bless the above, unless that blessing comes in the form of a major wake up call to making radical changes to the creating of real and sustainable wealth and seeing that it is distributed fairly and compassionately?
(the comments) are actually quite intelligently articulated. Especially Number 16. Janos, did you write that comment? It’s definitely your style. If so, good job.
==============
You had me completely fooled, Carol. I read #16 and nearly bust(ed) a gut.
As to the other comments, one mentioned “smelly Russians” which recalled to memory a time in the late ’60s when I was (a traveling auditor) in Chicago for a couple of months. I was staying in a hotel with 6-8 floors. I forget its name but it was directly across the street from the huge Conrad Hilton Hotel (700+ rooms). The Bolshoi Ballet was in town. One morning I left my room and boarded the elevator which made a couple of stops on its way down. Several extremely ratty looking, dour and unkempt men and women whose B.O. could knock a buzzard off a shit pile boarded my elevator car. Turns out these were the Bolshoi troupe on their way to rehearsal. A bus awaited them on the street outside.
I had occasion to observe these dancers several more times over the next few days. The salient feature of the men was a perpetual 3-day “5 o’clock shadow” and for the women it was legs with tremendous calves. For me, shapely calves on a women are second only to big boobs.
correction:
woman
For me, shapely calves on a women are second only to big boobs.
===========
These ballet dancers were as flat as latkes.
These ballet dancers were as flat as latkes.
===========
It beats crepes, so it’s not a complete loss. Slavic women, in general, have huge legs. In the autumn of their lives, those legs come to resemble mammoth tree trunks, and words cannot describe adequately the shape and girth of their calves. They’re so large and unsightly, it’s difficult to avert your gaze when they are revealed, but you must look away, if you wish to remain undamaged, both psychologically from the horror, and also from the vicious beating if she sees you staring.
s
Slavic women, in general, have huge legs.
============
Funny you should say that. My wife had a friend, American born but only a generation or two from immigrant heritage. She would often lament her “Ukranian legs.” Her (maiden) last name was Cenko. I thought she just used it as a funny line. I didn’t realize there was more than a kernel of truth to it.
s
==========
Vlad, I notice that you and others occasionally write a one letter comment. I’m guessing it serves somehow as a marker. Please explain.
“Tell me, are you insane to be entertaining this kind of gigantic conceit, or are you toying with the idea of becoming a gawd of sorts?”
I have to respectfully disagree that it is any sort of conceit at all. It is the very teachings of Jesus, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Buddha, Lao Tze, etc.
The true conceit and insanity is scientific materialism. Genetic engineering is a form of insanity is it not? And that is only one example of where scientific materialism leads.
Triple T wrote: “It is the very teachings of Jesus, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Buddha, Lao Tze, etc.”
This is the episode where the young monks get conned in China:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JBQPCHHK0Q
And I’m sure you wouldn’t lie to us, unless Jesus told you it’s for our own good.
Praise the lawd and pass the ammunition; there’s some Dark-Age Theocracy to be returned to! Good Times, Hurrah!
I recall Jesus saying something about pearls before swine. I think that applies here.
You’re not interested in a discussion so I’ll stand down. Have another beer, dude.
Feel free to have the last word, though. That seems to be important to you.
ZERP is here forever. The fed will buy 100 percent of U S bonds. i can’t see how ZERP will ever go away.
What about your reaction to finding out about the Jefferson Memorial? About how the Swine slandered Jefferson – in STONE while pretending to honor him? If you don’t burn with rage, you are not worthy of being born an American.
And of course, my question about the stray cat. That was not metaphorical or trying to make some kind of political or metaphysical point. It was simply a question from one cat lover to another. You can respect that I trust?
From our Heston’s Cold Dead Hands he passes the torch of Freedom to our’s. Not all the Newtown Parents are Stepford Moms and Dads. Not all of them New World Order Zombies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhXPlCjr0Vw&feature=player_embedded
He thinks he is the height of coolness when he spells God as Gawd. The creep would like nothing better than to put Christians up against a wall and shoot them. He hates all religions of course (except Communism) but Christianity the most. And the kicker: he is an anarchist and would be purged by his Communist fellow travelers.
How do you consumate your love of big calves? What do you/can you do “with them”?
What about your reaction to finding out about the Jefferson Memorial?
=========
It was your turn to answer MY question, namely I asked that you copy and paste the words and punctuation from the memorial so I could exam it.
For the same reason I did not answer your cat question. Your turn first on the Jefferson Memorial question.
Time to turn within. The Reaper reaps all here on this level. But your thoughts and feelings – those you can’t leave behind you even if you so desired. They follow us like our shadow.
Even if America hadn’t fallen, it would still be time to turn within. The senses are failing and friends dying. As a bachelor, you can practice sanyas. An elderly man with a wife can only practice partial withdrawl or vanaprashtha. There are none to hold you back from the Kingdom; it is spread out before you like a feast.
Plato said the wise man will act the same in a Tyranny or the Perfect City in terms of conducting his private life. Typically in times like these, gifted men withdraw from public service to cultivate their own garden. One may not be able to save the City, but one does not have to serve Tyrants – and share in their sin.
I sent you a link that quoted the words.
correction:
examine
The reply was to Vlad.
your love of big calves? What do you/can you do “with them”?
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Some things one merely beholds. I had a friend (7 years departed) whose favorite female body part was the collar bone. (Yes, I know, there are two of them.) Go figure.
I sent you a link that quoted the words.
===========
Date and time please.
And what about answering my 6:32PM question about your single letter s comment.
You owe me.
The junior monk, Ho Fung, figures it all out, so he gets thrown out of The Temple, but Grasshopper gets to stay in The Temple b/c he is still susceptible to getting conned.
This is the episode where the young monks get conned in China:
http://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=0JBQPCHHK0Q
“… two lesbian mothers…”
How can someone have 2 mothers?
“This is no doubt a major victory for moral values, but it is a temporary one,” said Jonathan Saenz, president of Texas Values, a group that organized a vigil supporting the ban on Wednesday and the parent of a Scout.
Zach Wahls, an Eagle Scout who has two lesbian mothers and is the founder of Scouts for Equality, called the delay “an abdication of responsibility.”
“By postponing this decision,” Wahls said in a statement, “the BSA has caved to those who argue that their anti-gay attitudes trump basic scouting values of kindness, courtesy and bravery.”
Zach Wahls must mean that he as 2 lesbian “Muthas”?
r
No. After you read the Jefferson Post, you will owe me – as your request for that initiated this exchange. Don’t try to con a Con. After you have paid that debt, I will owe you.
Feb 5, 6:31
The fact that the Scouts are even considering this means they have lost their way and the Organization is finished. The Pink Maffia claims another victim. If they like Scouting so much, why didn’t they just start their own?
But who would join? How many Gays have kids? And how many Liberal Supporters would really trust them that far? I mean do people want straight men camping with girl scouts? And from another angle: what fun would starting their own Scouts be? Their joy is that of the worm in the rose….
Janos said:
Plato said the wise man will act the same in a Tyranny or the Perfect City in terms of conducting his private life. Typically in times like these, gifted men withdraw from public service to cultivate their own garden. One may not be able to save the City, but one does not have to serve Tyrants – and share in their sin.
***********************************************************
Janos, I agree with Platos sentiment and also the ancient idea of the old man retreating to the woods during the final stage of his life to contemplate his existence. Even in the best of times, many aspects of social life seem like “Wash, rinse, repeat” so it is natural to self-isolate as one ages and one doesn’t want to repeat the same hackneyed social gestures for the millionth time.
It’s obvious that the gifted ARE staying mostly underground at this time because there are NO GIGANTIC SOULS visible any more. There are no Bachs, no Blakes or Yeats (modern poetry is revolting), no Einsteins (sorry, Hawking can’t hold his jock strap), no De Tocquevilles or other great chroniclers … it’s a world of ciphers in the public milieu and in the professions. You know the world has gone south when assholes like Steve Jobs are viewed as world changers but when Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of C and Unix without which there would be no Steve Jobs, died with virtually no acknowledgement.
It’s not even worthwhile to try to publish polemics about what’s going on because it’s like pissing into a hurricane. It’s time to form small groups who keep the lamp of reason alive so that after the darkness lifts, if humanity survives there is still a LAMP turned on.
E.
People seem to forget that in the Constitutional days, “diversity” meant diversity of THOUGHT. They also seem to forget “E Pluribus Unum” … “In the many are one”. However, ONENESS is exactly what has died in America. We have diversity of SKIN COLOR but there is no assimilation into a single American collective where we discuss the commonweal. E Pluribus Unum means that whatever separates you from your fellow men via your foreign birthplace and cultural inheritance is supposed to be left at the entry gates to the Republic.
Diversity of nationality was supposed to lead to UNITY OF PURPOSE. Now, it’s every man for himself. Little wonder that modern man seems so SMALL.
E.
Diversity of nationality was supposed to lead to UNITY OF PURPOSE. Now, it’s every man for himself. Little wonder that modern man seems so SMALL.
===========
I agree that it is every person for himself/herself, but you’re wrong about there being no UNITY OF PURPOSE. There most certainly is a UNITY OF PURPOSE, and it transcends Nationality and the antiquated and discarded convention of Nation-States. That UNITY OF PURPOSE is to consume this world at an exponential rate, until there is nothing left to consume. It’s the goal of NeoLiberalism and Neoconservatism (Siamese Twins). It’s the New World Order. To unify the world with a Singularity of Purpose. To turn the remainder of the Planet’s inhabitants into rapacious consumers, and in so doing, hasten their destiny. It was always going to end this way. From the moment that lamp was lit, this was the end of the story. And we’re almost there. Thank God it will finally be over. In the meantime, put another kettle on the fire. The fun is in the details.
Removes Calvinist hat and puts on smoking jacket.
Mom. Why is she here, I wonder? She divorced him over thirty years ago and it wasn’t amicable. Their relationship after that, if you could call it that, was cold and awkward. She can’t really care for him any longer, or have any feelings for him, at all. But here she is. Why? I don’t know. I can only guess. She’s much tougher to figure than Dad ever was. He was, and still is, an open book. Simple. Easy to read. She was, and still is, a neurotic mess. A Shape-shifter. Elusive. Difficult to read, and difficult to corner and pin down. If they were trees, and you sliced them open after they fell, Dad would have one, two, three at most, rings. Mom, on the other hand, would have thousands. She still has her memory, though, and her wits about her. She’s sharp as a tack despite the many lives she has led, or maybe because of all those lives. Something to consider. Maybe she’s here now precisely because he no longer remembers her, so she doesn’t fear his presence. Either way, she’s playing her part rather well, smiling and grinning at just the right moments. I’m not begrudging the smiling and grinning, believe me. In fact, I make it a point to elicit it, because the last thing I want are any of those awkward silences. They may be silent for some, but for me, they are deafening, and must be strategically avoided. Thankfully, we didn’t have any, but there were some close calls.
As our somewhat contrived conversation came to a close, Steve suggested Tom and I stay with Dad a little longer to catch up. What? Catch up on what, exactly? He doesn’t know who we are, and quite frankly, we don’t know who he is now, either. Fortunately, Dad recoiled at the notion, and suddenly appeared nervous and agitated. Steve, thankfully, abandoned his delusional idea and indicated that maybe it would be a better idea if he, Tom and I accompanied Dad back to his room. We agreed. Crisis averted. Despite undergoing major surgery a year earlier at age eighty six to repair a broken hip, this Old Codger could high-tail it. Sure, he was using a Walker, but still, it was quite impressive. Many in their mid-to-late eighties don’t recover from hip surgery. It’s the nail in the coffin for quite a few. It’s a testament to his physical resilience. He may not be mentally durable, but he sure is physically.
His room was cramped. Well, it’s really not his room since he shares it with a platoon of former soldiers. It looked to be about five or six beds in this space, and each of the inmates had a very modest carve-out separated from the other carve-outs by a curtain, just as it is in a hospital. There was a small bookshelf by the side of his bed. On it was an assortment of knick-knacks various visitors had brought him over the past couple of years, to include pictures and sentimental cards for various occasions, i.e. Easter and his Birthday. Steve asked Dad, “where’s the picture of your buddy, Al, Dad?” Dad shrugged his shoulders as if to say he didn’t know, or else, he had no clue what Steve was talking about, and didn’t know how to respond. I know him well enough to know it was probably the latter. Steve wouldn’t let it go, though. He informed Tom and I that Al was Dad’s buddy, and Dad had a picture of him on his bookshelf. Al had passed away the week before, and now his picture was missing. I searched the bookshelf, and found a picture frame turned backwards on the bottom shelf. I lifted it to take a look, and showed it to Steve. “Is this Al,” I asked? “ Yeah, that’s him,” said Steve. Did Dad do that? Interesting. Whether it was a fully conscious act, or not, it certainly was symbolic. In this place, when you’re gone, you’re gone. It’s the last stop before the Big House, if you believe in the Big House. If you don’t, and I don’t, it’s still the last stop. If he did place that picture on the bottom shelf, he understood that, at least subconsciously.
What’s odd is that I cannot recollect hugging him goodbye, or not. As if it matters. He was not an affectionate man. If we wanted a hug when we were young, we hugged him. He never hugged back. You were lucky if in that process, you got a light pat on the back or shoulder. Once I was in my teens, there were no more attempts on my part to solicit any reciprocating affection from him. I considered it a lost cause, and never gave it another thought. Until Hank’s wedding thirteen years prior. We were saying goodbye at the airport. I was about to turn and head to my gate when he grabbed a hold of me and hugged me. Not a weak, ineffectual hug either. It was a real hug. He meant it. There was something behind it. Of course, I hugged back, but I was completely flummoxed and dumb-founded. This was entirely unexpected. And to top it off, after we released each other from our hardy embrace, he said “I love you, Mike.” “I love you too, Dad,” I said. And with that, I turned, and headed to my gate to meet my wife who was waiting for me. Along the way, I raised my hand to wipe the moisture that collected just beneath my eyes. It was the last I saw of my Father. What I just visited was not him. It was his ghost.
Holy Frijole, Batman, this takes Rocking the Cradle to a whole new level. It’s jaw-dropping. Damn Catholics. I bet he was a Boy Scout, too. Damn Boy Scouts.
http://news.yahoo.com/9-old-gives-birth-mexico-police-search-teenage-050429720.html
MEXICO CITY – Authorities say a nine-year-old girl has given birth in western Mexico and they are looking for the purported father, a 17-year-old.
Jalisco state police spokesman Lino Gonzalez says the baby girl was born last week at a hospital in the city of Guadalajara. He says the girl and her baby are doing well.
Gonzalez said Wednesday that the girl’s family alerted authorities after she gave birth and the alleged father has not been seen since in the neighbourhood they both live in.
He says that if the teenager’s paternity is proven he could face child sex abuse charges.
Gonzalez says the girl told authorities the teenager was her boyfriend.
Nice distillation. That is also my viewpoint.
My patience for this “purpose” that we’re surrounded by has ebbed, drop by drop, over the years, and I despair of it ever dissolving by force of will. IMHO, the only way this mindset is going to be seen for the suicidal one that it is, is for a great calamity to visit itself upon the acculturated, worldwide, sociopathic tenet of “more stuff; always”. This is even reflected in visions of an afterlife; eternally reliable luxury and comforts without end, amen. The reward for transcending the vicissitudes, chaos and terrors of the real universe, and denial of same. Damning oneself to the eternal ignorance of pretending that humans and dirt are not composed of the exact same elements (to be “apart” by conceit and cupidity) is very dangerous to both the natural world and ourselves as entwined in it (as we have vividly seen).
I’m really not sure that we haven’t soiled our nest beyond repair (extinction). Perhaps this is why delusions are ascendant as the subconscious “sees” a desperate end to overuse and morbid acquisitiveness.
I now remove my shoes with the square buckles. (Mine are bronze, as I don’t want to appear to flashy with the silver ones. ;o)
James, the price of heating oil and gas is climbing steadily in Russia where I am, as well. KulturCritic
And, yes, the fun IS in the details. Interestingly enough, as there is more and more of a clampdown on freely-available info, more and more of those details slip out. (It really is a most deadly and entertaining exercise in oppositions.)
General Question #37:
Part 1 –
Does little laddie lederhosen specialize in placing words in the mouths of others while projecting his darkest desires and terrors upon them as well?
Explain, briefly.
Part 2 (for extra credit) –
Is this the classic tactic of the internet troll? (To engender disgust and divert from actual issues the blog would address.)
Explain, briefly.
The price of a gallon of milk in Charleston, SC is now approaching parity with CT and MA.
The median wage never has (and probably never will).
The price of food is one of those prime indicators. The “low cost of living” in SC is/was one of its’ advantages. What happens when the po’ folk (which are the majority of S. Carolinians) become “under-nourished” and “food insecure” due to rising prices? (And this in a population that has willfully forgotten most of its’ skills, aside from trundling a cart down the aisles of Piggly Wiggly and driving the pick-’em-up truck to the Gas ‘n’ Go.)
Oz, another ‘Prime Indicator’ is the cost of people to heat their homes in winter up here in New England. Its running about $800 to fill an oil tank right now; many cannot afford it and are freezing in their houses.
It was fun reading TLE back in ’05, almost like reading science fiction, or of events that might occur in the far future, if at all. Well, the future is here, and the reality of it is not so much fun. Yet in our local newspaper today they announce the ‘housing crisis’ is over, sales are going up, new units are being built, prices are rising, happy days are here again, with real estate, once again, leading the way.
==CD
Feb 5, 6:31
===========
Below are the relevant words from your link:
The Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.”[i]
I assume [the Negroes] is not a part of what is carved into the memorial?
I also assume the words (beginning with “nor”) that followed the alleged semicolon do not appear on the memorial as a separate sentence?
I am not suggesting someone is lying about the [original] existence of a semicolon, just that it would strengthen your case immensely if a link with a photo of the complete passage in Jefferson’s hand were provided.
The issue you’ve raised certainly gives support to my obsession with accuracy in spelling, punctuation, etc.
If there is ever a next time for me to visit Washington DC I’ll make a point to visit the memorial and read what is inscribed for myself.
No. After you read the Jefferson Post, you will owe me
===========
Regarding the cat fur:
I don’t recall ever touching a cat whose fur was rough. I HAVE touched a cat whose fur is long, matted and lumpy. One of the 3 cats in our household is such a cat. The cat’s name is Amber but I refer to her as “the demented one.” She came as part of a package deal with my mother-in-law from Toms River, NJ in the summer of 2005. Amber was a rescued feral cat (we think) and has never acted what I would call “normal.” The only person she permits touching her is my m-i-l. The only time I touched her (in about 15 years) was when I was placing her food bowl on the floor and the back of my hand accidentally bumped into her. Only when I am feeding her can I get any closer than about 4′.
About once a year, usually early summer, we take her to the groomer. The long lumpy and matted orange hair/fur is shorn very short, all but the head/face (which gives her a hilarious exotic look). She appears to lose about half her size/weight.
From my perspective Amber is all expense and no revenue (affection).
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”.
Eric Blair
Mom. Why is she here, I wonder? She divorced him over thirty years ago and it wasn’t amicable…………….. It was the last I saw of my Father. What I just visited was not him. It was his ghost.
==========
It appears you are doling out your novel or short story like writers did in the old days, serialized in magazines. Are the last sentences above: “It was the last I saw of my Father. What I just visited was not him. It was his ghost.” the end of a short story?
If you are thinking of publishing I have two things to point out about what you have posted here today:
. You wrote “He informed Tom and I.” It s/b Tom and me.
. You wrote of “slicing open” a tree. Trees are not sliced open, they are either chopped or sawed, cross-cut fashion. Only when sawed could one clearly observe the rings. I would look for a way to repair this metaphor.
Interesting that she began this after you got your go ahead to do exactly the same thing. She’s stealing your fire.
Corrections have been made to the original copy. Thanks for the economical copy-editing services.
I’m not sure if it’s the end of a short story, or just a part of a novel that could go in many different directions. It could go either way. It depends on where my muse takes me.
Interesting that she began this after you got your go ahead to do exactly the same thing. She’s stealing your fire.
==========
thunder
Thank you, I think this is the case with my stray.
I will look for more info about the Jefferson memorial. The quote is from his book, “Notes on Virginia” and the passage can be seen in context of what he was talking about: Negroes.
As for the single letters: would you believe that it is a code to Benedict in Rome? That the letter in conjunction with the person’s name being responded to, provides the reference to a passage in a book, that in turn provides the message once decoded.
Both expression are used. Don’t try to limit the English language or my creativity. Even if the expression was never used before, it has been now. By me. There’s a first time for everything after all. But I have seen fire used this way before.
It depends on where my muse takes me.
==========
And who or what is your muse?
Punk, what is your problem? You commiserate with others about me all the time. Is this “putting words in someone’s mouth”? I didn’t think so.
Now seriously. Are you going to sit there and pretend you don’t have violent fantasies about what you’d like to do to Christians? I don’t believe you.
As usual, no comment on your stupid alliance with Leftists. You a fool, boy.
“…another ‘Prime Indicator’ is the cost of people to heat their homes in winter up here in New England. Its running about $800 to fill an oil tank right now; many cannot afford it and are freezing in their houses.” CD
M.,
An anecdote from this very week speaks to that specifically.
An elderly woman in the center of town (that phrase is kinda laughable for a collection of 4 houses) decided that she could no longer justify heating her large rambling house, so she moved into a smaller building on the property. She forgot (or didn’t know) that pipes have to be drained and drain traps have to be primed with alcohol to keep them from freezing and splitting, if you’re going to shut off the heat.
My buddy got the call for the inevitable repair after the cold snap. Extensive and expensive damage to a butt-load of copper pipe (a lot of it 2 1/2″). On top of that, she was out of running water for almost a week, as the small building was fed from the large one. Not a savings, as you might easily guess. It also points to the fragility of our infrastructure when pitted against the non-negotiable forces of Nature.
But why worry? The boom is back, despite some prime indicators of the exact opposite!
(I agree, very strange, but it’s the only way the cannibalistic pot of modern “capitalism” can remain boiling.)
The content of TLE is now brought to reality, and [like you] I would say, without the psychic thrill of an “outside the box” speculation. Things are getting grimmer faster than anyone suspected.
M.,
Get supplies in today, we might be in for a gollywhomper of a storm, come tomorrow (just past noon). Good Luck!
I was wrong. The Jefferson is quote is from a letter to Madison. Here is the passage as written on the Monument. It makes clear that the issue is Negro slavery. Typically, White slavery is not addressed.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Jefferson_Memorial
I was wrong: only the last sentence is from the letter. They took Jefferson’s writings and mixed and matched to create a pastiche that supported FDR’s Liberalism. See the criticism at wikipedia.
Gadzooks!
Conveniently supplied context for my queries in every posting! (Astonishing and delightful.) Too busy obsessing about other amendments to peer into the Fifth?
Hey Vlad why don’t you lay off Ozone.
The names you call him, Commie, leftist etc definitely he is not. I really don’t know what his politics are and neither do you.
Along with Tripp, Ibendet, P2C, Treeman and some others his posts mostly run concurrent with the spirit of this site.
Yeah this is an open forum and you can say what you want. But don’t go driving off those who stick to the subject.
==CD
“What about your reaction to finding out about the Jefferson Memorial”
Do you mean the 120,000,000$ MLK [made by Chinese] I-D-O-L?
And MLKs family got 800,000$, somehow.
Actually TBSOA have been buying silence for a long time.
DID YOU KNOW HOW THEY BUY BOYS SILENCE?
I hope many of you have checked out February’s “Eyesore of the Month.” It’s a horrible, boxy museum in Dallas surrounded by parking lots and freeways.
In today’s San Jose Mercury News I learned that they are building a giant “Bass Pro Shop” not too far from my house. It will be built on one of the last remaining agricultural sites in the Santa Clara Valley.
It will have the cookie-cutter Bass Pro look–like a super-sized log cabin. I’m pretty sure their signage includes a a 30 ft. tall fish.
My motto for the day: “Nothing says class like a giant fake bass.”
Eleuthero, at least Palo Alto doesn’t allow giant suburban atrocities like San Jose.
Okay Mr. Bing, since you’ve thrown down the gauntlet……….
A few months ago you published a Crazy Boss story of mine in which I declined even attempting to describe my boss (saying it would require an Orwell or a Kafka) and instead I simply revealed a ‘letter of resignation’ I’d composed but never sent that served like art therapy does for prisoners or pet therapy for the demented and helped me to remain sane and to survive until I could retire.
…….at your prodding, I will try to describe my “crazy boss” though it’s doubtful I’ll be able to fully capture his essence.
You may recall a hilarious Seinfeld episode in which Elaine reveals (in strictest confidence) to a nudnik Rabbi in her apartment building a very personal situation involving her jealousy of George Castanza because he has become engaged. To Elaine’s horror the Rabbi turns right around and discusses that personal situation on a talk show and implies he is maintaining the confidentiality of his subjects when he says “we’ll call this young woman, Elaine, and this young man, George.”
And so, in like manner, but for a small modification, we’ll call my boss……Mot.
Mot was hired with a Director’s title by GD, the VP of Finance with whom he had worked for a number of years previously at [another] large defense contracting firm. In his new role Mot would be the key financial interface with the auditors and Administrative Contracting Officer of our number one customer, the US government, who accounted for 90% of our business. (Note: the average citizen has no concept or appreciation of the extent to which the government performs financial oversight on its larger suppliers of military equipment. Contrary to popular belief the defense business is not a gravy train of sweet-heart deals arranged with a wink and a nod by Dick Chaney.) I and two other financial analysts comprised Mot’s staff. One of these other two (we’ll call him Nostaw) was, in some sense, brilliant but very odd (I suspect some rare form of autism or perhaps Aspergers was the culprit)…..but I digress.
The second analyst, HC, was hired by Mot to replace a long term employee of more than thirty years who took early retirement four months after Mot’s arrival. This fellow (i.e. the early retiree), a short, plump, jolly and hilarious character resembling Charlie Brown (we’ll call him Nodrog) could say the most outrageous sexually explicit things to women of any age from 18 to 81 that anyone else would be instantly fired for yet the women loved it. I would be scarlet-faced with embarrassment when he’d invite an AARP-aged secretary to sit on his lap and “discuss whatever came up” and she would giggle as though Brad Pitt were flirting with her. Nodrog had an extraordinary gift…….but, again, I digress.
A week after Mot’s arrival Nodrog informed me privately that as soon as an anticipated layoff was announced he would be first in line to volunteer. To give Nodrog his due (although ostensibly an accountant he barely knew which side of a T account the debit was on and which side the credit) he was an astute judge of character and knew in a matter of days that Mot was someone to flee from for your life. Sure enough a layoff announcement arrived by email one morning in November seeking volunteers who, if enough came forward, might mitigate the need for management to cull out dead wood in an involuntary phase of the “restructuring” plan. Nodrog’s reply to HR went out that same morning and on a day in early January, after reaping the benefit of all paid holidays from Thanksgiving through New Years plus taking his usual two week’s vacation in Florida, Nodrog shook the guys’ hands, kissed the women and departed smiling.
For reasons I will never fully understand I became, from day one of Mot’s psychological reign of terror, the favorite whipping boy, kind of like the character Traddles was to Mr. Creakle in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Perhaps a Napoleon complex was at work, I being a lanky 6 feet 1″ and Mot a 5 foot 5″ fireplug, but I don’t really think it was that.
We had conversations over lunch in the company Caf in which we shared profiles on age, marital status, kids, prior employment, schooling (his degree was in physics, of all things!), etc and it was here that I learned he had been divorced two years earlier in his mid-fifties after 26 years of marriage. This was undoubtedly a source of bitterness for Mot since, as I soon came to realize, he could not tolerate the slightest thing reflecting negatively on him, much less a failed marriage. (The irony was that unbeknownst to himself virtually his entire being was a negative reflection on himself.) Some time later when I knew him better I would muse on the hell those 26 years must have been for his wife and imagine her eventual reward in the highest rooms of heaven for the mental torture she must have endured.
to be cont.
Always one to return a favor, it should be Costanza, not Castanza, and Cheney, not Chaney, unless you are referring to Lon Chaney.
A competent line editor or copy editor who reviews your prose would likely make the following remarks.
“Their relationship after that, if you could call it that.” The double “that” undermines the euphony of the sentence.
“If they were trees, and you sliced them open after they fell.” The slicing open takes place after the falling. The tense you need is the past perfect. “After they had fallen.”
“Dad would have one, two, three at most, rings.” The reader has to wait until “rings” to find out what the one, two, and three refer to. Place “rings” earlier in the sentence.
“Sharp as a tack” is one of the many metaphors in English that have been dulled by overuse. Use metaphors of your own invention. Or avoid similies and metaphors altogether. Their employment tends to enervate as often as enliven.
“And must be strategically avoided.” And the strategy is what?
“And quite frankly.” This phrase aids the rhythm of the sentence, but its triteness might make the discriminating reader wince.
Steve’s suggestion that Tom and you stay with your father is “delusional,” you write. How so? Have you explained?
Old, codger, walker, dad–why the capitalization?
“It’s the nail in the coffin for quite a few. It’s a testament to his physical resilience. He may not be mentally durable, but he sure is physically.” The first and second sentences are too closely related to each other to stand AS sentences. Break them into clauses. Make one independent and one dependent. Again, perhaps you mean the LAST nail or ONE of the last nails. And again, can mental durability really be separated from from physical durability?
I wrote the above to get your attention for the more important remarks I want to make about your prose, which are not the finicking copy-editing kind, but general. These follow.
Okay Mr. Bing, since you’ve thrown down the gauntlet……….
A few months ago you published a Crazy Boss story of mine in which I declined even attempting to describe my boss (saying it would require an Orwell or a Kafka) and instead I simply revealed a ‘letter of resignation’ I’d composed but never sent that served like art therapy does for prisoners or pet therapy for the demented and helped me to remain sane and to survive until I could retire.
…….at your prodding, I will try to describe my “crazy boss” though it’s doubtful I’ll be able to fully capture his essence.
You may recall a hilarious Seinfeld episode in which Elaine reveals (in strictest confidence) to a nudnik Rabbi in her apartment building a very personal situation involving her jealousy of George Castanza because he has become engaged. To Elaine’s horror the Rabbi turns right around and discusses that personal situation on a talk show and implies he is maintaining the confidentiality of his subjects when he says “we’ll call this young woman, Elaine, and this young man, George.”
And so, in like manner, but for a small modification, we’ll call my boss……Mot.
Mot was hired with a Director’s title by GD, the VP of Finance with whom he had worked for a number of years previously at [another] large defense contracting firm. In his new role Mot would be the key financial interface with the auditors and Administrative Contracting Officer of our number one customer, the US government, who accounted for 90% of our business. (Note: the average citizen has no concept or appreciation of the extent to which the government performs financial oversight on its larger suppliers of military equipment. Contrary to popular belief the defense business is not a gravy train of sweet-heart deals arranged with a wink and a nod by Dick Chaney.) I and two other financial analysts comprised Mot’s staff. One of these other two (we’ll call him Nostaw) was, in some sense, brilliant but very odd (I suspect some rare form of autism or perhaps Aspergers was the culprit)…..but I digress.
The second analyst, HC, was hired by Mot to replace a long term employee of more than thirty years who took early retirement four months after Mot’s arrival. This fellow (i.e. the early retiree), a short, plump, jolly and hilarious character resembling Charlie Brown (we’ll call him Nodrog) could say the most outrageous sexually explicit things to women of any age from 18 to 81 that anyone else would be instantly fired for yet the women loved it. I would be scarlet-faced with embarrassment when he’d invite an AARP-aged secretary to sit on his lap and “discuss whatever came up” and she would giggle as though Brad Pitt were flirting with her. Nodrog had an extraordinary gift…….but, again, I digress.
A week after Mot’s arrival Nodrog informed me privately that as soon as an anticipated layoff was announced he would be first in line to volunteer. To give Nodrog his due (although ostensibly an accountant he barely knew which side of a T account the debit was on and which side the credit) he was an astute judge of character and knew in a matter of days that Mot was someone to flee from for your life. Sure enough a layoff announcement arrived by email one morning in November seeking volunteers who, if enough came forward, might mitigate the need for management to cull out dead wood in an involuntary phase of the “restructuring” plan. Nodrog’s reply to HR went out that same morning and on a day in early January, after reaping the benefit of all paid holidays from Thanksgiving through New Years plus taking his usual two week’s vacation in Florida, Nodrog shook the guys’ hands, kissed the women and departed smiling.
For reasons I will never fully understand I became, from day one of Mot’s psychological reign of terror, the favorite whipping boy, kind of like the character Traddles was to Mr. Creakle in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Perhaps a Napoleon complex was at work, I being a lanky 6 feet 1″ and Mot a 5 foot 5″ fireplug, but I don’t really think it was that.
We had conversations over lunch in the company Caf in which we shared profiles on age, marital status, kids, prior employment, schooling (his degree was in physics, of all things!), etc and it was here that I learned he had been divorced two years earlier in his mid-fifties after 26 years of marriage. This was undoubtedly a source of bitterness for Mot since, as I soon came to realize, he could not tolerate the slightest thing reflecting negatively on him, much less a failed marriage. (The irony was that unbeknownst to himself virtually his entire being was a negative reflection on himself.) Some time later when I knew him better I would muse on the hell those 26 years must have been for his wife and imagine her eventual reward in the highest rooms of heaven for the mental torture she must have endured.
to be continued..
THE ABOVE POST IS FOR CAROL NEWQUIST.
Look sharp you sea wrecks!
Since it’s the words and punctuation you want to examine rather than the memorial on which they are engraved, the more accurate phrasing would be “examine THEM.”
He’s a hater of the White Race and its Defenders. Thinks the White Race needs to die and loathes any White who refuses to join on with the Suicide Cult. He has pretty much said that he is an anarchist. And as you may know, they are insane for the most part since they march with the Left. During Communist Revolutions, they try to earn Leftist respect by committing atrocities. It doesn’t help them though. They aren’t PC enough and they get purged from power – or sent to the gulag.
How does his hatred of Christians have anything to do with Peak Oil btw?
If that’s what Plato thought, his thinking ran counter to the generally accepted (at the time) thinking of the Classical Greeks. If a the government of a polis turned tyrannical, the citizens of the polis would not have the freedom of action that is necessary for moral behaviour, even in their private lives. Bad government forces bad conduct.
Carol said:
That UNITY OF PURPOSE is to consume this world at an exponential rate, until there is nothing left to consume. It’s the goal of NeoLiberalism and Neoconservatism (Siamese Twins).
************************************************************
Yes, indeed, Carol, the new “Unity of Purpose” is global consumerism. The world is united in its desires for plasma screen TVs and the construction of new McDonalds. It is united in its mania for computers and iPhones. The up-and-comers like China all want to buy large Buicks. None of the new emerging economies wants its new middle class to renounce consumerism so, indeed, it’ll hasten the end.
As for “… nothing left to consume”, marine scientists estimate that the world’s oceans will be completely void of life in less than 50 years. In the Pacific Ocean, there’s a huge zone in the North Pacific where plastic and plastic particles have a density, at or just below the surface, of 5.1 kilograms per square kilometer of ocean. Plastic still remains a polymer even when broken down to small particles. A square kilometer is only about 0.37 square miles.
I feel that simple living is an idea that transcends whatever political “ism” one adheres to. Of course, pundits would declare that a conservative like me couldn’t possibly be so “anti-American” as to reject consumption as a lifestyle but conservatives during and before the 1960s believed in … CONSERVING!!
When the outer life is lived at the expense of the inner, it leads Americans and our many immigrants to develop a “he who dies with the most toys wins” mentality. You see this even in childrearing where an average middle class 2-year-old will have two HUNDRED toys instead of five or six. We train ’em early to get bored with EVERYTHING.
Thus, the toll on our souls for living in such a fashion starts formation in our youngest years. Everything is “I want”.
That’s why public life has grown so dull because “I want” is a passive state where we not only demand goods, we demand constant entertainment. It makes people expect the world to entertain them but does not make them feel the need to be entertainING in return. I’ve noticed this over the last couple of decades to a fare-thee-well. It makes me recall W.C. Fields dictum that “You should never try to impress a person because if you do, you’ll be expected to keep up to that standard for the rest of your life.”
E.
SJM … some of us would find the entire city of Dallas to be an eyesore. It is the quintessence of the sterile, postmodern “hyper-urbia”. It has plenty of company but its poured concrete ugliness seems to exceed any other American city I’ve seen.
E.
Oh, a short follow-up, SJM … what did they do to the De Young Museum in San Francisco?! A beautiful museum was torn down and the nouveau product is HIDEOUS.
E.
Are you saying that because they are no “gigantic souls” visible to YOU, such souls don’t exist at all, anywhere. And what does being gifted have to do with having a gigantic soul? And if a person has a gigantic soul, what kind of person are they anyway? Let’s say being gigantic-souled means being truly magnanimous. Here’s a short list of famous people, gifted people, to whom magnanimity was an alien trait: Picasso, Hemingway, Sartre, Baudelaire, Celine, Shelley, Brecht, Crowley.
If magnanimity isn’t a necessary and sufficient condition for the great-souled, what is?
Wow, when Ass Wiper isn’t manically posting, suddenly CFN is back to life!! It’s great to have posters like James Skorenzy, Collapse, ComradeDystopia, and several other keen observers join the fold.
I’m also happy that we’ve kept BeingThere, Ozone, Kyooshtik, and SJMom. Even though a few of the remaining folks are “liberals”, I don’t think ANY are “Neo-Liberals” and, besides, it’s the sensibility of the expressed thoughts that transcends any “ism” to which one may or may not adhere. I also appreciate that Vlad is still around because it’s healthy for non-politically-correct individuals to stick around and occasionally call “bullshit” on many social notions that are only “true” because they’ve just been repeated often enough by the Orwellian Left.
This place is now … a PLACE!!!
E.
Well, Jam, there’s no disputing that many historical figures, especially in the arts and literature, were less than stellar individuals. I would dispute Sartre, though, for his work on the French Underground in WWII but overall I have no quibble. I never saw what people see in Hemingway, a little man with a macho hang-up.
I would agree that altruism is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a “great soul”. However, I dare say that this trait was far more evident before modern life turned all of us into consumer androids. There’s not even any CHARISMA out there any more. Most people in positions of responsibility now are just apparatchiks … knob-tweakers and micromanagers.
Is Obama the best we can do as far as inspired speaking goes? I’m afraid the answer might be “yes”.
E.
This is just my second post this week.
Immigration reform (aka legalizing the illegals and increasing the unsustainable population of the United States still further) is looking, hideously enough, like it may be a done deal. I’m still fighting it, and encourage any of you who care about the future or the environment that sustains that future – to do the same.
If nothing else, those of us who fight against this US immigration madness will all be able to say, “I told you so,” when, 15 years from now it turns out that this “reform” was the final nail in the coffin for a United States that’s worth a sh*t – or, maybe even, for human life on Earth.
(BTW, when I’m POed, I tend to write overly long sentences and indulge in a barrage of overlapping metaphors – thus, this post.)
And that’s assuming we make it 15 years, which sometimes seems quite optimistic.
==============
And, E, you’re right that this discussion thread is better, right now. I doubt it will hold.
Unless the RI really was a govt. or corporate agent who has now been “reassigned.”
There was an article in the UK press that offered some proof that “paid agents” of the European Union were deliberately screwing up the dialog on comment treads that were trending toward opposition to the EU.
And the following may be fake – or not? – but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
“On January 23, something called “the Cyber-Warriors for Obama Project” (501(c)4 Soros) was activated. 3,575 “cyber assets,” or “warriors” are being paid just over minimum wage to work from home on identified “targets” which are a list of web sites. Instructions are to infiltrate web forums, collect screen names, avatars, and posters’ tag lines, and attempt to resolve these to their actual identities. They are to only monitor but not disrupt without authorization. They have also been provided with specific language to use to marginalize different posters, and effective methods to discredit people while maintaining a sense of legitimacy.”
http://nesaranews.blogspot.com/2013/02/dhs-insider-obamas-cyber-warriors.html
Vlad thought that maybe Soaker’s handler reassigned him to another blog.
Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of him, but who knows? Hope for the best; prepare for the worst…
Colon
It’s nice to see a left-wing lunatic – to offset all of the right-wing lunatics.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/07/mass-killer-manifesto-endotrses-hillary-gun-control-elite-media
This guy certainly puts paid to the idea that unarmed civilians should patiently wait – in a humble and always trusting manner – for Trustworthy and Trained Armed Law Enforcement Officers – to show up and defend them – forever and ever, Amen.
This is a weird, modern phenomenon that’s apparently gaining social acceptability—Dumpster Diving….
I guess that the young, unemployed university dumpster divers will out-compete the hobos for the food, unless the hobo pulls a jagged, broken Ripple bottle on the Women’s Studies PhD?
http://news.yahoo.com/german-bin-divers-connected-wage-war-food-waste-140617797.html
I bet that the U.S. Dumpster Divers are all big O..ba, ma supporters….
And, apparently, this pediatric surgeon really gave Obama a “schooling,” this morning.
Good for him!
But – don’t look at his picture, Vlad/Janus – ‘Cause it WILL hurt you!
===================
BTW, Vlad, what’s with all the new screennames?
Why not pick something that leaves you “identifiable?”
Oops! Forgot the link
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/07/prayer-breakfast-speaker-praises-jesus-gets-political-calls-political-correctness-dangerous-hammers-fiscal-irresponsibility/
What happened to Asoka?
Is he Department of War???
And meanwhile in the resource war….
Mali vs French government ….
Is France dependent on Mali for Uranium?
Thats how France is powered.
Who, now, is a ‘hater of the White R-a-c-e’?
And where’s K-dog?
He outed asoka..quite nicely – and now HE’S gone, too? Spy vs spy?
Nah, that’s to conspiratorial, even for this ClusterFuck! Isn’t it? ??
Mary is, sadly, long dead.
I understand. You replied to the post below my MLK post. You were referring to MLK.
BTW, “Carol Newquist” is posting some of the same blocks of text over at Naturebatslast.com.
If you think THIS ClusterFuck is depressing, then you need to log some time over at that place.
I’d heard of it, but never read any of the Amazing Doomerisms over there – until I typed some of Carol’s prose in quotes in a Google search string –
Just a guess, Bustin Jay – you spend a lot of time at Nature Bats Last, don’t you?
Do any of you ClusterF..ckers know of any good books that accurately describe the millennial generation’s attitudes towards the Boomer Generation? Thanks.
The Boomers will be expecting that the indebted, unemployed university grads and returning unemployed Ir aq and Af..g han istan war vet Millenial Dumpster-Diver Ob a ma supporters will be paying for all of the Boomer’s health care, Social Security and other entitlements.
until I typed some of Carol’s prose in quotes in a Google search string –
===========
Why would you do that?
Liberals are never Neoliberals. If you think otherwise, you misunderstand the term.
How do you explain the concept of “Jumbo Shrimp”?
Jumbo = Big
Shrimp = Small
Jumbo Shrimp = Big Small
O b am,a is basically a “Jumbo Shrimp”, right?
On the one hand, O b am,a is Big b/c he’s The Prez, but, on the other hand, he’s Small because he’s just a Sock Puppet. Right?
“Why would you do that?”
-cn-
Let me count the reasons:
1. K/Q suggested that you might be the missing Wagelaborer. I didn’t think so, but thought a little investigation was in order. (and you’re definitely note Wage, IMO.)
2. You are new here, ostensibly – yet you begin posting these huge blocks of text right off the bat. Something made me want to investigate.
3. Three years+ of dealing with the Soaker Hose has sensitized me to be on the lookout for large blocks of text that don’t look quite “right;” that don’t precisely fit the style of the poster, of his objective, or of the general sturm and drang of this CF. So I wanted to investigate.
4. Why not? Or, why not investigate?
=====================
And, CN, I don’t have any real objection to your posts. The one where you referenced “obsession with collapse” might have something to say to a lot of the CF’ers around this Nation. I’d like to see more posts like that, personally.
And your posts are an improvement on the spammmers spammings, 8m’s rantings, and the Soaker’s Hosings.
So post on, dude or dudette.
Here’s an anecdote that shows how overly sensitive members of our United State’s Minority Grievance Coalitions are making racism worse and worse – and worse.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/black-family-claims-disney-white-rabbit-character-refused-180034301–finance.html
This story is all over the internet.
I saw it on broadcast news in Atlanta this morning, so it’s out in the “media.”
Yet, no one is considering ANY harmless, innocuous, or RANDOM innocent explanation – –
IT’S RACISM TO THE MEDIA!! AND THAT SETTLES IT!!
It would be really magnificent if that “white cat” were being played by a black Disney actor/actress.
That would make the story “disappear.”
Because it didn’t fit the “narrative.”
Crazy Boss continued..
In the early going I couldn’t help but notice that one, the other, or both of Mot’s feet were constantly pumping up and down on the floor at a rate that I have never seen equaled. His entire chair wobbled in sync with his feet and it never seemed to occur to him that this might appear odd to a new acquaintance or visitor to his office. As we conversed he constantly twisted a thick rubber band around the fingers of his hands or rapidly clicked a ball point pen or repeatedly disassembled and reassembled that pen. Further, he would periodically pull out a large pair of paper shears in the midst of a deep conversation on some complex financial data and begin trimming his finger nails with the clippings flying in all directions. (Memory of this flashed into my mind during the last season of “Rome” on HBO when, in one scene, Mark Antony is discussing politics with Cicero (whom he detests) and without comment Antony begins pissing in a flower urn and a droplet lands in Cicero’s wine cup.)
On other occasions while in deep conversation Mot might pull off his shoes, take a shoeshine kit from a drawer and begin vigorously polishing them. He’d put a shoe back on and pull up on the laces with such force that I expected either the laces would snap or he would actually lift himself off the ground. The point of these anecdotes is that, in addition to the obvious rudeness, Mot could not do just one thing at a time. He needed to have ten balls in the air and anything less would have left him with too much idle capacity.
Mot usually arrived at work each day between 8:30 and 9:00 while official start time was at 7:00. He rarely left before 7PM, however, and it was not unusual to receive emails from him sent at 10:30PM or later. (As we all know, no executive in corporate America would dare leave at normal quitting time.) However, many of those late hours were spent on personal business not the least of which was an on-line search for a new mate to restore his sense of self-worth and on whom to inflict his unique style of torment.
Typically, Mot arrived wearing one of a score of odd hats he owned that he apparently felt added some pizazz to his persona. One in particular was a round brimless thing of tartan pattern with a fuzzy red ball the size of a walnut on top. Co-workers would furtively peek at him from their cubicles as he passed, rolling their eyes heavenward and wagging their heads in disbelief.
It was Mot’s practice to stop off at the Caf on his way in, to pick up a bagel with cream cheese and a large coffee, before coming up to our floor. He’d hit the ground running, as it were, by telling me, without stopping as he passed my doorway, to come to his office. This gave him the opportunity to conduct business while I watched with revulsion as he simultaneously talked and masticated his food open-mouthed while hunched forward, bagel in hands, with elbows spread wide on his desk. The food was washed down with large and noisy slurps of coffee and the inevitable mess of cream cheese on his lips and face was wiped off in a concluding grotesque motion. Watching Mot’s mouth and its contents as he ate was like watching the open end of an operating cement mixer.
Mot’s emails were often indecipherable because he could not spell and, since his mind was a hundred words ahead of his keyboard, whole phrases were either, missing, fragmented, or repeated. When I proof read and corrected for him a particularly bad piece of his handiwork he took the opportunity to whisper (even though his office door was closed) that he was dyslexic and ADHD as though it were something that was not obvious to anyone with eyes. A drawer of his desk contained a jumble of prescription medications for his various conditions and mood disorders and it was only too obvious when his chemical balance was out of whack.
So far I have painted a picture of an individual whom the more modern, liberal or politically correct in society might think deserving of empathy rather than vilification but his quirks were combined with a mean streak bordering on evil. His attempts to portray human warmth, particularly in regularly scheduled meetings with the government folks, were so obviously bogus, disingenuous and inept that it was embarrassing. He loved to begin a meeting with what he termed “a cute story.”
A discussion that for normal people might take five minutes could last an hour or more with Mot because he could not refrain from explaining the same thing over and over by mere rearrangement of words and sentences. As a result people avoided his office like the plague. Body language such as glancing at one’s watch or getting up and moving toward the doorway, that to an ordinary person might signal a visitor’s desire to be on his way, went entirely unnoticed by Mot.
Lucky,
Yes, France has more nuke-supplied electricity than any other nation on earth. You will see breakthroughs soon that will return nuke power to the fore, namely, the use of THORIUM instead of enriched Uranium. You get more than 90% less radioactive waste, we have enough Thorium just in the USA for more than 1000 years, and the burn products cannot be used to make bombs. Reactor accidents in thorium-powered nukes are self-extinguishing to no Chernobyl/Fukushima accidents are even possible
Thorium-powered nukes are being built in India, China, Russia, and perhaps soon even the USA. Nuke power may be dangerous but it scales much better than stuff like biodiesel.
E.
Notaneoliberal said:
Liberals are never Neoliberals. If you think otherwise, you misunderstand the term.
***********************************************************
Never say “never”. Almost by definition, a lot of “blue dog” Democrats are Neoliberals like Diane Feinstein. She might not agree to that moniker but it fits her and many other House and Senate Democrats.
Harry Reid might be another but he’s such a flip-flopper it’s hard to say but he’s certainly mighty soft on bankers.
E.
Sound like the Captain Bligh/Queeg type. Have you seen the movie with Humphrey Bogart as Queeg? You may identify with the journalist who mocks him.
And, CN, I don’t have any real objection to your posts. The one where you referenced “obsession with collapse” might have something to say to a lot of the CF’ers around this Nation. I’d like to see more posts like that, personally.
And your posts are an improvement on the spammmers spammings, 8m’s rantings, and the Soaker’s Hosings.
So post on, dude or dudette.
==========
Who died and made you boss? Are you an official gatekeeper here, or an unofficial one? For your information, the majority of people, meaning 99.9%, who visit Jim’s site consider the comments section to be a bad joke. So, we have one of two conclusions to draw from that.
1. You’re a witting and willing part of that process to make the comments section a joke, meaning you’re in on it.
2. You’re an idiot who can’t see that.
Which is it? If it’s the latter, the arrogance accompanying the idiocy precludes any possibility of mercy. Arrogant idiocy is intolerable and unforgivable.
Jam, thank you for your copy-editing suggestions. I have taken them into consideration and made revisions to the items I agreed with you on. I posted a lengthy response to you concerning it, but Movable Type gobbled it up and told me it was saving it for the blog owner’s approval. I take that to mean that it is gone forever. I don’t think Jim maintains his blog aside from the periodic bannings that resembles spraying several clips of bullets into a crowd from a assault rifle.
Kyooshtik, I can relate to your experience. More than you would imagine. Unlike you, I could never have taken that abuse until retirement, and still been able to hold my head up.
Neoliberals can be pseudoliberals. Let’s not confuse “liberal” with “member of the Democratic party”.
“For your information, the majority of people, meaning 99.9%, who visit Jim’s site consider the comments section to be a bad joke.”
-carol, newly quisting-
So, we have one of two conclusions to draw from that, Ms. NQ:
1. You have a God Complex, which enables you to do accurate statistical analysis of the CFN visitor traffic, including the internal psychological motivations of the individuals who comprise such traffic.
or, more likely, since you are participating here at CFN yourself
2. You are so psychologically weak that you believe that nothing you do is worthwhile. Therefore, you participate in the CFN thread ONLY because it puts you (in your own mind) in the 0.1% of JHK’s followers who do NOT consider this comments section to be “a bad joke.”
Think about it.
1. You have a God Complex, which enables you to do accurate statistical analysis of the CFN visitor traffic, including the internal psychological motivations of the individuals who comprise such traffic.
==========
No God Complex. It’s called common sense, something you are obviously lacking, since you haven’t drawn similar conclusions, and you take this seriously.
2. You are so psychologically weak that you believe that nothing you do is worthwhile.
==========
Interesting how you frame things as weak and strong. It reflects on your deep-seated insecurity. The key word here is “believe.” It gets at the heart of psychology. If people “believe” hard enough, they can convince themselves of most anything, to include that whatever they are doing is somehow worthwhile, even if that something is reading and posting to a joke of a comments section in some distant corner of cyberspace.
Therefore, you participate in the CFN thread ONLY because it puts you (in your own mind) in the 0.1% of JHK’s followers who do NOT consider this comments section to be “a bad joke.”
=========
Wrong. I participate here because I’m bored and this is entertainment for me. Jesus liked to hang with the prostitutes and tax collectors much to the chagrin of his disciples. I like to hang with the liars and arrogant idiots, but in my case, there is no chagrin, because there are no disciples. I don’t want any, because contrary to what you BELIEVE, I don’t have a God Complex.
Who knows, maybe I’ll take a teaching position at The Military College of Georgia. I can teach a course, amongst other things, on CFN. What do you think? We can be neighbors. Maybe even colleagues. Cool.
This is Spot On! It is rather ironic that it comes from a site that calls itself Market Watch. Irony is so ubiquitous these days, it’s no longer recognizable, and is taken fro granted.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/so-god-made-a-banker-2013-02-06
Well, the only safe thing to do now is to sit in your house and read a (DHS approved) book. Anything by Maya Angelou would be acceptable.
All other activities might be deemed illegal, and you risk immediate arrest.
Above all, do not get caught with any books by James Howard Kunstler.
==CD
… as yet another ‘Storm of the Century’ bears down upon us.
Yes, I will admit creeping case of ‘Cabin Fever’. I’m beginning to see the first few flakes.
==CD
Well, the only safe thing to do now is to sit in your house and read a (DHS approved) book. Anything by Maya Angelou would be acceptable.
==========
Apparently, DHS also approves of Glenn Beck’s offerings. His latest, Agenda 21, is now in circulation. It’s a satire, as is most of his work. He also refers to himself as a #1 New York Times Bestselling Author. More irony, although I’m betting some of you can’t see that irony. Anyone want to step up to the plate and tell me why that is ironic? I didn’t think so.
http://www.glennbeck.com/agenda21/
Is that actor John Hurt in that trailer for Agenda 21? That would be fitting because Hurt was Winston Smith in ‘1984’.
I’m politely asked to show my ‘papers’, that is my ID., all the time now. Years ago I would’t even carry my wallet around town. I knew everybody, everybody knew me. To buy kerosene, to pick up my nephew at school, to mail a package, to buy a train or bus ticket, “I need to see your ID”. So far numbers tatooed on forehead or wrist is not a requirement.
== CD
Not a Neo said:
Neoliberals can be pseudoliberals. Let’s not confuse “liberal” with “member of the Democratic party”.
***************************************************************
Well, it appears you have a considerable investment in word wrangling over who’s a liberal and who’s a “pseudoliberal”. Personally, I have no such investment because the Democratic Party consists either of Orwellian Liberals (“Newspeak” Liberals) or fake liberals (the “Blue Dogs”) and the Republicans are fake conservatives who shame the name of Lincoln.
Outside of that rather obvious set of observations, I’m not terribly interested in quibbling about whether Neoliberals are pseudo-liberals, fake-liberals, some twilight zone in between … I’ll let you obsess about that.
Some disputes are too trivial to be worth resolving.
E.
You make a couple of interesting points, CN.
From memory, it seems that JHK gets about 15,000 unique page views every week. Out of that he attracts comments from less than, maybe, 100 individuals.
And then by Wednesday, this thread is down to the usual band of +/- 10 recurrent commenters.
“A quiet backwater of the internet,” is a term that I have used for this place, in times past.
================
Now, having given you that much – you do have some issues, CN. (Is that a riff on Cluster Nation, btw?)
“Wrong. I participate here because I’m bored and this is entertainment for me. Jesus liked to hang with the prostitutes and tax collectors much to the chagrin of his disciples…” -cn-
Yep, comparing oneself affirmatively to Jesus for purposes of random internet debate? Issues.
No matter, this is a great place for exploring one’s issues, CN. Explore away.
======================
One more piece of fascinating trivia about you, CN, is that you’ve been following this thread long enough to know that I live near a town with a military college. From my memory, it’s been MONTHS since I mentioned that.
Fascinating.
You’ve got the wrong college, though.
http://www.gmc.cc.ga.us/ This is the one you named. It’s 100+ miles to the south of here.
“Anyone want to step up to the plate and tell me why that is ironic?” -cn-
“Most of his (Beck’s) six published books–each hit the New York Times bestseller list, with five debuting at No. 1-”
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0426/entertainment-fox-news-simon-schuster-glenn-beck-inc_print.html
Seems like a fairly linear assessment of the bestseller status of Beck’s books to me.
Perhaps you can explain the “irony.”
Under Becky-Boy’s Agenda 21 [total] Totalitarian dystopia, there probably wouldn’t BE any NY Times (in its’ present iteration of half-truthiness and half outright gum’mint mouthpiece).
And his “views” [fictional and sorta-otherwise] wouldn’t be tolerated for a NY minute. “Buh-bye, Becky-Boy!”
(I already find his carnival-huckster bullshit/snake-oil act intolerable; just for other reasons than it might be critical of the present imperial regime. I think Becky would be just fine with a totalitarian setup, as long as he gets to be one of the masters/regional satraps.)
IOW, plenty of ironies for all to peek at (if willing). Aye, there’s the rub; the will to see with a bit more than a surface scan, or what one is TOLD to see.
OzP you don’t sound like you’re on board for Agenda 21.
Did you watch all the trailers? Not just one.
Sounds like a pretty interesting book. ComradeDystopia has a liking for Dystopian novels, although ‘Brave New World’ doesn’t do much for me.
Mark Steyn’s ‘After America’ didn’t get very good reviews on this site either, although he says many of the same things JHK says. Don’t just dismiss these guys because they’re from the right side.
==CD
Here we go!
Batten down and buckle up. Make sure the generator or the fireplace is in good working order. (I wonder what the high winds might do for our power supply over the night-time hours.)
Crazy Boss continued.. final installment
One of my functions was to maintain a set of names, numbers and functional descriptions of the various departments or “cost centers” that comprised the company. New ones were always being added, obsolete ones eliminated, and existing ones revised in some way or another. Everything we analysts worked on or accomplished had to be spelled out in a weekly activity report. A write-up of mine in one such report, that concerned recent changes to the aforementioned structure of departments, appeared as mysterious to Mot (though I ran it by others who found it perfectly clear) as a dissertation on the Theory of Relativity might appear to Forrest Gump and he flew into a rage of scribbled profane notes in the margins and left it on my desk to be found on Monday. I showed it to Nodrog and he said “don’t ever lose that sheet of paper, you’ll be showing it to HR one of these days.” Before I could even go to the copier to make a duplicate Mot entered the office, took the sheet of paper out of my hand, tore the scribbled notes from the margins, stuffed them in his pocket and walked off with the rest of the report with a sheepish grin saying I should forget about it. Mot had apparently come to his senses over the weekend, realizing that those written remarks were the smoking gun of a raving lunatic. Aside from the content of those margin notes I always thought how interesting an analysis of the handwriting itself would have been. It was actually scary. I could envision men in white coats lacing Mot into a straight jacket.
On hundreds of occasions I worked with Mot in his office on complex spreadsheets. (Oh how I wish I had video of this process.) Mot would create a spreadsheet on regular white lined paper using a fistful of #2 yellow lead pencils for later transfer into Excel on a PC. (I always worked directly in Excel, cutting out the paper middle-man, and tried to convince Mot that this was what automation was all about but this just infuriated him.) He would write furiously, lining and labeling columns, entering numbers and all the while giving an unfathomable verbal account of what he was doing and why and expecting me to commit it to memory. With my brain nearly smoldering from the effort he would suddenly stop, pick up an eraser and furiously (everything Mot did was done furiously) erase half of what he had just written, and then begin incorporating revisions that nullified the previous rationale. Suddenly he’d rip the whole page from the pad, crumple it up and toss it in the trash and start over on an entirely new tack. At times this would go on for hours until his desk was an inch deep in eraser crumbs and the waste basket was overflowing in crumpled paper. (Okay, I exaggerate…..the eraser crumbs were only a quarter inch deep.)
It occurs to me at this point that my tale has become quite long and, as such, perhaps is not appropriate for this forum. Or, that I should find a way of drawing it to a close since readers may already have heard just about all they’d care to hear about….MOT!
And yet I have barely scratched the surface. I haven’t talked about the endless convoluted analogies he used (“I love analogies”, he would say) in the belief that they clarified some point he was trying to make but only left one more confused … such as one that referred to some arcane thing in physics called “Brownian motion” (if you’re curious, google it) which then, due to my unfamiliarity, required yet further explanation.
I never got around to the episode of Mot’s ejection from the office of the Director of Accounting — a gentle, religious and non-profane man — who, driven to distraction by Mot, screamed “GET THE HELL OUT OF MY OFFICE” loud enough to be heard throughout our entire quadrant of the building.
Nor have I touched on the vociferous reprimand given me within earshot of the world at large occasioned by my simply moving the computer cursor in a couple of quick circles to visually locate it on my monitor with Mot and his attention deficit demon looking over my shoulder, nor his openly expressed disgust with the number of butter patties on my morning toast, nor his annoyance at my holding a paper clip between my lips for lack of a free hand. (Don’t ask…I don’t get it either.)
And a saga could have been written about Mot’s meeting and marrying a woman who then never spent a day under the same roof with him and about the road to divorce which began just six months and two days after the nuptials. (At his wedding I had callously whispered to my wife, “This marriage won’t last six months.”) Later there was a new squeeze, a Russian woman he’d found, who used him to help set up a hair cutting business then, wisely, distanced herself from him.
I could have recounted questionable personal real estate dealings he hinted at involving the creation of paper audit trails designed to avoid capital gains taxes (though you might counter, “How does this make him crazy?).
I might have disturbed the ears of any would-be lexicographers among you with a compendium of his mispronunciations which no underling was crazy enough to point out. A personal favorite was corporate bureaucracy’s over-used word, “paradigm.” Mot would say “purry-a-dine” and I would think, yeah, and a sky diver uses a “purry-a-chute.” And when he latched on to some neat new word that came down the pike you could be sure he’d flog it to death (i.e. find innumerable occasions to use it) for the next six months.
There was an extreme atmosphere of ill-will with the government for a period of time caused chiefly by Mot that nearly resulted in the government ceasing payments due the Company for work performed to the tune of umpteen millions of dollars which disaster was avoided in the end only by a concerted program of ass-kissing.
And, to shorten a long story, I’m going to pass on delving into the whole realm of paranoia…..How Mot saw every nuance of daily business life as a blood and guts battle….How he didn’t want to have to “fall on his sword” (i.e. admit a mistake) …. And how he feared giving his boss bad data lest he “have his nuts cut off and stuffed down his throat.”
Finally, there was a perfect summation of Mot’s reputation among co-workers expressed in a single gesture by an elderly lady in HR: at the mention of Mot’s name she pointed her index finger at the side of her head and twirled it in a circular motion.
Yes, my boss was a seething mass of disorders that ranged from foible through idiosyncrasy to psychosis and beyond.
Oh, the tales I could yet tell of Mot’s tyranny over underlings while he himself was a groveling sycophant at the feet of his superiors.
The End
“Mark Steyn’s ‘After America’ didn’t get very good reviews on this site either,” -CD
Hadn’t heard of that one either; I’ll look into it. (You and I sometimes like things just for the stylings; stuff the reviews… not that that’s a bad thing. ;o)
Hey, “The Dog Stars” is one you’d love. Extremely personal little “memoir” (with an interesting style, or course).
We got a fire going, Oz. Watching the western channel with my little grandson. We’re ready to lay low for a coupla days.
I guess you’re getting hit harder up in those hills.
==CD
I bought the book but only skimmed it.
MS fills in for Rush on AM Radio.
Jewish. Warning of the power / population explosion
of Muslims.
He is an Israel firster.
What an ordeal! I can’t believe he cut his fingernails at work.
Hopefully he eventually got canned?
Jen
Rather than GBs opinion of A21, what is your opinion of Agenda 21?
And remember Carol, ‘bored people are boring’.
Lady [or Mister] are you ever dis informed.
The jooyawk Times!
See: Crimes of the Times blog.
” wouldn’t BE any NY Times (in its’ present iteration of half-truthiness and half outright gum’mint mouthpiece)”
It is a government mouthpiece…world government.
Carol would have put him in his place, probably saying, “Be a Bon Mot, Mot”.
Sounds like an amazing example of the Peter Principle: people rise to the level of their incompetence. I thought private industry was supposed to be better than Goverment at getting rid of these dead branches.
Not sure how a simple observation amounts to “obsessing”, but that said, I think I can pretty much agree with you’re assessment of the composition of the current “main stream” political parties. Neoliberalism is essentially the antithesis of true liberalism, imo.
So Timmy Geithner was asked in his exit interview about the causes of financial calamities going back to the 1990s. And he tells us that the common element to all of them was excess leverage.
And so you slap your forehead thinking wow what a brilliant insight. Amazing that money borrowed for speculative purposes would bite borrowers in the ass when the mania turns.
And then Mr Financial Einstein gives us another glimpse into his astonishing analytical depth. He sez it creates a vicious spiral. Ground breaking economic thinking this is.
And then he says that in such a situation monetary policy has to be very “aggressive”.
Hmmm…years of aggressive monetary policy creates speculative bubbles and then disastrous busts. For which the remedy supposedly is more aggressive monetary policy. The mind reels.
Americans aren’t especially ridiculous in this respect because Geithner’s thinking is orthodox. It’s well within the mainstream. You see it all the time. Like Mr. “We’ll-do-whatever-it-takes” Draghi at the ECB. You might ask, what does “do whatever it takes” mean? It means printing money. As if the world wasn’t awash in it. Fucking hell.
You guys tout American exceptionalism. You even hear about it in ads to the accompaniment of homey sounding music. Brings tears to your eyes. No really. So do the world a favor and do that, be exceptional, pick those people that have a stitch of sense (people that in times past were unexceptional in this respect), that won’t prescribe as medicine the very poison that creates the illness in the first place. Somewhere in your 300 million there’s people that call Fed policy what it is – reckless – but get shouldered aside in favor of the group-think types. You can’t afford this anymore. It used to be said that you guys would do the right thing once you’ve tried everything else. Well, you’ve tried everything else.
I was pretty much of the same impression. “Liberating” the wealth of the commons into the hands of the very few, under cover of “doing those po’, downtrodden folk a biiiig favor by bringin’ the freedom and the democracy”.
Why, it’s downright Orwellian, I tells ya!
Wow. I had been under the impression that the De Young was being renovated, not razed to make room for such a disgrace. That’s an architectural travesty on par with the wrecking of Penn Station.
What’s most surprising about the razing is that it happened in San Francisco, which long had perhaps the most restrictive architectural preservation regulations in the country. The consensus always was that San Francisco was deliberate and cautious to a fault about modifications and replacements of architecturally significant buildings. The city could be process-oriented to the point of sclerosis, but at least it didn’t allow its architectural gems to be razed to make way for faddish monstrosities.
It’s a sign of the times, I guess, and certainly not a good one.
(I already find his carnival-huckster bullshit/snake-oil act intolerable; just for other reasons than it might be critical of the present imperial regime. I think Becky would be just fine with a totalitarian setup, as long as he gets to be one of the masters/regional satraps.)
=========
Exactly, Ozone.
The irony is that Beck is promoting himself as a Bestselling Author via the very mechanism he so often derides, the “Liberal” Media. I don’t buy that “Liberal” media bullshit. It’s the Corporate Media, and Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Maddow, Olberman and Matthews are all part of it.
I am neither “conservative,” nor “liberal.” Those terms are so polluted, they no longer hold, or apply. I don’t adhere to ideology of any sort. I try to live my life by a set of principles that are always subject to revision when presented with evidence that contravenes them, or renders them irrelevant or inappropriate.
And, I will say this. As is above, so too it is below. Progress and Comrade dig Beck’s Agenda 21 book, and fear having to show their papers, yet Progress runs a background check on a fellow poster, namely me. What’s the difference? The difference is, it’s alright when some of you so-called conservatives do that, but my God, if somebody, or something else does it, then it’s tyranny.
For the record, I don’t really care who any of you are, or where you’ve been. The only thing you are per this reality, the reality of this comments section, is what you post. As far as this reality is concerned, you don’t exist outside of it. So, let’s just call this Vegas, and let’s leave it in Vegas.
Good place to be.
Not sure we’re going to be getting a worse wallop than you, as you’re nearer the coastal flatlands where the wind can crank in with less resistance.
(Only an inch here so far… but it’s just starting and the frontal lows haven’t yet collided and melded; when/if they do, look out!)
You might take pictures (same place; same angle) to be featured in the paper for a time-lapse record of the storm. (Yes, from inside! Doh!)
You should know that it almost never gets bad when they make a big deal about it. Big Weather is just another way to grow the Goverment. On the other hand, Global Warming Conferences always get snow. God and Nature seem to have a sense of humor.
How did you know about the military college near his home? Eh, Comrade Carol? No normal person likes Roseanne Barr – only extreme Leftists.
Actually, “Carol” did put quite a few of them in their place, and as a result was “let go” many times. “Carol” finally said screw it. No more blood for the vampires. No more rectum for the sodomites. I feel for Kyooshtik. He probably has to wear diapers now after all those years of taking it up the ass. It created a channel so wide, there’s no way to hold the crap in. There’s a new brand on the market. You might want to run out and get yourself a case-load, Janos, before the storm hits. They’ll be sold out before you know it.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/10308
I think my description is more accurate.
How do you think they maintained their “commie-lib’rul-pinko-fag” cred, when Big Dick Cheney did the pump-lies-in, pull-quotes-out crap for the Iraqi freedom and democracy crusade?
(IOW, I don’t think things can be exclusively piled under the banner of world Joo-ry; the papers’ [supposed] cred would be shot to shit. You may have noticed that Israel’s reputation has not been one of benevolence and tolerance in anyone’s book of late.)
Yes, to these folks America must stay strong to serve Israel. They will never admit that Jews were behind weakening America by mass immigration. I guess we had to be weak enough for them to attain dominance, but now that they have, we have to get strong again.
Because he has mentioned in this reality, meaning in this comments section, where he lives. I know people who have gone to the college near where he lives. He’s right, I got the name wrong. I wasn’t much interested in it when they brought it up a number of years prior. That’s how little it means to me. It was light-hearted snark, but you boys are like time-bombs ready to blow at any moment. Kind of like that fellow in Alabama.
I neither like, nor dislike, Roseanne, Janos. I feel about her the same way I feel about you. I stand by my assertion that her rendition of the Anthem was perfect. That doesn’t mean she’s perfect, and it certainly doesn’t mean you’re perfect.
Yes, to these folks America must stay strong to serve Israel. They will never admit that Jews were behind weakening America by mass immigration. I guess we had to be weak enough for them to attain dominance, but now that they have, we have to get strong again.
==========
If they’re as proficient as you say they are, then you don’t stand a chance, so sit back and relax, and enjoy what little bit of freedom you have left, before it vanishes entirely. If you are an example of their opposition, any effort to “get strong again” is already dead in the water. A stillbirth. You don’t have what it takes. That’s why you’re in this position. You’re a baby, and your candy has been taken from you. And you think you’re going to get it back? This I want to see!!
Don Kent was the greatest of all New England Weathermen. He passed the torch to Bruc Schwoegler. Sine then, it has been all down hill with mostly fake Blondes who don’t know anything about it and care less.
To set the record straight for Progress, The Military College of Georgia is part of the the University of North Georgia.
http://ung.edu/military-college/index.php
He passed the torch to Bruc Schwoegler.
=========
I always liked the name Bruc. It’s a lot like Heath, or Storm, or Ridge, and the exact opposite of a name like Janos. Janos is feminine-sounding. Limp-wristed.
Carol Newquist said:
I always liked the name Bruc. It’s a lot like Heath, or Storm, or Ridge, and the exact opposite of a name like Janos. Janos is feminine-sounding. Limp-wristed.
***************************************************************
Okay, some of your stormtrooper rhetorical tactics could be amusing but now you’re making fun of a guy’s name for Chrissake!! Are those the turds you want to be throwing in this sandbox? It’s called a SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY when you accuse a blog and its members of being feckless and/or crazy yet YOU are contributing to the craziness as much as anybody!
Janos is Hungarian for JOHN. Does JOHN sound “limp-wristed” to you? You only elevate something you consider beneath you and that mythical “99%” of people in the world who find the content herein silly if YOU do something to ELEVATE it yourself. You’re not doing that. You’re turning into another troll.
You have no opinion about Roseanne? I find Glenn Beck pathetic and I’d rather watch him than Roseanne. Roseanne, among her many non-virtues, is a gun control nutter who had a personal army of armed “guards” in her hire. Her cackle is so forced that it’s embarrassing.
E.
Does JOHN sound “limp-wristed” to you?
No, it sounds like someone who would solicit a prostitute. But Janos does sound feminine. It reminds me of The Brady Bunch.
Roseanne’s a joke, Beck’s a joke, and anyone who calls themselves a “liberal” or a “conservative” is a joke.
This is your hero? This guy cries more than most women I know. What a panty-waist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmXjxgy6MUo
What’s your name IRL, E. Since we’re doing background checks at CFN Central, give us your name, your social security number, your street address, your place of work, the name of your wife and children, if you have any. Who do you post as elsewhere on the internet, E. Let’s get it all out, E. Would you like to rape me, E? I mean, my name is Carol, so therefore, I must be a woman, therefore, you’d like to beat me and rape me, right, E. Just like the old days, when it was a man’s right to beat and rape a woman.
Carol said this about Janos’ critique of US Israel lovers and the recent history and actions of Jews here in America:
If they’re as proficient as you say they are, then you don’t stand a chance, so sit back and relax, and enjoy what little bit of freedom you have left, before it vanishes entirely.
*************************************************************
Yes, Carol, don’t let FACTS stand in the way of your screeds against posters and their positions. Don’t you find it rather incredibly “coincidental” that seemingly half or more of the major names in BANKING just “happen” to be Jewish guys? Have Jews been evicted from every major country for MILLENIA just because their evictors are cranky curmudgeons? How ’bout looking at the signatories to the Project for a New American Century document with BILL KRISTOL (clue: He ain’t Irish Catholic) as its CHAIRMAN.
How can a group which is TWO percent of America be overrepresented in the media by about two orders of magnitude? How can they get away with being underrepresented in the military by a factor of TEN compared to their proportion in the population?
And, what, you want Janos to PERSONALLY right this wrong? Don’t worry, Carol, the culture, as a whole will be complacent about this issue … until it ISN’T. With 16% of Americans defined as being “food insecure” (don’t know where next meal is coming from), eventually a Newtonian reaction is going to occur at some point and Jews will find themselves ghetto-ized and isolated again whether or not they’re evicted.
The essence of all debates about race and ethnicity is that NO ONE is allowed to talk about race and ethnicity. This is the new Orwellian “Liberalism” of America. Open dialog? My ass!!
E.
Yet more irony. JHK is Jewish, and here you are, stereotyping and scapegoating the Jews on a blog belonging to a Jew. This is the problem with your type. You fail to have any sense of irony, and you have no sense of humor. But you are humorous. You’re a satire.
Carol Newquist said this (ewww!!!):
What’s your name IRL, E. Since we’re doing background checks at CFN Central, give us your name, your social security number, your street address, your place of work, the name of your wife and children, if you have any. Who do you post as elsewhere on the internet, E. Let’s get it all out, E. Would you like to rape me, E? I mean, my name is Carol, so therefore, I must be a woman, therefore, you’d like to beat me and rape me, right, E. Just like the old days, when it was a man’s right to beat and rape a woman.
***************************************************************
Carol, I suggest a course at your local community college in LOGIC and/or CRITICAL THINKING since you apparently have a problem with issuing NON-SEQUITURS. No, I don’t want to beat and rape you because doing so means I’d have to get within ten yards of you when, in fact, I wouldn’t want to be in the same COUNTY as you.
By the way, your history is a little off about a man’s “right” to beat and rape a woman unless you’re going back to the Dark Ages or before. Which “old days” are you referring to with regard to this “right” than men had? By the way, Carol, did you know that WOMEN commit as many cases of domestic violence as men? Did you know that WOMEN serve 40% less prison time for the same crime as men? Did you know that 98% of industrial accident victims are MEN?
Yeah, women had it so tough when they stayed home and baked cookies. Now, they’re ripping pissed off that freedom didn’t come for free so they suffer 2X the rates of depression as men and there are far more of them in financial distress because even though they are “equal” to us brutish men, they don’t seem to be earning as much money?! I say, teleport men to the Planet Remulak for 10 years and watch women try to repair a car engine, plumbing problems, or home gadgets. And let’s see how many things that you take for granted around the house get INVENTED by women in the absence of men.
Bah. You’re just another Femme wack-a-doodle. You’re a dime a dozen. I think they build y’all in a little factory in San Jose. No, I’m not going to give you my “real name” because the Internet is filled with CRAZIES … kind of like … YOU.
E.
Yes, JHK is a Jew but only an idiot would fail to realize that any critique of ANY ethnicity does not include ALL members of that ethnicity. You erect STRAW MEN (that ALL of any group are bad) that people did not contend and then you fight against their non-position.
Again, Carol, I suggest you go to a community college and take a course in logic and critical thinking. You’re badly in need of it because you don’t even know the rudiments of well-founded debate like FACTS and correct SUPPOSITIONS given a person’s position on various issues.
You say you’re “neither liberal nor conservative”. Hmmm. Funny, but you ARGUE just like a liberal in the sense that if uncomfortable FACTS intervene, you don’t want them to stand in the way. You’re like the “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” members of the dictators of “1984”. The ideals of liberalism include open colloquy about major issues but now that’s been amended so only COMFORTABLE issues can be discussed. And the worst thing one can do is use FACTS in a debate.
E.
E, you don’t drive a Denali by any chance, do you?
Her version of the Anthem was a gross insult to America. Typical Leftism but now mainstreamed. She should have been punished for that.
You are a gross insult to America, but I don’t think you should be punished for it. I think you punish yourself enough. Roseanne was just doing what all the players do when the Anthem is being butchered. They spit and grab their jocks. You just don’t like it because a beautiful woman did it.
Her style of aggressive, personal irrationality is quintessentialy fishwife feminine and reminscient of Wage. That’s why I took Kyoo’s suggestion of that seriously at first.
And she has been lurking here for Ages. I mean even Wage took awhile before she warmed up enough to start bashing someone. But Carol “knows” us already. What was the name of that Lovecraft story? She is The Lurker at the Threshold.
Beautiful? So you find her attractive? That would explain much.
Indeed, the new DeYoung looks like a parked Imperial Star Cruiser. The outside is horrible, but the interior really works for me. When you head down to the special exhibits hall, there is a lovely atrium as you use the staircase. Very unique and beautiful.
De De Wilsey was the woman who made it all happen. She’s a force to be reckoned with, but managed to extract all the money to build the new DeYoung from donors who needed a visible form of reputation correction.
While I’m on the subject of art. Camille Paglia wrote a beatiful book, “Glittering Images.” She included 30 or so of her favorite works of art through the ages. Her writing is excellent, even if don’t agree with her.
She’s a firebrand! Back in the 1990’s she said that if the world had been left to woman, we’d still be living in grass huts!
Heath? Storm? Ridge? The first and last are Harlequin Romance type names. The middle one sounds more like a female pornstar name.
Thank you for mentioning Camille. It would be nice if you stepped up the plate and started defending us against Carol.Good Women have to fight Evil Women since Men are forbidden to use their full strength now. Oh for the days of Achilles! There is a beautiful image of him killing the Queen of the Amazons. As she died, their eyes met and they fell in love.
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=achilles+kills+the+queen+of+the+amazons&qpvt=achilles+kills+the+queen+of+the+amazons&FORM=IGRE
Damn! This shit is better than GENERAL HOSPITAL!
But, let’s get serious and bring it way down for a second. WAY DOWN.
Your tax dollars at work. 130 years of weather data courtesy of NASA.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqBCzWTs3r4
Get it now?
I loved that reply. Indeed, where are the innovators like Chomsky, who developed language hierarchy, such that languages *LIKE* C and UNIX (Cobol/Fortran/Pascal – I programmed in each of those) could have been *COMPILED*.
I *HERE,* that he *still* ‘works it’.
“hierarchy”
MY BAD. Syntax and Semantics…
America [and The West’s] Decline [Cap]
never ceases to amaze me.
Found a ‘gem’ in todays newspaper.
‘She’ was 8 months and 2? weeks.
News for new mexico abortionist cleared
MiamiHerald.com
New Mexico medical board clears abortion doctor of negligence
Los Angeles Times ?- by Michael Muskal ?- 1 day ago
An Albuquerque doctor, accused by an antiabortion group of gross negligence for her handling of a late-term abortion, was exonerated by New …
New Mexico medical board clears abortion doctor of negligence …
http://www.latimes.com/news/…/la-na-nn-new-mexico-abortion-d...
Michael Muskal
by Michael Muskal – in 59 Google+ circles – More by Michael Muskal
1 day ago – An Albuquerque doctor, accused by an antiabortion group of gross negligence for her handling …
.
CFN’s newest ding-ding said:
E, you don’t drive a Denali by any chance, do you?
*********************************************************
Typical DUMB BROAD. You think you’ve got me sized up as some sort of macho crypto-Nazi who drives a gas hog. Wow, you’re as horrible at deduction as you are at rhetorical skills. Now get this ding-ding ’cause I’m only gonna say in ONCE: I drive a 1997 Honda Civic DX … the LOW END Civic. It gets 37 mpg on the open highway.
I’m an ANTI-CONSUMER, not a consumer. I buy new clothes when I need them. I actually eat organic produce so that I don’t eat those new “Frankenfoods” that are GMO. In short, you will find that I defy any dumb stereotype that you can come up with. You, on the other hand, match EVERY stereotype I have of a dumb, “I am woman, hear me roar”, power Femme whose “power” is mostly just her possession of a vagina which, as any lawyer will tell you, is nine-tenths of the law.
Janos Skorenzy is the epitome of the rational process compared to a beeyotch like yourself.
E.
Janos said:
And she has been lurking here for Ages. I mean even Wage took awhile before she warmed up enough to start bashing someone. But Carol “knows” us already. What was the name of that Lovecraft story? She is The Lurker at the Threshold.
**************************************************************
I’m an educated man who taught for a living and in any institution of education, the values of these power femme wack-a-doodles have come to the fore. That’s why we have ridiculous crap in the public sector like “sensitivity training” and State-mandated “sexual harassment” workshops. Uh, right, taking a workshop is going to prevent sexual misbehavior … like perps don’t know the consequences from the get-go. My Chancellor and three of five Vice Presidents were all women and they drove my college from a former #2 national ranking to invisibility. That’s why I retired at 59.
Carol thought she had me sized up as a guy who drove a Denali i.e., a gas hog … which is hi-freaking-larious since I drive a low end 1997 Honda Civic. She probably thinks I have swastika tattoos and beat my girlfriend. She’s as dumb as a freaking doorknob but fancies that she “knows” me from reading a few posts. If I could be stereotyped as ANYTHING, I’m probably an aesthete. I listen to nothing but classical music, read a lot, and my big expenditure is going downtown for coffee with my friends.
I expect she’ll raise hell for a little while longer until she realizes that we’re NOT intimidated by the fact that she has a vagina and we’re not going to cut her slack for irrationality … whether it is or is NOT “that time of the month”. 🙂
E.
The globe is warming but, of course, the real issue is what percentage is man’s contribution. The problem with “scientists” that write about that (often non-meteorologists or the bought-and-pain for members of IPCC) is that their “maps” go back maybe up to a thousand years. Geologically, that is a BLIP. Climate cycles exist which go out to 600,000 years with many cycles within the largest cycles.
Bottom line? We have no idea how much man contributes to global warming. Greenland once had FARMERS … way before man was even capable of massive environmental despoiling. What caused THAT warming? Cow farts?
Man has done some grievous damage to the earth but while everyone is blithering about global warming we’ve got maybe 50 years of marine life left on earth before it’s all extinct. Such is the damage of having hundreds of billions of tons of polymer plastic molecules floating on or just below the surface of the oceans.
Global warming kind of reminds me of the 9/11 “troofers”. While our country has some serious shit going down, they want to put that on the back burner while they figure out how the US Govt. took the WTCs down. Sigh.
E.
we’re NOT intimidated by the fact that she has a vagina
===========
I don’t know E (and Vlad), I can’t put my finger on why but more and more I’m thinking Carol has a penis.
Whatever the case I’m still waiting for the next installment of his/her novel.
“Oh, the tales I could yet tell of Mot’s tyranny over underlings while he himself was a groveling sycophant at the feet of his superiors.”
-k/q-
Thanks for the tales, Kyo. I’ve spent my share of time dealing with deranged supervisors – but you seem to have me beat, on that score.
Of course, this being CFN, I want to run your post through my “peak everything filter.” IOW, how much of the approaching train wreck of modern US life is due to the “Mots” and their many clones in the leadership class of the modern US.
AND, this being CFN, I also have to run your “Mot” story through my “race and sex filter,” as well.
IOW, are “Mots” more common in WASP society?
And “Mots” are usually male, but is that because of genetic sexual predisposition – or simply because of opportunity thus far presented.
————-
In my experience, there are fewer really obnoxious “Mots” in bureaucratic chains-of-command these days. Employees now tend, generally, to orient less toward following-the-rules – than they did two decades ago.
Plus feminism and the ever-present threat of complaint to “Human Resources” hang over the heads of today’s supervisors – forcing the “Mots” to Mute the worst of the dark Machiavellian tendencies of their personalities.
It’s a theory. What do you think?
I heard that the Career Services Offices of some U.S. colleges and universities are now giving seminars to imminent graduates on “Dumpster-Diving”.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-2-graduates-jobless-underemployed-140300522.html
“Progress and Comrade dig Beck’s Agenda 21 book, and fear having to show their papers, yet Progress runs a background check on a fellow poster, namely me. What’s the difference? The difference is, it’s alright when some of you so-called conservatives do that, but my God, if somebody, or something else does it, then it’s tyranny.”
-c. frank new quest*-
I’ve been carrying “papers” since I turned 15, almost 43 years ago, now.
I really do not get the “civil liberty” fears expressed about carrying ID. Today in the US it is impossible to vote, fly, drive, or cash a check without carrying ID, or showing ID on demand.
=============
So yeah, in a perfect world, no law abiding citizen would need ID, because all the “terrorists” would label themselves with a big “T.” And the criminals would have a big “C” label.
And all the adulterers would have a beautiful Scarlet “A.”
NO, wait, that’s the wrong story, Hawthorne.
Has Asoka reincarnated, ALREADY?
It’s a theory. What do you think?
===========
I think oppressive bosses are as common as hens teeth (Steve Jobs and Frank Lloyd Wright come to mind) and their sex doesn’t seem to make a big difference. I worry about my daughter who is being driven mad by a female boss at Ralph Lauren. I doubt there’s a person on earth who has worked a full career that can’t relate a few boss horror stories.
For me, though, Mot was special. I may have given an incorrect impression that he was incompetent but he wasn’t. He was as knowledgeable in his field as anyone out there and quite bright in general…even told me with a straight face that he was “brilliant.”
His problem was severe ADHD and dyslexia, social ineptitude, depression and his own special brand of evil. He would make for a wonderful psychiatric case study. I didn’t include it in my story but Mot also used a “light box” for 30 mins or so a day during the short days of winter. He was of Scottish heritage, not that I think that has anything to do with the price of tea in China. I am Scottish on my mother’s side as well.
I went to HR about Mot on two occasions and they immediately got on his case. It seemed to briefly scare the shit out of him. He attempted reforming himself but it was fruitless, as I knew it would be, because Mot could not help from being Mot. Aren’t we all trapped by being who we are?
Miss Barr is [sur-prise] tribe.
I remember your story about Ms. Tribation, the
teacher [cough] who passed the dildo round the classroom!!!
I tell ya, imagine if some folk had to work in the
public sector.
Aren’t we all trapped by being who we are?
=============
It would be like asking ME not to grind my teeth and wince when talking football with my brother-in-law today and he mentioned the quarterback Roger “Starbuck.”
“You” “dare” 2 “write” C.h0=m,sKy”s “naam” with out disgize?
Yes of course. But do you want One Agency called World Goverment to have all your information at their disposal? And say they start demanding we carry it with us – say as a chip under our skin? Oh it will be volunary at first – so convenient! No cards to lose, no purse to carry, etc. But wait and see how they treat the hold outs who refuse once it becomes popular.
Do you think they aren’t drooling over this? They want it. Badly.
I think oppressive bosses are as common as hens teeth
===========
What I wrote^ makes no sense at all. What I should have said is that oppressive bosses are a dime a dozen.
Janos said:
Yes of course. But do you want One Agency called World Goverment to have all your information at their disposal? And say they start demanding we carry it with us – say as a chip under our skin? Oh it will be volunary at first – so convenient! No cards to lose, no purse to carry, etc. But wait and see how they treat the hold outs who refuse once it becomes popular.
**************************************************************
It all starts with little dribs and drabs … the Patriot Act one day, “gun control” the next, doping our kids with SSRIs the next, the ubiquity of TV (it’s turned on more than Big Brother in “1984”). We will be coerced by a soft global totalitarianism to cede all of our sovereign rights to “protect us” under the umbrella of Big Brother.
It’s funny, that’s how the MAFIA works. Vinny to store owner: “We ask for a little bit of money for ‘insurance’, Mr. Store Owner. Otherwise, hey, things could happen to you. Know what I mean?” The farce and comedy of smiley-faced global totalitarianism is that it’s a PROTECTION RACKET. If you don’t pay tribute to your protectors by ceding your rights and your privacy, “terrorists” might kill you.
The “terrorists” who pose the biggest threat to me don’t live in the Middle East. They live in Washington, DC.
E.
Lucky said:I remember your story about Ms. Tribation, the
teacher [cough] who passed the dildo round the classroom!!!
I tell ya, imagine if some folk had to work in the
public sector.
***********************************************************
Lucky, that same lady who passed a dildo around a college classroom spent major class time talking about lesbianism and “mistressbation” (as opposed to masturbation, of course). She claimed to be an alien. It’s a tribute to the consummate insanity of the public sector now that it took EIGHT YEARS to give her a settlement package so that she would get lost. There’s a gag order about how much the package was for but you can bet it was 7 figures. But, hey, she was a black, psychotic lesbian … the trifecta. 🙂
You can picture the hiring committee: “Well, Mary and John, we have 3 minorities in one person here. Gotta hire this woman!!”
E.
Good point about the gangsta nation, I’ve been dubbing Murder Inc. for some time in the financial and military war fronts.
I heard a great segment on Guns and Butter with William K. Black.(“The Greatest Bank Robbery Ever”. He often says the best way to rob a bank is to own one)
It was an interview Bonnie Faulkner didn’t air last year in lieu of a lecture he gave in Rimini, Italy last year, but well worth listening to.
He explains the institutionalization of economic criminality in order to continue the global economic fraud.(neoliberalism)–Clinton’s administration as I’ve written here in the past was instrumental in setting up the “restructuring of govt. where the banks were the government’s clients, not we the people.(fascist)
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/88701
And as you said earlier this week, you know I’m not one–You know it is a disaster which they will not give up.
And speaking about education, you must have heard that ID Senator (R)John Goedde wants to pass legislation to make the atheist cult leader who loved her medicare and social security, Ayn Rand compulsory reading to pass high school. And just to prove that you’ve been fully indoctrinated into “greed is good” and there is no community here, you must also have to take a test on the readings.
I wonder whether they will be fully honest about her anti-organized religion stance, or whether–of course they will cherry pick what they want the dangerous little minds to focus on.
Crikey, if P, E and J are collectively an example of what comprises the opposition to their theory of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, McHale’s Navy stands a better chance. The next best treatment for penis inadequacy is for a male to be a teacher. It’s a close second to the Denali.
A Honda Civic? Good God, yet another irony. They abound. Ironies, but so too do Honda Civics. Captain America, the “man” who has to blame his failures on the Jews, and on the Illegal Immigrants, on anyone but himself, drives a car that is distinctly not American. It’s reflective of all the idiotic Conservatards who berate “entitlements” like Medicare and Social Security when they’re the ones who rely on those so-called “entitlements” the most.
I have news for you. The government doesn’t need all the draconian measures to keep you freaks in line. Indoctrination through the traditional educational system, of which E was a part, combined with mass marketing, has solicited you unwitting dupes in building your own prison walls. Candy from babies. Pathetic. Where have all the REAL MEN gone?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPR108kwNo4
A Honda Civic! What a joke. The People’s Car. Lenin and Stalin are laughing.
How utterly pathetic you all are. Many of you are in the autumn of your years, and your entire lives you bent over for authority. You handed over whatever dignity and self-respect you had. You traded it for baubles, or what you perceived to be baubles, but instead it was always only crumbs. And now that you have the time to step back and reflect, you can no longer distract yourself from the naked truth. You gave away what you never had for nothing in return. And, you want to blame it on the other. So you make up others, and you project your pathetic inadequacies on those others, and it allows you to carry on, pretending you are something you most assuredly are not.
More irony. It’s a steady stream. No, a raging river, mightier than the Amazon. The theory is the Jewish Bankers rule the world, and one of our great warriors, armed to the teeth in his ’97 Honda Civic, suggests as a matter of course, that I go to Community College. Of course, to do so, will require student loans, and of course as anyone with half a brain knows, student loans are yet another bubble those reptilian Jewish Bankers are blowing, according to Captain E’s theory, and those loans are guaranteed by the Government so you can never default and there is no risk what-so-ever for demonic Jewish Bankers. Also, with the flood of people going back to school because of the lack of jobs, combined with the ease in which you can finance that education, the price of that education has increased well beyond the rate of inflation. And Captain Emerica, the Honda Civic driving E, wants to add further fuel to that fire. Incredible.
And you call yourselves an opposition? And you say this isn’t some kind of joke? If you look at the visitor paths, people visit this site from around the world, and if they are intelligent and sane, the only conclusion they can draw from reading your posts, is that you deserve what you are going to get.
I thought this quoted message would be a good one for the CFN forum.
“Can we rely on it that a ‘turning around will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world?’ The question is often asked, but whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer ‘yes’ will lead to complacency; the answer ‘no’ to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.”
–E.F. Schumacher
A Guide for the Perplexed
M.,
From my homemade gauge, I’m reading 22″ of ski-snow.
It’s scoured down to about a foot on some surfaces and piled up to my waist in others. I think my placement of the measuring gauge is in a pretty good, average spot.
Power never went out up here; very lucky to get powdery snow if we’re going to have such a huge amount. I dread to think what a wall of snow I’ll find at the end of the drive where the plows have thrown it. I’ll find out, if and when I get there today.
Hope everyone is okay, especially youses near coastal areas where there are a lot of power outages. (It’s STILL snowing in Boston.)
Stay warm and holler through the howling winds when you can.
Looks like about 3 ft. here Oz.
Started clearing it out about 5am, just finished.
Deep snow, P., but at 30d F, and not much wind, hardly a blizzard. What do you think?
–CD
Nope. I wouldn’t call it a blizzard for us. Up in Gloucester, with 75 mph winds… blizzardy! ;o)
Isn’t a “blizzard” defined as a hurricane with snow (vs. rain)?
Glad to hear you’re cleared out already; I’ll be at it a good while. (Now I wish I had a backhoe/loader, damnit!)
Ps. The “snow-devil” mini-tornados are fun to watch skitter across the surface. …I’ll be cursing ’em soon enough when they’re blasting in my face!
Yep, I think hens’ teeth are commonly labeled as, “scarce”.
Been looking online for some of those to add to the cauldron, but, so far, no luck! ;o)
Wow, O
Sounds like you got walloped. Although NYC was mainly slush last night, we did get a topping of dusty snow, so I’ll be getting out the ole’ cross country skis in the next hr.
Hoping Bloomberg didn’t clear too much away! 2010 was incredible, but I’m guessing I’m the only one in the city that was happy B wasn’t prepared.
A theist and an atheist, being friends, decide to go to the beach together for the first time. Both are immensely impressed. They can’t agree on religion, so play mental recreations.
One of these is to estimate the number of drops in the ocean.
The atheist is keen-sighted and a brilliant mathematician; he devises a formula to give the exact number. It is a 28-digit number beginning with two and ending with seven. He says “If mathematics alone can solve such a marvelous problem, who needs God?”.
Then it was the theist’s turn. He wears glasses, has appalling eyesight, and never even learned to count. Not being able to see any divisions between the drops, he assumes they don’t exist.
His answer, therefore, is “One. A blessed big one”. And adds: “If every problem is that easy, who needs mathematics?”.
BT,
Other than the howling gusts, you’d love it ’round hyar. 22″ of fresh powder, no slush. My neighbor likes to c-c ski and snowshoe, so she’s going to get some entertainment value out of this dumping too.
Enjoy yourself… I wouldn’t imagine Hizzoner is finding it too much fun. Good. Headline: Billionaire Mayor, B, Forced to Pretend to Work After Snows ;o)
Good one, as I am perpetually perplexed.
I’ll take that advice right about now.
I’m out………side.
Carol,
Sometimes a car is just a tool for going places.
E. is perfectly able to defend himself, but I believe he is way beyond the crass materialism that motivates my neighbor, Fratman, to buy a Denali he can’t possibly afford.
Ozone –
And all the rest of you Far Norther’s –
Good luck up there!
That stuff will melt, eventually.
My big weather worry is too much warmth, right now, followed by too much cold. That’s bad for the vegetation, you know? And at least I know I depend on the vegetation. Lot’s of people don’t seem to know that, anymore.
=============
K/Q –
Nice response, and I don’t disagree with you.
Which happens about as often as hens flying while showing their teeth – or something. ha!
“…people visit this site from around the world, and if they are intelligent and sane, the only conclusion they can draw from reading your posts, is that you deserve what you are going to get.”
-cn-
So tell us, “Carol,” in your always polite fashion
What are your views on “open borders” and high immigration rates for the United States.
https://www.numbersusa.com/content/news/february-7-2013/survey-majority-americans-want-illegal-aliens-return-home.html
Something tells me that you will never agree with the majority of US residents, on this subject.
Wow. You need student loans to go to a community college?! I see your life hasn’t featured any old fashioned stuff like SAVING ANY MONEY because a full load for a full year at my community college for the entire 23 years I taught there was about $700. Let’s say books cost another $700 per year. Thus, even the most pessimistic estimate places your total yearly cost at $1400. It’s pretty clear that your novels aren’t selling and likely never will.
But then, of course, is your put-down of MALE TEACHERS as being “inadequate”. Thus, you are such a bitch that whether the male is a wife beater or the OPPOSITE of a wife beater (a mellow, never-violent aesthete), he’s undesirable. You’re just another Femme Bot who loathes MALENESS. Apparently you’re so impoverished financially that you’ve ALREADY “gotten what you deserve” … which is your loathesome wish for us guys. Well, I hate to rub your nose in it but I actually DID get what I deserve because I lived simply, saved, and retired at 59. I can afford to go to the community college you can’t go to for ONE year for one THOUSAND years. How about that, my lovely [sic]!!
Again, Carol, don’t let any FACTS get in your way about the ethnic origins of an astonishing percentage of the high muckety-mucks in the banking industry, in the Neoconservative “Project for a New American Century”, and in the media industry. So many old guard non-Semitic guys in the media and financial industries with no reputation whatever for anti-Semitism have said, off camera … “don’t fuck with the Jews”. You’re just another one of these members of CFN over its lifetime who love to preen their feathers about how egalitarian they are because it’s a social pose that makes them feel good about themselves.
The rest is just stupid rhetorical “flourish”. I don’t believe the Jews are alien Reptilians. I have no idea where you got the “Captain Emerica” label for me since I’m one of this country’s biggest critics … especially about its bellicose foreign policy from Vietnam to this day.
Other than writing fact-free screeds about us, I continue to exhort you to get an education because FACTS never constitute a fraction of your posts. As long as that’s true, you’re just a screecher of no substance.
E.
Iron Maid
Take any ensemble of items, any random set of things you see, a piece of tree, a car, a house a glass and now assign them and consider them as components of an Electronic Circuit (or any kind of circuit, a circuit that uses a car tire as its “Electricity” or that uses a street as its “fluid” or information exchange means and so on), consider it a special circuit that is performing a function, (and the connections are the grass, a window, a finger, a star, a sun, a mountain and other things connecting the “Logic” of the circuit, any wild design, intricate and complex beyond bold is the schematic diagram) now imagine what incredible thought paths were necessary to create a circuit like that (and what incredible modified New Brains thought them up associates with them, and all other projections as 0 is the circuit, 1 is the thought path 2 is the brain then what is 234 or minus 344 or W or that pebble on the street, and project ever more, mix it up, ever more incredible things, ever more wild connections, ever more abstract, go crazy, make it all go far away and incredible, dream up the most incredible, make the craziest connections, the craziest worlds, the craziest possible ensembles, relationships, interactions, make fun of boring logic), consider what incredible “Laws of the Universe” must be operating for such a circuit to exist and perform a function, or maybe many functions or multiple functions according to parallel minds, and imagine how many new thought paths that will create a new circuit of entities for new functions, wild functions for wild circuits from wild thoughts.
And now imagine how many different functions and how those circuits could work, and imagine a short thought path creating that circuit and a long thought path and multiple thought paths and imagine that the Electricity of the circuit is car tire, and imagine that the circuit is outputting signals that then become themselves circuits that become thoughts and so on, an infinite recursion of possibilities and imagine the pebble and the street and all of its details as a giant Integrated circuit performing some complex mechanism that only another even more incredible and complex thought machine generating trillions of incredible new thought paths could have designed and so forth.
And now imagine the Ocean Wave is another circuit that was designed by another thought path, trillions of thought paths creating trillions of delimitations as functions, an entire forest is a new circuit, created by a steering wheel that is thinking up a thought that is the Star (the entire star is the thought generated by the steering wheel) and so forth, and then put it upside down, the Star is the circuit and the forest the brains and the steering wheel is the thought path, and so forth all of new circuits (infinite precision but also infinite vague, mixed and confused and mathematically precise and so forth), using all kinds of crazy, all crazy and cool and Wop,
Cinderella Candy, APE STAR, Barbie Crazy, …
APE, SHPAK A LACK
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.it
http://instantsingularity3.blogspot.it
Femme Bot said:
It’s reflective of all the idiotic Conservatards who berate “entitlements” like Medicare and Social Security when they’re the ones who rely on those so-called “entitlements” the most.
***************************************************************
Apparently you’ve been lurking on this site for years yet you know NOTHING about many of us. I am a conservative but hate the Republican Party precisely because of its venal attitude toward working people. Now listen carefully, Carol, Social Security is NOT AN ENTITLEMENT. People pay into Social Security over a LIFETIME. They are not freeloading. They are simply claiming what’s theirs, okay?
Medicare is an example of “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. I am NOT a doctrinaire “Conservatard” who believes in NO government. Actually, I deal in FACTS which us “Conservatards” believe in more than you Orwellian Liberals. And the FACT is that the SINGLE PAYER national healthcare system in Germany is the CHEAPEST socialized form of health insurance because it eliminates the HUGE healthcare bureaucracies extant in the USA. I would love to see the health insurance industry die, die, die because it’s nothing but a mafia-like protection racket.
My conservatism is that of the Founders e.g., abhorrence of involvement in foreign wars, the unimpeded rights of the individual if no harm is done to others, sound money, separation of church and state, and a proper, Jeffersonian cynicism about the influence of monied interests invading government. Your problem, Carol, is that you don’t know what a REAL conservative is. You have no freaking idea.
Go back to the lurking “hole” from whence you came.
E.
Dinali schminali. Google Ahnold’s mother of all trucks.
Thanks for the moral support in my battle with the goofy Carol. It’s obvious that she has a serious issue with MALENESS because if I have a Denali then I’m probably a wife beater while if I drive a Civic then I’m an “inadequate male teacher”. Any excuse to go on her “No Fact Zone” rants.
If I ever saw a FACT in her posts, I think I’d have the coronary infarction she so wants me to have with great dispatch. Sigh.
E.
“Infarction” is a very cool word.
I once let go a silent but deadly “infarction” on a crowded elevator and everyone began turning their heads and looking around for the culprit. TeeHeHe
LB said:
He explains the institutionalization of economic criminality in order to continue the global economic fraud.(neoliberalism)–Clinton’s administration as I’ve written here in the past was instrumental in setting up the “restructuring of govt. where the banks were the government’s clients, not we the people.(fascist)
*************************************************************
People forget that it was the Glass-Steagall Act that was repealed under the Clinton Administration. Also, it was the Clinton Administration, with its misguided “compassion”, that was the spiritual father for the idea of FORCING bankers to make home loans to people who, in former times, would not qualify.
This actually fed the alarming real estate bubble of the 2001-2006 period because DEMAND suddenly surged. If that artificial demand bubble was not created, homes would be at their proper value today … BELOW their current median level. In a sound, non-bubble economy, historically a home has sold for 2X median household income. This means, roughly, that the national median home price should be $100,000 … a 50% discount to the current median price.
Of course, bankers are among the most opportunistic people in existence so once they had to tow the “forced compassion” line under Clinton, they “made lemonade out of lemons” by expanding their book of business into the stratosphere. Then, of course, when liar’s loans and no-down-payment “owners” went into the tank, they were the first to demand succor from Washington. Even the “forced compassion” legislation didn’t require one-tenth of the profligacy that banks ultimately engaged in. So we bailed them out and continue to suspend mark-to-market accounting ONLY for that sector of the economy. Why? Because otherwise their insolvency would be obvious.
Much of Neoliberalism, like the Clintonistas, represents a FAKE free market. It continues to this day under Obama who has never said a cross word about the Federal Reserve Bank and who perpetuated the reign of Bernanke, the greatest friend of plutocrats ever to occupy that office and the greatest enemy of workers ever to occupy that office.
Between Neoliberalism and Neoconservatives, we have the comic spectacle of a two-party system which is neither truly progressive or truly conservative. They both clink glasses together at $1000/plate Washington fundraisers … along with the millionaire Punditocracy.
E.
Yeah, I love the word “infarction”, too. It’s a strange word because few English words have that “rct” combo in a row.
Just remember, Q. … the only farts that smell good are one’s own. Have a great Saturday.
E.
they had to tow the “forced compassion” line under Clinton
=========
Google “tow the line” vs “toe the line” and I think you’ll agree toe wins out.
Another thing, you wrote “a two-party system which is neither truly progressive or truly conservative.”
Neither/or is certainly acceptable but to my ear neither/nor has a superior ring to it.
Try it out in your sentence and see if you don’t agree. Or, better yet, see if you DO agree. (Why on earth do we say “see if you don’t agree.”?)
You know something, having spent quite a bit of time in the corporate world, I’ve noticed a few things. One is that that there’s generally (not always but generally) an inverse relationship between the size of an employee’s mouth and their skill level.
And so sometimes you get a dispruptive pain in the ass that spends a lot of time talking and complaining as opposed to doing what they’re being paid to do. In my experience such perpetual outrage machines emerge quickly in their tenure with the company. They just cannot keep a lid on it. And it gets to be a burden for you and other people in your group. And so you cut your losses with the pain in the ass and give them a shove out the door.
“Carol”, you say, put quite a few of them “in their place” and as a consequence was “let go”. “Many times” you say? Hmmmm… OK.
One other thing I learned is that if you don’t like the pile of shit where you work you can always find another job. But what you’ll likely find is another pile of shit. Maybe somewhat different in nature but still a pile of shit.
And maybe this sounds weary-ingly Ozzie and Harriet but there’s no getting around it, most of us have to bring home a paycheck. You see, most of us have responsibilities to other people, you know, like a wife and kids.
And so, for their sake, for the sake of a tranquil home life, for the sake of getting laid regularly, like the archetypal fedora wearing 1950s style company men, we eat shit. For a great many of us putting people “in their place”, especially people higher than us in the corporate foodchain, is a just a frivolity that we dream about but can’t afford. But maybe you can. If so, congratulations.
You know something, having spent quite a bit of time in the corporate world, I’ve noticed a few things.
===============
Excellent post Rhino, start to finish.
O,
Back from CC skiing in the streets and park of NYC.
Great—skis can go on almost any slippery surface. Main thing, after having not eve a weekend free, I got my exercise.
———-
E.
The whole mortgage fraud scheme goes back to our Ayn Rand friend Alan Greespan who lowered the interest rates to create the bubble.
You and I define things a bit differently. Neoconservs are one thing, but….
I see neoliberals as from both sides of the aisle. A result of Milton Friedman’s economic theory taught in schools and pushed by the think tanks. (not to mention the talking heads on the TV) It was also pushed by Thatcher and successors in Britain.
We also have to thank “W.” for the Ownership Society concept. He too wanted more people to be able to buy their own homes it seems regardless of whether they could afford the homes. The implementation of this was on steroids during his term until the crash of ’08.
Again, I keep saying this is game set and match no matter who’s in office. It really starts with Nixon’s administration where Friedman was orchestrating the Chile laboratory of economic counter-revolution through Pinochet’s coup to topple Allende.
After Nixon, was Ford and the deregulation gang of Carter. It all moves this country to globalism, no use of Sherman anti-trust laws and the end of Glass-Stegall.
The govt. is co-opted away from representing the people into a closed loop of crony capitalist insiders going through a revolving door between govt and corporations. The lobbyists fashion law to suit the corporations. Judges like Justice Thomas once represented Monsanto.
It’s all so simple and beautifully orchestrated, that if they were the only ones who lived in this country it would be heaven on earth.
Unfortunately many of us on the outside of this minuet don’t see it that way.
This Oligarchy continues regardless of who gets elected into office. Anyone who would put us on a different track is destroyed. [either reputation or a little accident, shall we say]
PLEASE READ THIS:
It Has Happened Here–Paul Craig Roberts
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/
You’re a coward, plain and simple. You took it up the ass all those years, and watched as others got it shoveled in their ass, and now you are trying to cover over your yellow belly with the nonsense you just posted. Like I said, you, and everyone else like you, are going to get what you deserve, and that’s on top of having your rectum defiled all those years. And here you want to blame your submissive acquiescence on someone else. Pathetic.
Hey Doofus, I didn’t like it, and I did leave. Some jobs I was let go, others I left willingly. One of them was Cerberus, you Numb Nuts. Maybe I should have stayed and continued to make millions off of idiots like you who run and buy guns every time you get scared the Gubmint’s going to take your guns away, which is every minute, 24/7.
Rhino? Hardly. That’s not a name that would describe you. You’re more like the frightened and abused dog that shakes and pees every time its abusive master so much as breaths. The nerve of you to blame your inadequacy to stand up for yourself and for others on those who had the guts to stand against the psychopaths. This is why you are losing, and this is why you will lose. All so the little darling could have a college education and work for Ralph Lauren. Nauseating.
And Q, you think you are superior to Mot, as loathsome as he is, because at least you’re still married, and he was divorced. If you did stand up to your psychopathic, bullying employers, and lost your job(s), you can bet you would no longer be married. You know that, and that’s not a healthy marriage, one where the privileged woman holds the privileged man hostage, and he holds her hostage. It’s a charade being acted out by the majority of married couples across this wonderful nation. One of many charades in the show that never ends.
I think a number of you need to get the hell out and head back over to Stormfront from whence you came. That’s your real home. It was made just for you. This is not where you belong. Clear this space so it can recover from the joke you’ve made it. Facts? You have no facts. You only have your racism and bigotry. You compile information from disparate sources, patch it together out of context, and then draw false conclusions based off of that compilation.
You have nothing, and you’re losing, and you’re going to lose. You’re bitter, and this is the best you can do. Beat on women in internet chat rooms. I can’t wait for collapse to go hard and heavy. I will watch with delight as you cowards finally get your asses handed to you for real, rather than metaphorically. You’re done. Finished. You never started, and you will never start.
You think the so called Conservatives are Nazis? More fool you. They belly crawl to the Jews as do the Demorats. The least whiff of “anti-semitism” and they are destroyed. And that reveals who really has the power doesn’t it?
The Far Right see the Truth about the Jews – as does the Far Left. As you say, in this world Trut is marginalized and exists only on the fringes. With mentalities like yours, the few nuggets of truth mix with prejudice and rage and create even bigger illusions than falsehood alone would.
WOW! It’s like somebody said up thread: “As the World Turns” or something like that. I vote Carol CFN Character of the Month.
In case Asoka dot dot is lurking… here is how it begins:
A headline from section A of today’s NYT:
Venezuela Devalues Currency by a Third Amid Shortages and Inflation
And this sub-headline:
Fears of spiking prices in a nation where a Big Mac costs 70 bolivars, or $16.27.
Now Asoka will tell me they shouldn’t be eating shit food like Big Macs anyway.
Was her FIRST comment here about ’99 ? %
of the people who read this site know the comment section is a bad joke’?
Talk about a poster [male or female, I side with you
that she may be the former] with an axe to grind!
CN finds Roseanne Barr attractive?!?
Was her FIRST comment here about ’99 ? %
of the people who read this site know the comment section is a bad joke’?
===============
No, the first time Carol’s name appeared this week was on 2/4 at 4:35PM and the post read as follows:
People would rave about Bing Crosby the same way they do about Harvey, and yet, Crosby led a double life. His public face was amiable and gracious, but his private face was that of a monster, beating his wife and children to a pulp when he got home.
Immediately following ^that^ s(he) wrote about the S-S-B being crap crap crap.
S(he) went on from there to attack other targets at random. Then s(he) launched into a novel or short story that was starting to get me interested but has since abandoned the project.
I am expecting s(he) will shortly deliver a scathing attack on Fred Rogers (corn-holing young boys, perhaps?).
Hi, LB. Oh, don’t worry that I’m picking on Clinton unfairly. I detested every Republican President from Nixon through until today. They’re all fake conservatives. Nixon was the “conservative” who closed the gold window. What kind of “conservative” goes off of sound money?
The framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are rolling over in their graves watching these effing Republicans. Due, mostly, to Republicans, through things like the Patriot Act, the 4th Amendment is all but dead in the USA. In no way is anyone “free from illegal search and seizure”. The concept of “just cause” disappeared way before Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho. People can be Gitmoed now in the same way that old Soviet dissidents would get that “knock on the door” in the middle of the night.
I look at politics now as “bread and circuses” where the ruse of major ideological differences founders before the reality that BOTH parties voted to keep the Patriot Act and they’ve also been pretty much in synchrony about all the skirmishes in the Middle East.
Neoconservatism is only temporarily defanged because it’s Neoliberalism’s turn at the moment. Republicans, in general, are suffering at the moment because they chose to hitch their wagon to militant stupidity like Sarah Palin and radical fundamentalist Christianity. At least Americans knew that was dumber than the alternative Obama represented. I guess our electorate isn’t totally stupid.
E.
In Chinese, the word for crisis and opportunity same.
E.: What kind of “conservative” goes off of sound money?
answer: The kind who listened to Milton Friedman and Kissinger.
Here’s another story that you should know. It seems some schools are thinking about not teaching algebra anymore.
Slate has an excellent article countering this idea.
Don’t Let Economists and Politicians Hack Your Math
Of course kids need to learn algebra.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/should_algebra_be_in_curriculum_why_math_protects_us_from_the_unscrupulous.html
I am expecting s(he) will shortly deliver a scathing attack on Fred Rogers (corn-holing young boys, perhaps?).
===========
Kyooshtik, defender and enabler of tyrants and psychopaths everywhere. He wants to pretend Bing was a nice man. Bing was a terrorist and sadist.
There’s no proof of Fred Rogers doing anything inappropriate, but there was plenty of proof about Bing. Just as there is plenty of proof about Catholic priests. Of course, sleazes like Kyooshtik will defend all of that. Why? Why would someone do something as creepy as to marginalize what scum like that have done? Could it be because they identify with it, so they defend it? I think that’s what it is, and if so, talk about ewwww. That’s much worse than ewwww.
I’d love to show E’s feminist rants to Kyooshtik’s daughter to see what she thinks. In fact, I’d love for Kyooshtik’s wife and daughter to see the company he keeps here. To see the creeps he hangs with and coddles day in and day out. I’d like for them to see what their husband and father really is.
No, I won’t go after Fred Rogers. But I will look into Captain Kangaroo.
Right, Newquist, all your employers that let you go are wrong and all people that go toe-to-toe with you are also wrong. Everyone is wrong about everything except Carol Newquist (what the hell is your name, anyhow? Newquist sounds half British and half Swedish. Pen name?).
It’s hilarious that you come on here to talk about everyone else’s unjustified bile yet every single paragraph of every recent post of yours is name calling combined with suppositions about people that include wife beating, sodomy, or something else parodical. Your bile screams WAAAAY louder than anyone else’s on CFN yet we’re still waiting for a FACT-BASED post to support your contentions.
You make so many logical errors, too, like if I or anyone else criticizes an ethnicity, we’re Nazis or Stormfront members. You don’t know ANY of us as social beings and in my cafe circle there just happen to be two Jews and a Black. The Jews must be the self-loathing variety because they have no problem with me whatsoever and they know that I have a problem with the machinations of their ethnic group AS A WHOLE … not with them as individuals. You, of course, make the logical error that if I have a problem with ethnicity X then I must hate EVERY MEMBER of that tribe.
But, what the hell, until you take that course in critical thinking you’ll never figure out the rudiments of truth in any arena, political or not.
E.
It’s hard to BE so wrong, Be. Conservatives merely observed and commented on Obama worship. You actually thought they created it whole cloth out of their imagination.
Learn: http://www.examiner.com/article/jamie-foxx-calls-barack-obama-our-lord-and-savior
In my “rants about feminism”, I conclude that Femme Liberation was one of the greatest all time failures in human social history and men have taken it in the short hairs.
Am I wrong? Unlike YOU, I deal in FACTS. Women file for divorce 72% of the time, 90% if it’s a college-educated couple. What happened to the idea of women as “nurterers”? Women who commit the same crime as men get a 40% “discount” on their prison sentence. Men are victims of 98% of industrial accidents ’cause you “liberated” women don’t go after good-paying jobs in industry ’cause you might bust a nail. In divorces, unless the woman is a criminal or schizophrenic, she gets the kids and Dad gets to rent a shack in nowheresville.
It’s so bad now that even radical feminist Susan Faludi wrote a book called “Stiffed” which talks about Femme Lib going too far and how the current plight of white males is hardly auspicious. Why don’t you EDUCATE yourself, dummy? Obviously the novel writing gig ain’t even paying for a community college tuition so try a new tack, okay?
E.
Why Does the USA Still Grow ?
Comparing the USA to JAPAN or Europe, especially Spain, Italy etc. you can see why the USA still can grow economically: the USA has a psychological culture of being naive (customs and behaviors radically different from the very conservative, boring, “wise” (and therefore dead and boring and not willing to change jobs and move around and risk and such, not willing to believe in the possibility to make it and being successful psychological language of Europe and JAPAN) customs, culture and behavior of Europe and JAPAN (and most of the rest of the world outside of the USA)), of believing in fairy tales, of risking, of the possibility to change jobs and become a boss and such.
The USA are more simple minded (more simple action and reaction without “deep thought” or contemplating forever the risks and such, more impulsive, etc. willing to fight and risk and confront each other) they are willing to play the game, they are willing to move to another state (being that the USA is a monolithic standardized country where the entire country speaks the same psychological language (make or break it, work yourself up, try to improve, “you can always change jobs”, and this explains the corollary effect of “hard work” of wanting to work hard so you can make it, of the impossibility of being in the middle, it is either up or out, up or down, and being that many in the USA are simple minded, naive, believe in the fairy tale, they are willing to change jobs and work hard (or at least create the appearance of working hard by talking alot, connections, making connections, having loads of meetings and staying many more hours than 8 at the job and such))). This belief in the fairy tale of being successful may be mostly false statistically, but it works to still create some economic growth in the USA, the most developed country of the “developed countries” in the world, bar none.
Compare this to Europe or JAPAN: these places are old, conservative, “wise”, they don’t believe in the fairy tales of “making it”, in Europe you can’t even go to the next town without them noticing that you are from “outside”, they are old and conservative, in a sense, not risk taking, they accept the Status Quo, if you lose your job, you are finished, in JAPAN either you abide forever to your lifelong prisoner of a job or you kill yourself, in Italy if people lose their jobs they kill themselves (let alone going to another European country, where not only completely different psychological languages are spoken and completely different customs and behaviors are present, but they speak completely different languages and such like the difference between Spain, Italy on one hand and Germany on the other).
So the USA played the game of hiking up the prices of real estate, so who cares, it is over now, the prices went down, the market is moving again, things change: in Spain the played the same game, but the prices can’t move down, nothing happens, same in the UK the prices are ever higher, no help on this side, prices in the rest of the world go up and stay up forever, no market forces working here like they work in the USA (they should introduce serious property taxes on homes like they do in the USA, but don’t worry they all suck too much to want to do this, old hags), Spain only played that one game, lost, and now is frozen in that situation until they starve to death, in Italy it is even worse, they didn’t even notice that they played the same game, the prices of homes went higher there than any place else in the world compared to their puny salaries, but no one notices it, incredible, they all worship stiff home prices ever higher to protect the Status Quo, to protect those who have against the minority of those who will never have (the new generation in these countries are all hosed for good). Same story in JAPAN, home prices and rents are and will always be high, nothing can ever change, the jobs are prisons, the young don’t want to work in such crap holes where you have to stay until your boss goes home (until 10 o’clock) to respect the “powers that be”, to respect an old fashioned, stone age mentality of status, inequality, nothing worth anything and such.
And they wonder why they don’t “Grow Economically” and such: like the freer labor laws they introduced in Italy (or Spain and Greece), this just created an even more static and rigid labor market, this created an even higher structural rigidity, since as soon as anything changes, the idea is always on how to hose someone, how to rip off someone, and the looser labor laws allowed the bosses to punish and pay ever less workers in Italy, reflects an insecure society and culture, an insecure and static system, labor laws have nothing to do with growth, these laws created and even worse situation because the culture of the country (and same goes for France or Spain, etc.) is old static, insecure, afraid, wanting to protect what they have, not wanting to play the game, not wanting to risk nor wanting to hire and fire (but in the sense that it is done in the USA, as you can always change jobs for the better, but it works both ways in the USA, both workers and employers have more freedom, in JAPAN and Southern Europe, workers are prisoners of the only chance job they are lucky to land, hence very vulnerable and insecure, hence creating a psychological culture of fear, no risk taking, a dead and static culture and environment that only protects the Status Quo and the Stiff and High Home prices culture and customs and behaviors and as soon as someone has any power, they express it violently by trying to grab as much away as possible from anyone else, hence the reason why all labor laws in Italy or Spain or mostly anywhere else will always fail miserably, it is all based on cultures, ways of beings a society has and such): they do not have the same culture of the USA, and this was supposed to open the market and make it grow and such: but they don’t understand that the labor laws have nothing to do with growth, it is all a question of the culture and way of beings of societies.
I explained why most of the rest of the world is way poorer than the USA, the USA is the only country that has really truly developed according to the Standard Economic Model of Growth (actually this model was invented in and for the USA (as the very concept of GDP) and then exported to the whole world as the only possible model and such) and such, wide roads, highways, huge malls, large homes, consumerism, hire and fire, simple minded as to easily buy new things (and to buy into new things, new behaviors, new activities like going on and inventing Facebook), try new things, always change, always believing in fairy tales, way more impulsive and less “intellectual” or “wise” or “cultured” (as culture is a drain and a brake on economic activity and growth and consumerism and always change and hire and fire) easily excited (even at 70 years old, not like in France and JAPAN and Italy where you are already defeated and dead and ready to give up at 20 years old and such) and change and hence some economic growth is always chugging along and such (and actually it also explains why foreigners have so much success in the USA, they are really more clever and wiser and used to much more rigid systems, when they go to the USA, it is all way simpler and easier for them, they don’t have all the chains keeping them in place as they do in the “old countries” the “cultured countries” and such (but they can hose that culture of theirs, it will keep them poorer and poorer)).
The USA grew 2 % in 2012, that would be a miracle in JAPAN or Italy or Spain: but really, these places will never change, you can’t change a culture and customs and behaviors of a society, it is very hard if not impossible for them to change, especially since these places are getting old, they are older and older, weaker and weaker, they don’t have a chance anymore, Europe, the UK, France JAPAN, Italy, all old, conservative Status Quo protecting cultures that would like to grow but are over and done with: cultures take centuries to change, especially since all the high economic growth potential of the 20th century is starting to run dry, very few new inventions and technologies that can hire all the unemployed (and those few novelties are being done only in the USA, the only country that still has that real innovative and rules breaking take on things, people can take chances, can be free, can try, you can’t do that in JAPAN or Italy or France and such).
So the same story goes for the new emerging economies and developing economies: you can be sure that they will stop growing in a few years, their real old, conservative, status quo protecting selves will come out, as it is already starting to emerge in China, Russia and especially India: just look at home prices, just look at how much it costs to rent or buy a home in those countries compared to their puny salaries: that says it all, that will kill all growth in those old countries in a few years no matter what, they will end up stagnating just like the UK, JAPAN and Italy, etc.
8
You have no credibility whatsoever you racist maggot. You have a poster here who has provided links to the Protocols numerous times, and you side with him and don’t take issue with him. Instead, you take issue with what you believe to be weakness, me, because you believe I am a female. Bring your friend Janos along next time when you go to the cafe you creepy little weasel, and see what your Jewish and Black friends think. You are so toast. And your typical jingoistic bullshit about the “founders’ and the “framers.” Pure propaganda. This country was founded as a Plutocratic Oligarchy and it has remained that to this day. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT, since you’re one to talk about facts.
And your puke about Thorium. What a shill. How much are you getting paid to drop a crap like that? And your investment advice to invest in heavy metals. Gee. that’s not too transparent, is it? More shilling.
You don’t seem to know what marginalize means. Perhaps using words that you don’t understand also helped get you fired – along with being a trouble maker?
Tell that to Kyooshtik’s daughter. You’ve managed to insult her up and down in this thread, and Kyooshtik sat by and didn’t lift a finger. That’s not surprising, though. It’s what Kyooshtik’s done his entire life. Just ask Mot. And San Jose Mom, you’re not fooling anyone. You have a penis just like all the rest of them, and you are no mother. No self-respecting woman would ever wade into this cesspool of creeps without putting her foot in a bunch of these coward’s crotches. In fact, I’m trying to figure which one you are. There are couple of you who post as several people here just for kicks. The question is, why? Is it for kicks, or is it because you are here purposely to turn this comments section into a joke?
Yes, we seem to have reached Peak Feminism a few years ago. Now people are realizing what a waste of money and human energy it is – and the marriage strike by men has been noticed although many are still in denial. When Feminists and Willim Bennett both are saying “Man up”, you know that something funny is going on.
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2013/02/08/vawa-fight-offers-more-proof-anglo-feminism-on-the-decline/
That should read precious metals, not heavy metals. Yeah, buy some more gold and kill a few more thousand Congolese. Why not, a few thousand is nothing compared to the ten million, or so, who have died over gold. That’s the core of conservatism. Selfish, heartless cowards who will one day very soon get what’s coming to them.
Yeah, just ask Mot. Kyoo’s daughter has a degree in Women’s Studies. And as Abby said, that opens doors to places like Ralph Lauen.
(what the hell is your name, anyhow? Newquist sounds half British and half Swedish.
=============
A typically racist inquiry. It indicates the person sees all things in terms of race. They then, in cowardly and weasel-like fashion disguise race with the word ethnicity. What does the national/ethnic origin of that name matter? Why would you concern yourself with that, unless of course, you were a racist, which you are.
Oh My God.
It’s all becoming clearer.I like INTELLIGENT hot broads who cut that wonderful middle between bad girl and articulate girl with common sense without excessive self inflation. True, you ARE putting yourself on display but there’s nocheesy dialog where you act like you’re “all that”. Also, I love fiends with big exhales with enough left over for a second exhale. This dirty professor digs the hell out of your clips … especially the cork-smoking ones.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Eleuthero5
Wow. Just wow.
Woman is STILL the nigger of the world!
Now get yourself really confused:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/09/us-afghanistan-allen-idUSBRE9180AE20130209
Let’s face it. ALL cultures suck.
Yes, ALL cultures suck, but let the women of Afghanistan be the ones to speak for themselves, not the U.S. military. The women of Afghanistan don’t want occupation. It’s made things even worse for them, so the military is not to be believed when they suddenly feign concern for women and women’s rights. The military is comprised of many who think just like Janos & E, and they are Taliban, American Style.
http://www.rawa.org/rawa/2009/11/11/afghan-women-speak-out-against-u-s-occupation.html
“The military is comprised of many who think just like Janos & E, and they are Taliban, American Style.”
————————————————
Well here’s a news flash. The WORLD is comprised of many who think that way. I was under the impression that the Taliban didn’t allow women to do much of anything until NATO showed up. Everybody needs help every now and then. Show me ONE instance of that kind of oppression being stopped without any blood being spilled. We still gots them monkey brains.
Banana?
Read the link. The women of Afghanistan said they don’t want YOUR HELP. The military is not in Afghanistan to help them. The women of Afghanistan know that.
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI203B.html
Dont give them an inch, carol.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/02/07/287770/us-has-killed-100s-of-afghan-kids-since-2008/
Fuckin’ Fine! I guess controlling the heroin trade and the opportunity to field test a few toys is too high a price to pay.
So maybe NATO should leave the precious children to the tender mercies of the Taliban and Sharia Law and let the chips fall where they may.
By the way, politics, like nature, hates a vacuum.
Grow the fuck up.
Please calm yourself Carol. You’re quickly loosing all credibility. And thanks to you, I’ve learned that E and I have something in common–a mutual dislike of Christopher Hitchens. (You should read what Camille Paglia has to say about Hitchens! Oh my!)
Jen
Please calm yourself Carol.
============
Best advice all day.
It’s weird the way they smile and stare as the smoke – almost as if they are challenging you. It’s almost as if something else is going on, as if the smoking was a, a, a “METAPHOR” for “Something Else”. But What!?
I like the way Gandalf could make ships and stuff out of his smoke. Nothing is more dignified than a Man or Wizard with his Pipe.
And what way is that? Nether E nor I approve of this war. I say bring the Legions home and put them on the Mexican Border.
aaaaaaaa…fuck this
I’m gonna go get a drink with Christopher.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/hitchens200807
Hey Carol!
Got a postcard from Benazir Bhutto lately?
Oh that’s right. She was assasinated.
Cheers!
You’re quickly loosing all credibility.
===========
It’s losing, not loosing. Kyooshtik let it slide because he believes you are a woman. Hell, you might even be him.
I want no credibility with this crowd. To have credibility with this crowd, is to have no credibility. Remember, this comments section is a bad joke.
Well hell, you better send in NATO. Let’s send troops everywhere. Wait, they already are everywhere. Okay, let’s send more troops everywhere and cut social security and medicare and deliver grandma and grandpa to various locales across the planet so they can spend the rest of their days earning their keep by fighting and dying for women’s rights, even if the women of that country don’t want them there.
How’s that for all growd up? Can I have another banana?
I will add, that you are a disgrace to women, even though you are an imposter. You sit idly by as another woman is metaphorically gang-raped. And you call yourself a Christian. May your God have mercy on your soul.
Wine at a Superblow party. Nice touch. Hilarious.
Yo, bitch.
I already capitulated.
Cue the Fuckin’ Taliban.
We have no bananas.
N’kay?
By the way, Asoka…
Love the new Bull Dyke character.
So macho.
Are you one of the people who meets with E at the cafe? If you are, I can imagine the scene. It would make for a fantastic satirical skit. Larry, do you hear that? Some new material for your next season that is hopefully coming soon.
I’m a woman who prefers the company of smart men to whiney women with a chip on their shoulder. You’re such a poor victim Carol. How pathetic.
If we had a cooking contest, I would kick your ass.
s
K-DOG!
Where does Miss Newquist post from?
If you read this and have an answer, please post on Monday!
Thanks.
SJM said:
I’m a woman who prefers the company of smart men to whiney women with a chip on their shoulder. You’re such a poor victim Carol. How pathetic.
If we had a cooking contest, I would kick your ass.
************************************************************
Yes, Carol doesn’t like strong men, weak men, drivers of gas guzzlers, drivers of Honda Civics, and … well just about anything with a penis. I think the green-eyed monster, ENVY, is at work here because most of us here on CFN have had a modicum of achievement in our lives and Carol doesn’t really like that either because it means that she’s got to explain why a “winner” like herself can’t afford to go to a community college.
She doesn’t read the dialog here much because most of the conversations I’ve had with you and virtually ALL of the dialog with BeingThere has been amicable and intelligent. She projects her extremism onto other people and thinks that if a man doesn’t like radical Feminism, he hates women. If a person has a problem with the way some tribes have behaved in the USA, they must hate ALL members of that tribe and belong to Stormfront.
Frankly, in the last two decades, I’ve become rather sour on White Trash because it’s become much more common and represents the adoption of ghetto/barrio dress, speech, and action by goofy suburban white kids. “Yo, homey, whassup muthafucka?!” Sigh.
As W.C. Fields said, when accused by a woman of being prejudiced: “Madam, I most certainly am NOT prejudiced. I detest all peoples equally!!”
E.
Carol said:
The military is comprised of many who think just like Janos & E, and they are Taliban, American Style.
***************************************************************
Did you NOT read ANY of my posts? I am a TRUE conservative which means that I ABHOR meddling in the affairs of sovereign foreign governments. I stated it in two posts within the last 24 hours. Are you illiterate?
Though you would like to paint all conservatives the same way, we’re clones of one another. It appears, for example, that I disagree with Xhalor on Afghanistan (and likely other occupations as well). I have NEVER supported the endless war policies of the Neoconservatives whose spiritual father was Leo Strauss … a MARXIST. That’s right!!! The darling of the Neo-right was a frigging Commie bastard.
You should really go back to lurking, Carol, because I’m making a fool of you in one post after another after another. I don’t want to do a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Whatever OTHER people might say about our forays in the Middle East is NOT reflective of my personal opinions. Where have I said ONE WORD in support of occupying Afghanistan or any other country? I have not.
Now, I did you the favor, here, of trying to be reasonable which is far, far more than you’ve ever done for ANY of the men you’ve assailed on this site. You don’t have the brains of BeingThere or the active civic mindedness of SanJoseMom. However, since I am a conservative and do not believe in New Age liberal bullshit, I do NOT recommend an anger management class for you like all the psychobabblers of your beloved Left might recommend. I continue to recommend a course in CRITICAL THINKING … which you are sorely in need of.
E.