JHK’s Three-Act Play
I drove the eight miles from Cambridge to Greenwich, New York, around eight o’clock and the night was bell-jar clear. A scrim of deepest blue sky backlit the landscape of tender hills and valleys while on the ground I wended the twisting two-lane state highway 372 with my brights amplifying the yellow road signs and the iridescent lines on the pavement, alert for deer, who can kill you. The Talking Heads spastically warbled one of their triumphant electronic anthems of post-modernity over the radio. It happened that I had been playing fiddle at a contra dance.
What a strange privilege it is to live in these perilous times. I don’t mean privilege in the sense of the college humanities departments, with all their crybaby overtones of grievance and resentment. I mean in the sense of having lived through a thrilling turbo-powered climactic chapter of the human melodrama. Until a few decades ago nobody ever swooshed through these ancient hills in a motor car, on a magnificently engineered minor country highway, and in perhaps less than a decade no one ever will again, and at the collective level of a culture or a nation we have no sense of this whatsoever.
We have no sense of anything except the junk-cluttered moment, including our junk politics and the junk ceremony of the present election. When today is a long time ago we will wonder at the feckless cravens that modernity made of us, in particular the absence of any sense of duty to the project of being the only self-aware organisms (as far as anyone knows) in the universe. In this country, anything goes and nothing matters, and that’s the simple sad truth of where we are right now.
In all the monumental yammer of the media sages surrounding the candidates they follow, and among the freighted legions of meticulously trained economists who try so hard to fit their equations and models over the spilled chicken guts of daily events, there is no sense of the transience of things. Tom Friedman over at The New York Times still thinks that the petroleum-saturated present he calls “the global economy” is a permanent condition of human life, and so does virtually every elected and appointed official in Washington, not to mention every broadcaster in Manhattan.
We’re not paying attention, of course. Someone told all these clowns about fourteen months ago that we will be able to keep running WalMart on shale oil and shale gas virtually forever, and they swallowed the story whole, and then force-fed it down the distracted public’s throat. In reality – that alternative universe to flat-screen America – all the mechanisms that allow us to keep running this wondrous show teeter on a razor’s age of extreme fragility. We’re one bomb-vest or HFT keystroke away from a possible dark age, or at least a world made by hand. The true sense of entitlement extends light-years beyond the peevish carpings of the tea-bags-for-brains bunch.
The only issue in this election contest between Pee Wee Herman and Captain Kangaroo is how to do nothing to disturb the fantasy that we can keep living the way we do. I am coming to detest Mr. Obama for the unforgivable feats of doing absolutely nothing to oppose, resist, or remedy the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and doing absolutely nothing to restore the rule-of-law in banking. Mr. Romney, at this point, can only be pitied as some kind of thought-experiment gone awry in an evil consumer product testing lab on a planet of oafs. His fecklessness has no modern analog. Next to Romney, Bob Dole looks Lincolnesque.
Which brings me in a very roundabout way to my point: Lincoln emerged out of a political age as mendacious as ours, after decades of gaming the issue of slavery. Out of that morass of lying connected to immense human suffering somebody had to bring the clarity of real moral duty to broad consciousness and Lincoln was selected by the same hand of Providence that would lodge a bullet in his brain-pan five years later — so it is not that hard to understand the awe of Providence that attended the terrible convulsion of the 1860s and all its long-resounding ramifications. It took most of the 20th century and then some for us to un-learn that life is tragic.
In the history that doesn’t repeat but only rhymes, we’re in the 1856 equivalent of the cycle now, short of the moment when mere clowning turns to savagery. I can barely stand to watch the antics, dogged by visions of where this is all tending. We have achieved something that few cultures ever have before: made ourselves unworthy even of our own low standards. There is no center left to hold, only ragged edges around a core of darkness.
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James Howard Kunstler’s newest nonfiction book, TOO MUCH MAGIC, will be available in stores in July 2012. The book will be available at booksellers, large and small, online and off. To find out how you can help support local bookstores with your purchase, CLICK HERE. Other books:
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
New Paintings from the 2022 Season
Barrel Racers, Cambridge, NY
Just Out! The whole shootin’ match going back to 1987!
For autographed copies:
Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY
Also at: Amazon, Barnes & Nobel
The Jeff Greenaway series of novellas. These rollicking, short books depict the misadventures of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in New York City in the early 1960s
Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:
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Book 4: |
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How often does it occur that information provided to you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? I would dare to say almost never.
Over 90% of the information you absorb (or are forced to absorb via billboards or radio/TV commercials) is complete junk and only benefits the publisher in one way or the other. In recent years we have become a lot more discerning about the food we eat, the water we drink, and our physical health in general. At the same time we give little thought about the potential mental harm that daily bombardment of info-tainment may inflict on our mental well-being.
Why spend all this time and energy exposing yourself to needless information or quite often thinly guised attempts of manipluation? Learn how to practice a strict information diet or fall prey to the increasingly useless info-junk that is polluting the minds of most Americans.
http://evilspeculator.com
What percentage of the U.S. population would agree with the following statement?:
The purpose of life is to party.
The purpose of life is to better yourself. We all lost our ways long ago when we replaced this challenge with the pursuit of materialism.
Good luck with your doomsday predictions!
One of the things I always wonder about when I read your blog is that while your writing is always interesting and thought provoking, the comments section tends towards the moronic, self-absorbed and self-promoting. I’ve been scrolling though them for a bit now, in utter amazement that some people seem to have all the time in the world to have endless personal dialogues with other posters, bloggers self-promoting their own blogs on a weekly basis, and let’s not forget the anti-semetic, minority bashing sector who never fail to spew their vitriolic notions here.
So why is this? Why do the commenters here not use this opportunity to engage in thoughtful discussions about the post at hand and related events ongoing? Why engage in such juvenile behaviors as evident in this comments section? Can’t you just do this on your facebook page?
@mountaingal,
The comments are infantile because the responders are infantile.
djc
Thank you for writing these commentaries, James Kunstler. Your screed is one of the few things I read these days, and one of the few things I find which helps to keep sanity in my life.
“In the history that doesn’t repeat but only rhymes, we’re in the 1856 equivalent of the cycle now, short of the moment when mere clowning turns to savagery.”
I see you’re channeling Strauss and Howe again. Good. I’m always heartened to read when someone does that, even if I don’t fully agree with their interpretation. Remember that The Civil War and Reconstruction aren’t the only analogues to our current predicament, even if they are apt. Also be sure to add in the Great Depression and World II and the American Revolution, and don’t forget that this crisis is global, not merely American. That written, I have this awful fear that there are people who will react to Obama’s re-election the way that their great-great-grandparents reacted to Lincoln’s first election. May there not be enough of them to actually spark a four-year civil war.
I know I’ve been promising to write about Strauss and Howe over at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News for a year now, but the news has provided such rich blogging fodder that I haven’t gotten around to it–yet. Leave me a comment at my blog (here doesn’t count) and I will. Instead, the big post this past week was yesterday’s, which was about the psychology of campaign ads. One of the results was routine (people tune out the ads of the opposition), but the other was counter-intuitive; negative ads work best on people who believe in government. Unfortunately, the number of people who think the Federal government in the form of Congress works is shrinking dramatically. That’s a bad sign for the future of representative democracy.
Speaking of bad signs for democracy, I also pointed out how the Right learned the wrong lessons from 1984–the Orwell book, not the year. I also noted the Autumnal Equinox, Talk Like a Pirate Day, last week’s space news, and how an internet troll helped save Troy, Michigan’s library. Oh, and I have a post about the Dark Bailout ready to post.
Happy motoring–for now–from Detroit!
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/
Infantile behavior comes from the top down:
https://contribute.barackobama.com/donation/join-beyonce-in-nyc-closed/09/index.html?amounts=15%7C35%7C50%7C100%7C250%7C500%7C1000&utm_medium=email&utm_source=obama&utm_content=httpsdonatebarackobamacomMeetMeinNewYork&utm_campaign=em12_20120913_ofa_nd&source=em12_20120913_ofa_nd
Thanks again Jim! I’m hearing the Heads singing Life During Wartime in my mind now. Amen.
And that blessed path you speak of to Greenwich I’m also fondly remembering too. A mighty beautiful place this is!
My weekend has been spent at The Common Ground Country Fair, put on by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. Friends, while much of modernity in the Us is as Jim speaks of, many on these fairgrounds are living simply. It is the new young farmers that are truly the most inspiring. One young man teaching about rocket cooking stoves, another young woman farmer leading her community, and working to change the demographic of her farmers markets with the implementation of many programs designed to teach and enable folks with little money to access these food sources. One after another it is these new farmers who are blazing a new trail for us. How different they are from my back to the land peers. Same material, different scale. I am awed. And for me, that is a miracle.
……changed my hair style, so many times now…..don’t remember who I look like……
Mountaingal: People engage in the pointless commentary here because they have no flesh-n-blood humans to talk to, or at least none who would pay attention to their ravings without either walking away or punching them in the mouth. (I’m thinking Vlad and a few others.) I have a life, and I only comment if I’m in the first 20 or so, because then it meanders into the weeds. It’s still good to read a few comments here and there to get a picture of the diversity of opinionated voices out there, though.
Not all mainstream media are clueless. Bloomberg (which I consider fairly mainstream) has an article on its site titled How ‘High Oil Prices Will Permanently Cap Economic Growth’. For me, he most instructive quote: “Each new Barrel is costing more than the last”. The article goes on to explain that the current banking and governmental responses are compounding a problem the nature of which no one in a position of power seems to understand.
The rest of mainstream media can’t be far behind. There have already been rumblings among the CNN and MSNBC talking heads. When the dawn comes, though, it will likely be too late.
Take note how JHK’s weekly screed has morphed into resigned reflection. Understandable. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The purpose of Life:
“Every man’s solemn duty is to pray and to fight.”
General Stonewall Jackson
Americans during the Civil War:
“Every man’s solemn duty is to pray and to fight.”
General Stonewall Jackson
Americans today:
“Every man’s solemn duty is to party.”
– The idiot who invented Facebook.
The Slow Collapse
Thanks JHK for a more poetic post today, beautifully articulated and tragic.
This morning I listened to a new entry on Max Keiser about how DA offices are now selling their leterheads to collection agencies for a cut of the profit.
Yes, we are truly no longer a nation of laws and for expediency and a lack of care about what we represent anymore, a person who bounces a check for $43.00 can now be gone after for $280.00 with a letterhead that falsely claims criminality at failure to pay.–A ruse to force that person to pay a huge fee for someone else’s gain.
This is the horror story the American dream has become. Your justice system is on the take and banks are getting $trillions while the former middle class loses their homes, bank accounts and all the accoutrements that were once symbols of their membership in the good life.
Where corruption goes with the territory of the human condition, this is now fully instituted in global governance and I’m afraid there will be no Lincoln moment.
We are at a different crossroad and the only way is down, now. We hear more drumbeats of war, our only export and one we do poorly with no objective other than to syphon more money to privatized interests. Nothing will feed the nation because the deciders have taken on an ideology that won’t allow that to happen.
For the past 40 years they have built up an economic model that leads in one direction and it is finally taking it’s toll. I’m not sure that the people will ever have a chance to catch on that the fossil fuel bonanza is over because I believe other disasters will take place before that becomes apparent.
This gaming of the world banking system will continue for a time while more people are disinherited as this goes up the food chain.
Sadly, we live in interesting times.
What a strange privilege it is to live in these perilous times.
I get that feeling too, that we are living at the moment of peak human material abundance (and population, too.) We have so much STUFF! including food, and just the mass of our possessions. Ancient cities made of stone got nothin’ on multiple New Yorks and Parises full of steel skyscrapers.
For the past four or five years, I’ve (slowly) been ploughing my way through Gibbons’ “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” I’m now on Volume II, just past Theodoric. This sprawling work reminds me that civilization is transient. There were ebbs and flows with Rome and Constantinople, and even the most highly developed society of its time wound up — often! — with its best and brightest skewered by spears outside their burning buildings. Civilization CAN go backwards. We are not immune from some new Dark Age. Pretending it can’t happen is magical NON-thinking.
With methane plumes rising into the atmosphere from global warming, our new dark age might be very dark, for all life forms larger than an amoeba. But as sociobiologist thinker E.O. Wilson says, it only takes 10 millions years for the Earth to generate a whole new environmental system after an extinction level event. 10 million seems like a lot to us, but we’ll all be long since fossilized. It’s just a month in the lifespan of the planet. I hope the coming species of intelligent raccoons or highly evolved cockroaches finds something more of us than discarded aluminum beer cans in a mountain cave somewhere.
Good read this morning, Jim.
And Mountaingal, I don’t see anything wrong with people flogging their blogs. Many of them have intelligent things to say, and seeing their links here reminds me to have a squizz at them if they’re not on my regular reading list. So you go, Crazy Eddie, KulturCritic et al!
Every man’s solemn duty is to party.”
– The idiot who invented Facebook.
The real reason why education is such a bottomless pit with little success is the culture itself that does not embrace learning.
The friends I have who brought up their kids to seek education and knowledge are enjoying their children’s success. It’s all about the culture and the peer groups frown upon learning.
about fB. It’s what you make of it. The people I know care about the world so there’s lots of posts about politics, the economy etc. Many years after graduating HS I’m happy to see how aware my fellow graduates are living all over the country.
As always James brings great clarity to the events of our time. While I try and stay tuned out, something always pulls me back to watch. At least trying to live sustainably and independently in my “Little House Off The Grid” I can try and enjoy some respite from reality. http://www.cammather.com/
BC wrote: “I hope the coming species of intelligent raccoons or highly evolved cockroaches finds something more of us than discarded aluminum beer cans in a mountain cave somewhere.”
Wow, that’s depressing!
I guess that it would be embarrassing if in the future intelligent raccoons or highly evolved cockroaches only find our discarded aluminum beer cans in a mountain cave somewhere. Of course, after 10 million years discarded cans of Bud might be worth something?
Jim,
Don’t be so hard on everyone. Something wicked this way comes, but who cares?
I’m riding this wave until it crashes. I’m fully cognizant that the break is going to hurt. But I am doing it for the same reason I used to drink 1000 beers a night in college. I knew I would be crushingly hungover the next day, but I was having too good a time to care.
Aimlow Joe was here.
http://www.aimlow.com
“…in particular the absence of any sense of duty to the project of being the only self-aware organisms (as far as anyone knows) in the universe.”
You’re a smart man, Jim, but behind the times on our knowledge of non-human animals. The old, “Man is the only sentient being” nonsense belongs in the dustbin of history. Here is but one example:
Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, an ability once thought to be uniquely human, according to a study released Wednesday.
The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, challenge assumptions about the boundary between human and non-human, and shed light on the evolutionary origins of consciousness, the researchers said.
Source: http://news.discovery.com/animals/chimpanzees-self-awareness-110504.html
We humans are not nearly as exceptional as we like to thing, except, perhaps, in our capacity for self-aggrandizement.
James I, too, voted for and was carried away by the hope and hype of the Obama significance. And like you, I am deeply disapointed by what he has done or not done in the case of allowing the bankers to get away with murder without consequence or conviction to change. I thought Obama was some one who ‘got it’; recognized that we had some tough choices to make; we need to decide what to keep and what has to go. Here was a man who would help us manage contraction before it managed us. NOT! Instead we got a yes man who not only turned a blind eye to forcing the wealthy elite bankers into accountability but jumped right into bed with the Fed and the wholesale printing of more and more toilet paper Benny Bucks. Obama must be the most influential ‘can kicker’ in the history of the USA.
The above references to 1860 and 1856 are striking in many ways for cycle researchers. NASA types have clearly demonstrated significant solar “weather” cycles of varying lengths, and some research suggests that these are at least correlated, if not causally related, to human activity (read mendacity).
According to NASA, we’re now into solar cycle 24, which is expected to be very similar to the ambient solar cycle in the late 1850’s. More specifically, the Carrington Event, involving powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun, occurred in 1859 and did massive damage to telegraph lines, the only real electrical connections we had at that time. Both NASA and the Academy of Sciences have put out serious warnings about the effects of such CMEs in our contemporary world of high tech and ultra sensitive electronics. The military has even spent billions to “harden” their systems against CMEs (and man made EMPs). The solar activity of cycle 24 peaks in late 2012 and early 2013.
Perhaps running out of cheap oil will be the least of our worries and only a minor reason for entering the world made by hand. All of our techno-triumphalism could literally end in a flash. Then again, everythings’ good; don’t worry, be happy. Nothing here to see, move along, move along !!!!
Wardoc, aspiring to be an 18th Century Physician
I can barely stand to watch the antics, dogged by visions of where this is all tending. We have achieved something that few cultures ever have before: made ourselves unworthy even of our own low standards. There is no center left to hold, only ragged edges around a core of darkness.
Jim, I still think what you said a few weeks ago about homosexual men not truly being men was a fucking dickweed thing to say and you should be fucking ashamed of yourself for saying it, but the above paragraph sums up very concisely exactly how I have been feeling of late.
Wow, that’s depressing!
Dude, I work in a psychiatric ward, so I KNOW depressing. And schizo, too. But I don’t GET depressed. Working 20 years as a nurse, I’ve seen enough people die before my eyes that I know what’s really important is how you live, not how you go out. So I go through life with a morbid sense of humour, and a sense of joy every time I flick the switch and the lights still go on. Never forget how great that is! WATER! That comes out of a piece of metal! And you can drink it without getting dysentery! As fucked as things are, we have got it soooooo good. We won’t really realize it until those things stop. Then, as Rutger Hauer’s android character said in “Blade Runner,” it will be “Time — to die.”
Yes, but then I realize that these people are allowed to walk aroound loose! I just wonder why commenters and readers of the JHK blog don’t take this as an opportunity to engage in intelligent and thoughtful discourse rather than what most of it turns into. And if there are others, such as yourself, who would like this to be so, why more of an attempt isn’t made to cut-off the trash talk and those who persist in it? It seems as if the comments section mostly descends to the level of the lowest common denominator but it doesn’t have to be the case, as some other sites comments sections attest to.
Hey Mountaingal-
I appreciate the introduction to other bloggers through the comment section. So keep self-promoting yal.
And if there are others, such as yourself, who would like this to be so, why more of an attempt isn’t made to cut-off the trash talk and those who persist in it?
They have the freedom to spout their inanity, and I have the freedom to ignore them. After laughing at them a little bit first. If I want intelligent intellectual discourse, I read comments on The Automatic Earth, Club Orlov or Guy McPherson’s blog.
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” – Kurt Vonnegut
He wasn’t being a smart-ass, either. He was saying the most important things we do involve minor social interactions, taking care of our little stuff, tending our relationships, and immersing ourselves in the things we actually do and the people we actually see all day, every day. Localizing, simplifying. Proponents of a complex, “modern” society look down on such stuff as unworthy “farting around.” But in the end, and indeed in our near future, “farting around” is going to become the key survival skill, and the main source of pleasure and accomplishment in our lives. And why the hell not? Let’s get back to our true purpose as social, dancing, animals.
Benjamin Franklin says in his autobiography that one of his relatives in 18th Century New England had a decent house, wife, raised 13 kids and had a decent life earning a living making candles.
Since the economy at that time was very local, each person only needed a basic skill and economic function in society in order to have a decent life. Mr. A makes candles. Mr. B makes shoes. Mr. C makes soap. Mr. Pummapomaped makes tandoori barbeque chicken kababs, etc.
Thanks. I always look forward to reading your thoughts on Monday morning. I prefer your more humorous articles as I am sure you do to but sometimes it is not in us. I have none this morning.
I am paying a lot of attention to the fed’s effort at what Ray Dalio describes as a ‘beautiful deleveraging’ and trying to discern how this will work in a shrinking transportation energy world, their effort at letting us down gently. I hope they are that smart. I think they are. I know I heard Bernanke say that ‘he couldn’t print oil’.
I think we are currently in a recession, the world that is. One must think worldwide when one thinks economic trends now.
Your comparison between our current period and the civil war is apt in a magnitude sort of way. We lost 2% of the nation not counting civilians to that war. That is 6MM lives not counting civilians in today’s numbers. So I think, or fear, that you have the magnitude right but I don’t know what coin the pain shall be measured in. If war then we will have a dark age.
War, that is the thing our specie must get past. The belief that it is right for some to consume more than others by dint of their ability to take it or not share it. This must go away if we are to survive. I think this is the lesson that our specie will have to learn in this coming time of resource scarcity.
JHK nails it down for this humanities faculty member:
“I don’t mean privilege in the sense of the college humanities departments, with all their crybaby overtones of grievance and resentment.”
The Academic Left and the Academic Right (it does exist, often in Humanities Departments!) failed miserably in the “theory wars” of the late 80s and early 90s. They made themselves obsolete in the era of the shallow “corporate university” that now prevails at most big schools.
Instead of fighting over the canon of literature, the nature of meaning, and the “transgressive” in all its forms and in language that no one–especially scholars–can understand, these smart but self-absorbed folks self-destructed.
They should have, after tenure protected them, have instead “gone Mumford” to become public intellectuals. We lack that core of smart folks critiquing and praising in language that any educated person could understand. Academics could have entered public life at city council and planning meetings, written for their newspapers, and done more of what JHK has tried to get done.
But they did not. And there is no core left now, just a bunch of profs scrambling to save their jobs until they can retire.
re: “..that while your writing is always interesting and thought provoking, the comments section tends towards the moronic, self-absorbed and self-promoting.” – I agree with this. When I read the comments sections of New York Times articles, I’m always reminded that the most intelligent people on the internet read the Times; it’s exhilarating, and restores my faith, however temporarily, in the human spirit for a little while. The comments on Jim’s board are good for about, oh, half a page each week, and then.. the children take over, which is a sad deal, because Jim’s writing is so important, timely and terrific, and so worthy of a much more intelligent readership (judging by the comments anyway).. just my .02..
Yea that ‘dickweed thing’ he said irritated me too but we all have our failings.
A useful site:
Help pass a Constitutional amendment to override the Supreme Court’s very dangerous Citizens United decision: https://action.citizen.org/p/salsa/event/common/public/create.sjs?distributed_event_KEY=693
“For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.”
from “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
by William Stafford
I would posit that dark ages are here in the present. What is a “dark age”, if not the decline and fall of the institutions which bring civilization – the family, community, religion, education, politics, economy. We live in a no-nothing age which scorns anything from the past which enlightens and inspires. Art, music, language and religion are bastardized to the point of parody. So, I seriously question those who comment on Mr. Kunstler’s musings as only the rants of a “doomer and gloomer”. He is merely providing one chronicle of what is palpably obvious and we ignore at our own peril, because the inevitable result of such a catastrophic collapse of civilization is anarchy and its attendant reaction.
I would ask Kunstler about his reference to Providence – with a capital P? Does this refer to a vague concept or something more effective. If the latter, perhaps this moves toward an answer to what is the meaning of life – maybe something more than just “making ourelves better people”?
I agree with mountaingal and RJGrones. Jim has one of the most intelligent blogs on the internet. I appreciate seeing the response he gets from other intelligent folks. Please try to keep it that way.
Well, Mr. Kunstler, whom do you imagine it was who designed and built that ‘magnificently engineered minor country highway” on which you were driving, as well as all the other country roads across the nation? I will tell you. It was sober, boring, straight-laced people who thought work, skill, and, oh yeah, duty, mattered more than style, pizazz, looks, personality, and all the rest of the meretricious crapulous ethos foisted on us by two generations of high urbanite propagandists. Those long ago builders, whose ethic of work and self reliance is so far removed from our own hedonism and self absorbation, they probably wore white socks, too, white being the socks color of choice for people who do their own laundry.
Revenge of the dorks is on it’s way. Pretty soon now, it is not going to be how someone talks to you, or what they look like, but what can they do to help you and your community stay alive.
Striking to read this on Bloomberg.com: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-23/how-high-oil-prices-will-permanently-cap-economic-growth.html
Like the comments we receive from Crazy Eddie the Motie in Detroit. Detroit has the potential to be a hugh experiment in how to restructure the failing American society. Why don’t you talk about how the blighted areas are being bulldozed – and what the next steps are (or should be) to re-energize the urban core. I know that we all want to run from the tragedy that’s become innercity living – but there’s not enough room in the countryside for all those who must eventually flee. So we must eventually face the stark reality that we must spend whatever resources we have left to make these spaces liveable.
Jim, the clowning already has turned to savagery. Last nite two shot in the back of the head in Hartford, a fatal stabbing in Bristol, a fatal stabbing in Meriden and another seriously wounded in Meriden, arson fire in New Haven, serious traffic accidents leaving flaming wrecks, closed roads, and a score dead in Fairfield, Windsor, Bridgeport … all I can say, “What a place!!”
–WSP7
Our moral duty to have consciousness of the results of our lives has been buried under a thick layer of materialism, egotism and hedonism. We covet the latest gadgets with no thought of the workers who spend their few hours off duty in company “dormitories” on the factory grounds and surrounded by guard towers. We prefer not to think of the miners sent 5 miles underground to retrieve the stuff they are made of, for whom $2 a day in pay is “too much” and protestors are simply shot.
We are the modern slaveowners. We expect our ever fatter asses to be propelled at 70mph on ground, (350mph in the air), in bloated luxury vehicles that increasingly resemble tanks. We think this is normal and will go on forever. Our collective guilt in having already mostly destroyed the ocean’s fisheries, the old growth forests and prospects for the continuation of a stable climate barely flickers at the edge of our collective awareness.
Meanwhile large parts of our population clamor for war over a few uninhabited rocks or murder over a perceived affront to their gods. We have reached a critical mass of population, ignorance and religio/nationalism that is about to explode and render our dreamtime into shreds of suffering for the foreseeable future.
God Bless you James.
I Know, I know, you don’t believe in the Deity, that’s ok… you do His work whether you know it or not. For you are correct, our culture has become totally immersed in the folly of materialism. Apathy and complacency rule and you show us the deeper shadows on the wall of our prison cave. But like a splinter in our mind, we know somethings wrong, but the sea and waves of Mystery roar, keeping us confused in our blanket of warm apathy, return to start, rinse and repeat.
The Cause is revealed in The Grail James, the Cycles are coming to get us, and we all know it deep down in our souls. For something wicked this way comes, and The Grail did predict and provide the meaning.
Thus The Grail was revealed for this time, and for everything there is a time and a season. The Galt engine lives James, but it is not for this people or time, because now is the time of scoffers and ridicule, such is the Way of Truth. You are the Chief Scoffer and Ridicule is your way, and you are right for they deserve it.
May the Phoenix that rises from the ashes of darkness, overcome the Rule of Gold by the Golden rule.
The Piper sings a New Song, in the wilderness,
so the Chorus may sing and the People can dance,
that the forest may echo with laughter.
http://pipermichael.wordpress.com
Our purpose on earth is to make the earth a better place. Whether we make a positive impact on the inhabitants or the environment, the process of making the earth a better place will also make you a better person.
WF,
I would agree that we are on the cusp of something momentous, and we’re hurtling toward it ensconced in a comfy couch with a brew in one hand and a bowl of snacks in the other. The gulf of “disconnect” that this situation requires is, in itself, cause for amazement and triple-takes.
When you say this:
“So I think, or fear, that you have the magnitude right but I don’t know what coin the pain shall be measured in. If war then we will have a dark age.”
…it prompts me to respond.
To paraphrase something I just recently read, we must understand that war is now a “system”, and a self-perpetuating and integral one at that.
The “war on terror” should make that abundantly clear. Warring is now immensely PROFITABLE (for a select few). Thus it will be continued until those that foment it (for reasons of that profit) are strung up by their necks until they are dead.
This paradigm also stems from a perception of unlimited abundance. “Go ahead and blow it up; we’ll make more (of both things to blow up, and things to blow things up WITH). Sure it’s insane, but the money sure appears to be rollin’ in at the moment, now doesn’t it? If this should continue, an early extinction will be granted by “Providence”. (Also known as the will and workings of the clever monkeys.)
Look about and marvel; be amazed at the levels of comfort and technologies we’ve achieved… then get to thinking about how all of it can be repurposed, and perhaps turned to some actually useful bent.
Regarding the election, and my utter loss of confidence in the current electoral charade, this is what I am now “bouncing back” to every crackpot, hate-radio listening relative who forwards to me those tiresome emails I know we all get:
Delivery of your message was attempted, but it was rejected by the recipient domain.
r=forwarded mail relaying messages from republican kooks, right_wing fascists, democratic party hacks, apologists for president hopey_changey, listeners of hate radio, yellow ribbon tin-plated patriots, followers of delusional religious dogma,
and vinyl siding salesmen are automatically sent to recipient TRASH.
Let’s start by calling a spade a spade. Problem solving is really very simple – but you must first identify the problem (then the solution -the plan and action). To take an approach that we are all going to be able to Kum By Ah out in the countryside is ridiculous. We need real solutions and we need them now, since it will take thirty years to upscale anything that seems plausible. Let’s start by realizing that our future is electricity for everthing we do – not produced from solar or wind (which lack reliability), but from coal, natural gas and uranium. Then we need to start upgrading (and protecting) the nations’ grid – to supply this reliably energy source. But as a nation, we can’t even define a list of priorities for our infrastucture. Just saying…
To “the most” this particular blog could be labeled as spectaculary virulent. But the virus only takes the rotten, leaving the healthy to propagate the future. Hence the resistence, the willful ignorance. You can’t blame them either, as one might as well party the remaining days away, as in death there is no conseguence of a hang over. “The most” wouldn’t take the luck offered, so don’t waste it. This blog is about a coming trajedy of the ignorant, not the renewal after…
Forgot a closed quotation mark there; hope that doesn’t confuse things too much.
JHK,
What about that New Yorker interview a couple years ago? You were talking then about the U.S. breaking up into pieces, as I recall. With Lincoln, victory meant the preservation of the union. What then will our victory be? A new union, or the breakup of the old one?
Well it’s not that simple. Unlike the nineteenth century, the twenty-first can all too easily imagine the alternative of government on a world-wide scale.
Well I’m not too sure about that, what do you think? On one hand, it could mean a world order with bankers giving the orders. On the other hand, what less than a new world order could protect the seas, the air, the forests? And cope with the exhaustion of natural resources?
God helps those who help themselves! Just a reminder for those who believe.
Thanks, Jagger,
I think so too.
So how long will it take before we all realize the New World Order isn’t working out for the average American citizen? The New World Order is embred into the very nature of our two-party political (politicized capitalism) system, and is the real problem here. In fact, I don’t see that the New World Order is working out very well for any of the industrialized world. Look no further than the natural orders in nature for real social orders that work.
“the only self aware organism” in the universe…? No jimmy, wrong wrong wrong. Out Next Possible Fearless Leader believes that Adam came from another planet and brought Eve with him to start the human race. Adam then returned home only later to come back to earth to sire jesus. So clearly there is that other place in the universe that has self-aware organisms. You just need to ask for details from our Next Possible Fearless Leader. But don’t ask him about his congregations Law of Consecration. Cause he won’t contribute. And the other one, our Next Likely Fearless Leader believes that Mary ascended directly to heaven without dying. So obviously there is some other or third place too. I suspect he won’t even give you time for your question let alone an answer. So there you have it. Proof from two fronts. Or just ask your own rabbi, he’ll give you lots of good info too.
The part that makes me queasy is that, in 1856, the US stood on the verge of an industrial and energy boom that lasted a century, and vastly extended our power to improve quality of life and develop new technology (and of course to pollute, disrupt other cultures, etc. – not forgetting these effects), whereas we now stand on the brink of the opposite. A Civil War on the way up the EROEI curve is a very different prospect to a Civil War on the way down…
Unless of course we start mining asteroids and getting energy space and all manner of related fantasies that the hyper-techno-optimists indulge in… Indentured servants booking a one-way passage in steerage to Vesta, anyone…?
http://OccupyMBA.com !
There is a new show on NBC Monday nights from Executive Producer J.J.Abrams of ‘Lost’ fame.
It is horrible. It is about a world where electricity just magically stopped working 15 years ago. Everybody uses bows and arrows and there are militias with only a few guns left. And everybody grows corn.
The first thing I thought of was ‘World Made By Hand.’
How much does it suck that your prophesies of Doomsday have been straight-up plagiarized for the latest cheesy low-budget, big profit, network sci-fi drama?
Thanks for antoher timely post Jim.
Here in NJ, the signs of autumn are seen-cooler and crisper air, leaves starting to change color, and the shorter days. The same could be said for the present age; we’re entering our “autumn”. With all which is occuring in our world, you can see the changing of our “seasons” in the air. (I’m listening to George Winston’s “Autumn” while typing.)
We have a presidential campaign that’s big on promise and “change”, yet little on follow through. We have a potential dustup between Israel and Iran that could explode all over the (oil-dependent) world. Global warming is bringing potential illnesses-once just common to warmer climes-into my neck of the words. And to top it all off, our current financial crisis, which is like a slow cancer-eating away at our society and spreading into every sector. I hear the wind blowing and see the leaves falling from the trees.
And we know what comes after autumn…winter.
Peace!
JHK,
Keep a-sawin’ on that thar fiddle!
It’s always been my contention that true fun comes from active, imaginative, participatory constructs, rather than “watching” (which would be today’s version of “fun”; the advertisements say so).
Keep the phalanges limber! (I’m finding wood-processing makes ’em a bit clumsy. ;o)
E.S. said:
The purpose of life is to better yourself. We all lost our ways long ago when we replaced this challenge with the pursuit of materialism.
***************************************************************
Absolutely. I enjoy comments that do not “gild the lily”. We now live in an interpersonal climate where it seems that we excuse blunt personality flaws as the “color of life”. Of course, those flaws involve entitlement, vanity, immodesty, and many others. Materialism, too, has been elevated to a kind of “prudence” … postmodern sagaciousness.
It’s simply going to take a disaster to force people not to be jellyfish any more.
E.
Sorry, doomers. I know you would be happier if the bottom was falling out of the economy and you could imagine a Black Swan event was happening. But the markets are not cooperating. Things are getting better and better. More jobs being created. Housing values returning. Leading Economic Index up. Damn. And we were all hoping for a giant collapse and a civil war, complete with pitch forks and hangings!
It is impossible to return to a medieval future … if that even makes sense.
We can never go back to an earlier time because we have an accumulated knowledge base that will be with us which was not available in medieval times. Our quality of life will be much better, even if oil disappears tomorrow.
For example, we have knowledge about solar energy photovoltaics, wind energy generators, etc. that medieval peoples did not. We will have lights at night with LED bulbs medieval peoples did not have.
Go ahead, make my day. Take away oil. We have alternatives that did not exist back in medieval times
Peace has arrived. Times have never been better for human beings, though you would never know it if all you read was the doomster “we are so fucked” moaning and bitching on CFN.
Allahu Akbar! (???? ????)
Assalaamu alaikum!
“This gaming of the world banking system will continue for a time while more people are disinherited as this goes up the food chain.”
What you say:
http://www.voxeu.com/article/doomsday-cycle-turns-who-s-next
E.,
A bit off-topic, but I thought you’d like this site for a little educated subversion.
Molding the consciousness of the young and incapable (college level; 8 years) is mentioned.
http://www.ginandtacos.com/about-ginandtacos/
I linked to the “about” page so you can catch the drift…
The comments are infantile because the responders are infantile.
Does that make Jim Kunstler a sort of pied-piper of infants? What an interesting idea. The image of it is hilarious. Begs the question, though: where is Jim leading all these infants? To the Apocalypse Nursery? A World Made by Babies?
Of course, your own comment is self-incriminating, though perhaps ironically, in which case that makes you some kind of nanny to Jim’s pied-piper.
Please child proof the forums on your way out.
Thanks!
Jim: If the U.S.A. is at the 1856 point in our current historical cycle, then where is our “bleeding Kansas”? Mexico? Afghanistan? Syria? And who will be our John Brown?
As every day passes I becomes ever more clear that we desperately need realistic and positive visions about the kind of world we want and not just what is being shoved down our throats. Let’s come together to discuss in detail what can work for us and leave our children and grandchildren a world worth living in.
See one positive and realistic vision at http://www.fromhere-tothere.org
In response to Zev Paiss – We can start here with issues that should be addressed by the incoming (2012) President:
RESTORE POWER TO THE PEOPLE / RESTORE GOVERNMENT CREDIBILITY:
Implement election reform (both finance and method – root out the corruption in the two-party system / end crony “politicized” capitalism / provide for traceable election results).
Provide a standard format (full transparency) for vetting political candidates…for use by Main Stream Media.
Simplify the tax code – eliminate the loop holes / do away with any tax provision that is “temporary” / downsize the IRS.
Do away with the Federal Reserve and money manipulation – let the Treasury assume the duties of printing currency / let the free-market system work.
Add a “What’s good for one is good for all” amendment to the US Constitution: “Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.”
End all federal foreign aid – this includes supply of military weapons.
UPGRADE NATIONAL SECURITY:
Add a “Balanced Budget” amendment to the US Constitution. (And make it mandatory that Congress passes an annual federal budget…no budget: no pay, no vacation home!)
Assure that all goods and services that are key to national defense are produced here in the US. This should include all individual parts. “Buy American” should be strictly enforced at the federal level.
Upgrade/modernize/protect the nation’s electrical grid. (Add trunk lines for clean energy sources – restring with new superconductors – protect grid from EMP attack.)
Finish the security fence on our southern border (make a legitimate effort to control illegal immigration).
Encourage development of alternative means of navigation other than satellite GPS…satellite navigation/communication is our Achilles Tendon.
PROVIDE RELIABLE ENERGY:
Provide a long-term repository for nuclear waste. Nuclear power is the only hope for our future as we move away from an oil based economy – and we need a place to safely store spent fuel.
Remove all barriers to off-shore oil drilling and cheap domestic oil.
IMPROVE HEALTH CARE:
Make it mandatory that Congress and the House participate in the Social Security/Medicare system. (No special retirement plan for elected officials).
Make it mandatory that all federal employees (including elected officials) participate in the VA health care system.
Repeal ObamaCare – reform the Health Insurance industry and control hospital costs.
IMPROVE THE SMALL-BUSINESS CLIMATE:
Bust up corporate monopolies…especially multi-nationals (Need to assure small business can compete in the market place.)
Deregulate everything. (Re-evaluate all existing laws. If it’s a burden to the people, or no longer applicable – delete it! Implement KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid!)
End the “American Rule” in our court system. (If it is found that you bring a frivolous law-suit against someone – you should pay for their defense.)
Protect US intellectual property. If US corporations want to set up shop in countries (like China) that demand access to our technology, then fine, but if they return to America, prosecute them for INDUSTRIAL ESPIONAGE.
Prosecute banking fraud…do away with Ponzi schemes and the Keynesian economic model.
Provide full fiber optic internet service to all parts of the country – including rural areas – and cut all ties of the Abilene Backbone (WWW2) to China.
Bravo for invoking the name of Stonewall Jackson. We are going to need men like him and Robert E Lee if we are to escape from the New World Order and their plans to “scarcifcy” us out of existence.
They were better than we even late in their history. They never sacrificed their own people like our Elite do – just to make themselves feel morally superior. They fought the barbarians as best they could while our Elite invite them in and favor them over Whites.
For example, immigrants to Engalnd from Pakistan or India get housing with a couple of weeks while native born Britons often have to wait for years. But you have no problem with that, do you? Face it, you’re part of the probelm – a wannabe Elite or at least a Mandarin.
Yes virtually all women are totalitarians – as Women Studies and Blogs indicate. All strictly moderated with speech codes etc. You all never understood America and will only miss the luxuries – not the Bill of Rights.
MATTHEWSTRUTH, our esteemed JHK can’t see what you see because in his heart he remains an urbanite and your farmer’s marketers lack picturesque appeal They should put up a maypole or. sacrifice some loathsome malefactor in effigy to the corn god, something like that. You could take a vote on whose effigy goes up in flames this year. Dick Chaney, anyone? Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney? Bet it would even make the NYT.
There is nothing your basic enlightened urbanite likes better
than seeing some rural whitebread farm boys in costume looking like fools, which is why Jerry Gettle, who is one smart cookie, built himself a country western theme park where he appears in Grand Ol Opry costume to promote his seed company. And now, when Jerry wants to undertake a serious project like putting on a national heirloom exposition or sueing Monsanto, financing, backing and contacts and connections are his for the asking.
“Learn how to practice a strict information diet or fall prey to the increasingly useless info-junk that is polluting the minds of most Americans.”
Well said, and one would also do well to be keenly aware of the delusional values so subtly espoused in both commercials and the storyline of certain programs. I believe that any effort you put forth to discern lasting values versus those that prick our craving for short term comforts, convenience, certainty, and fear that seeks control, is a worthy practice.
Yes exactly: they were White Men, now the most despised group unless Gay or Leftist. And White Women supported them by being wives and mothers. That’s the winning equation. Take away one component, be it race, sex, or religion and you will get different and most likely inferior results.
Someone once said: the more knowledge, the less widsom; the more information, the less knowldege.
As Baba said, a fast mind is sick; a slow mind is sound; a still mind is Divine.
Just ordered the Discourses. Please continue to post here so I can correct you with chapter and verse from your own Guru.
Some of your posts are good (like this one) but you veer Left and that just isn’t Baba.
Speaking of duty and what it might really be, I am going with the following:
A young man in 1941 sent a letter to Meher Baba and received in response the following message.
“The greatest need of humanity today is love – love divine which is pure and selfless, which awakens man to the proper sense and understanding of his real duty in life, which is to find true happiness in giving, not receiving; in serving and not in being served; and in willfully participating in the sufferings of others more than in their happiness.
My mission in life is to kindle that divine spark of love in all.”
I don’t think we’re “the only self-aware organisms” to bear witness to the world. What if humans were created to be mere tools in aid of another group of organisms which have already experienced their peak energy event millions of years ago? In that time the crucial fuel for the plant kingdom, CO2, has been on a slow, steady decline, becoming irretrievably buried under the earth in the fossilizing corpses of their long dead ancestors. The solution, intervene in the evolutionary process to nurture the evolution of an animal with a built-in cleverness for tool-making and an congenital urge to dig for buried plant mummies to fuel this fetish. To achieve this, the plants have sacrificed generations of their own kind, proferring themselves as food, fuel, and IKEA furniture for humans. We’ve even been designed to constantly lap up their excreta, oxygen. But, the plants designed a safety mechanism into our DNA, an auto-destruct mechanism in the form of a grotesquely over developed brain that gaurantees our self inflicted extiction (like a Monsanto breed of terminator seed). After our civilization has collapsed, the plant kingdom will be enjoying its return to the halcyon days of a heavily carbonated atmosphere, brimming with cellulose and fibrin building CO2. Maybe they’ll even bring back the dinsours to finish off any of us who survive long past the collapse.
“In the history that doesn’t repeat but only rhymes, we’re in the 1856 equivalent of the cycle now, short of the moment when mere clowning turns to savagery. I can barely stand to watch the antics, dogged by visions of where this is all tending. We have achieved something that few cultures ever have before: made ourselves unworthy even of our own low standards. There is no center left to hold, only ragged edges around a core of darkness.”
That’s a ‘Pulitzer Prize’ level closing paragraph. Yet the world doesn’t listen. But I have.
Great job you do, JHK. as always,kudos….
Read today’s post, Mountaingal, it will answer your question.
You know what I would like to see Jim?
A man with flames tattooed on his neck with his head actually lit on fire!
Wouldn’t that be a sight.
The story from Bloomberg is very interesting. Maybe the dams are weakening.
History as a disciple has yet to recognize the centrality of fossil fuels in the explosion of Western “progress.” Changes are coming. http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/11582-how-coal-brought-us-democracy-and-oil-ended-it-lessons-from-the-new-book-carbon-democracy, a review of Tim Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.
To sum up the purpose of humanity: pollute, then scoot.
Obama has everything you would want in a president except for honesty, integrity, and courage.
My voting for Jill Stein does not take away a vote from Obama as my conscience would never permit me to vote for him. And especially adding to his mandate out of fear that the Repugnicans would somehow do anything much worse. In deed, how much better are our citizens or the people in this world with an Obama presidency instead of a Bush one? The choice offered in this “fantasy” election is between lunacy versus lies.
Greetings from Canada, where we have our own duly elected right wing George Bush wannabe systematically destroying our beautiful dominion. Your election is a nice distraction from our own problems, as long as we can forget that events in the USA have repercussions all over the world.
We should all have a vote in your election, that would be just and fair to the rest of us. Clearly never will happen though, just as Republican states, 23 of them, have put in rules that will disenfranchise so many who just happen to vote Democrat.
While Obama has disappointed many in his failure to single handedly save the USA from itself in four years, we forget how powerful the forces that oppose him really are. The kind of transformation so many of us want isn’t that easy to accomplish.
Not to worry, a poll in my local paper has Obama running 3 to 1 over Romney. I’m quite disappointed in Obama too, until I think about what the USA would look like if McCain had won with that ditz Palin at his side. Unless she bolted for a really great tv show offer, of course.
Seriously, if Obama has screwed up so badly, how would it look with another Republican president? Think about it for a minute, then hold your nose and go vote for Obama.
Ya gotta play the hand you’re dealt, and until somebody better comes along, Obama is the best choice you’ve got. Believe this Canadian.
“perhaps less than a decade no one ever will again”
This statement is especially hyperbolic. Methinks motoring in one form or another will be around for a lot longer than a decade, especially in remote country places in America where there’s basically no other viable mode of transport. Because if gas becomes too expensive, we’ll find other ways like electric cars. We love them that much.
I agree: many of our Environmentalists are Chimps in suits with their global warming cue cards taped on their lapels during dinner to catch spills.
I’m gratified to be told “all women are totalitarians” by this guy. Previously, we were thought to be too dumb to form any kind of philosophical framework.
Now that’s progress.
Common Cents:
Nuclear energy has alot of drawbacks. They say a high percentage of them are leaking tritium from their pipes underground that are too cost-prohibitive to replace. Welcome to some cancer if you’re living downstream from that, or if you’re using the same water underground. Also, it is very, very expensive, and very dangerous. Nuclear storage, that’s necessary, but the ultimate nimby/lulu, not in my back yard, locally undesirable land use.
Germany is a major solar power with about half the sunlight as Colorado. Think about that.
“We’re one bomb-vest or HFT keystroke away from a possible dark age”
Again, here we go again with the exaggerated doomery. When it goes, our civilization will die of a thousand cuts, not a single Black Swan event. That’s just how things play out.
Probably we won’t even know it until well after the fact. People thought they were living in the Roman Empire well into the Middle Ages, when historians basically agree the traditional form of that empire fell round about 450 AD.
So, I assume they’ll be people talking about US and A in the year 2500, after the actual thing has long since faded away or turned into something else.
“Obama has everything you would want in a president except for honesty, integrity, and courage.”
How do you arrive at this conclusion? Is it simply because Obama didn’t do what you wanted him to do these last four years?
Compared to the last couple presidents, the guy definitely has integrity and some decent amount of honesty (though you know we “can’t handle the truth”).
As far as courage, that’s a bit subjective. Courage to do what?
Looking forward to hearing you speak at Elon, N.C. next Monday!
Nastarana: I found Jere Gettle on Google, not Jerry Gettle. Better search results.
Love? But who first? We can’t love everyone equally unless we are enligthened – and even they focus their energies on deserving disciples who can benefit the most.
So for most of us it’s concentric circles of self, children, partner, parents, community, city, state, nation, and so. The “World” and “Africans” come last if at all. Globalism would reverse all of this and makes a monkey out of us all.
Hierarchy, Ront, hierarchy. Get used it – it’s the key to all. As Prabhupad said, “Deserve, and then desire”. Those who are worthy get the reward – not the parasites. Borders? Skin. The Nation is an organism – would you scrape your own skin off and then say you are “one” with the world? Why do it to America? But that’s what you do when you advocate for wetbacks. And you call it love. As the Greek orator said, “They make a desert and they call it peace”. You skin and castrate America and call it love.
I can’t believe it – you are actually going to vote for the fraud again. The one who put Goldman Sachs predators in charge of the Treasury. Get out your razor and get to work on yourself.
Pee Wee Herman and Captain Kangaroo. That’s good but I was thinking Fred Flintstone is a better match than the ‘Capn’ for one of them.
He He He. Wilma I’m home. He He He.
Which one rides around the stage on a kids trike smiling and laughing is pretty clear.
The hope and dream of future riches warms the mind and drives away the cold damp nasty truths of reality. Our petroleum-present ‘global economy’ has to go on because the alternative is simply too hard to face. Americans having to care about their fellow man as the only way to survive the future? Anything may go in our society right now, anything except that.
In a decade only one percent of the country will swoosh through the through ancient hills in cars. Ninety-nine percent will be walking because IRAN will have made oil cost $400 a barrel.
It will then be the responsibility of the 99% to keep the roads clear for Obama as he drives by. Every throw of your pick and every scoop of your shovel will be just reward for tolerating Mr. Obama’s unforgivable feats.
? K-Dog
Don’t let the future dog you!!! Vote K-dog.
I wrote this four years ago.
It could be that the majority of U.S. citizens are still clinging habitually to what has, over the past thirty years, come to be “conventional wisdom.” That would be the “wisdom” which claims that to be in the “real” world, one must “sadly” reject or ignore the absolute fact of the universal brotherhood of all men and women, the feelings of love and tolerance that one’s recognition of it can inspire, and the inherent duties it demands. Rejection of these principles gradually allows for the free reign of every human weakness, such as ignorance, arrogance and greed.
More and more people, however, are being shaken free by the increase of suffering, the suffering that the upholding of this paradigm brings. They begin to see clearly that the misery in this world, past, present and future, has as its root cause the selfishness and unbridled hunger for worldly gain which flows from the acceptance of this cultural dictate. One of two fears, that of embarrassment, is an impetus to continue the clinging. The “wisdom” preached by its most avid practitioners suggest that those who have not accepted their deluded logic based upon their shortsighted experience are naive, immature, foolish idealists living in a dream world. The notion is that one should feel embarrassed and would be a complete fool in the eyes of the world were they to follow the lead of their loving heart that suggests any course that risks or sacrifices their own comforts or worldly gains for the sake of strangers. The other fear is unconscious, as it is the fear of shame. The successful practitioners never examine their motives adequately to self-discover or admit the dishonorable, harmful, cruel and corrupt behavior they have allowed for their own selfish ends.
These fears are phantoms. Ask anyone who has stood up to their fears for the sake of principle–undaunted. Franklin Roosevelt, who helped our country through a period not unlike this one we are now facing, knew that we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.
9-19-08
Mountaingal: Today’s pretty rockin’ so far. Keep up the good work. (sarcasm off)
“The universal brotherhood of all men and women, the feelings of love and tolerance that one’s recognition of it can inspire, and the inherent duties it demands. Rejection of these principles gradually allows for the free reign of every human weakness, such as ignorance, arrogance and greed.”
You may have written this four years ago but you have been thinking about depletion issues a lot longer because your insight doesn’t happen right away. Your duty and commitment to the ‘project’ must certainly date from longer than four years ago.
? K-Dog
You first.
Come Together right now over me.
A study was done where Grad Students checked themselves into a mental hospital – and acted normally. Nobody there caught on. Everything they did was patholagized – writing in their notebooks was labeled “writing behavior” and so on.
Ezra Pound, one of the most brilliant men of the 20th century was kept in St Elizabeth’s for 10 years for being against things like the Dresden Holocaust (see Vonnegut’s Slaughter House 5). Likewise, you and Mt Girl would put me in for wanting the White Race to survive. The more things change the more they stay the same.
The influence of Ezra Pound on poetry was immense but his paranoid and racist sentiments toward Jews was his undoing.
Today JHK said:
I am coming to detest Mr. Obama for the unforgivable feats of doing absolutely nothing to oppose, resist, or remedy the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and doing absolutely nothing to restore the rule-of-law in banking.
“Doing absolutely nothing” would have hastened an apocalypse. What you detest is that Mr. Obama has been an activist, and he has been effective in preventing the much awaited Black Swan events, the much awaited doom and gloom scenarios of complete economic collapse.
In 2000 JHK said of Y2K:
In any case, we really won’t know more until a period of time goes by, weeks or perhaps months. If the rollover was a surprise and a shock, then it seems to me that this unprecedented techno-problem still retains the capacity to affect and shock us. This is a nation addicted to happy endings. I just don’t believe that life is like television. Let’s wait a decent interval before declaring victory.
Well, we’ve waited 12 years now for the catastrophe.
Today’s post wisely move the time horizon out a few more years:
we’re in the 1856 equivalent of the cycle now, short of the moment when mere clowning turns to savagery.
So, according to JHK, we have lots of time before the masses of the United States stop being clowns and begin to band together to massacre their neighbors by the millions. I don’t agree. I think our clownhood can continue for decades.
Nevertheless, this movement of the apocalyptic time horizon out to years, instead of the usual days or weeks or months, is an optimistic and reassuring development in JHK’s thinking, one to be welcomed.
But at least this week we got a break from the incessant proclamation of an “imminent” collapse. And we have waited 12 years since JHK’s predictions related to Y2K, with no collapse in sight. The tenor of his Y2K comment was almost mournful, a palpable disappointment that nothhing happened.
The USA Civil War began in 1861. JHK says we are now at 1856. We have an extention in this week’s JHK post: five glorious years. That is a happy
and unexpected ending in today’s post.
I am absolutely addicted to happy endings. The last 70 years have been happy ones.
I am looking forward to my own death. Dying a natural death (of old age or sickness) is a happy event because it is a Bardo transition with the possibility of The Great Liberation… if one is prepared to die.
This happy ending is a possibility for us all. Death cannot be avoided. It is our opportunity to continue our journey well. That is just the way things are set up to help us on our journey. It is exciting. I feel it is my DUTY to prepare to die as gracefully as possible.
Look at his actions. His god is the Almighty Dollar.
My thoughts this morning, are how long will USA send welfare checks to its sworn enemies and how much longer will ‘we’ put up with it?
And the endless war[s].
From Angry White Dude:
Yesterday, the US Senate voted 81 to 10 to CONTINUE aid to Pakistan, Egypt and Libya.
These are countries that are our enemies even though disingenuous politicians continue to refer to them as allies.
After seeing four Americans killed in Libya and attacks on our embassies in Egypt and Pakistan, 81 Senators voted to continue sending money we don’t have to those who call for our death.
The Chinese and Russians must be wetting their pants laughing. They’ll see America fall without ever firing a bullet.
AND:
About 20 years ago, as Hong Kong went to the reds, a Canuk said to me that BC was being overrun by rich Chinese:
Chinese have displaced Whites in Vancouver:
http://www.salisburyreview.co.
Non-whites are occupying all white nations. Obama and the left approve, but theirs are suicide genes.
.
Better lat than never, I always say, James. kulturCritic
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/holy-moses-fratricide-and-the-western-curriculum/
kulturCritic
What did he post about Gays?
Everyone here thought he was [except me]!
“The much awaited Black Swan events”
This statement from someone obviously unfamiliar with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s work.
A black swan event by its very nature is unanticipated. To a turkey every day is a good day right up to the day before thanksgiving.
We are a nation of Turkeys. And you are a really big one. Cluck cluck cluck gobble gobble gobble every week.
JFK: Ask not what your country can do for you [etc]
then things morphed with Teddy K and the Demon-crats, now, wanting most to be dependent
on a check from the Government.
Or do worse.
However it is common sense, yes?
Ha, ha.
The last comment was for you Asoka. I sent it to myself. So the pot calls the kettle black, I mock myself. Ok then, but at least I have something to say.
“The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”
Terence McKenna
Especially when the nights are lit with the light of the bridges we’ve burned.
Hope to see you in Sunderland, Jim.
JD
http://alttransbikes.blogspot.com/
all women are totalitarians
O pleeze, what bars do you go to?
Common Cent:
A big reason Germany is a leader in renewable energy is because they put their money where their mouths are. And, of course, Simmons ain’t Solyndra. People can sell back energy that they produce at retail prices (net metering), and maybe even at a premium if I remember correctly. That’s huge. It isn’t quite cost effective yet, but it is heading that way, and they have the foresight to see that soon they’ll be well justified in their activities. I believe they are getting out of nuclear energy altogether after Fukushima.
Colorado’s Proposition 37 got the energy company (xcel, mainly) to buy back electricity that people with photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines (and whatever else) put back into the grid at wholesale rates. It’s a start. I think California has “net metering”:
“Net energy metering, or “NEM”, is a special billing arrangement that provides credit to customers with solar PV systems for the full retail value of the electricity their system generates. Under NEM, the customer’s electric meter keeps track of how much electricity is consumed by the customer, and how much excess electricity is generated by the system and sent back into the electric utility grid. Over a 12-month period, the customer has to pay only for the net amount of electricity used from the utility over-and-above the amount of electricity generated by their solar system (in addition to monthly customer transmission, distribution, and meter service charges they incur).”
http://www.gosolarcalifornia.org/solar_basics/net_metering.php
Don’t Worry – Drive On – There’s Lots of Oil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uKgU7krWzE
Jim,
I understand and agree with your disgust with President Obama (this comment should get me a reservation at one of the FEMA camps, right?), his lack of pursuit of law in regard to financial matters is staggering.
Last week after reading your latest entry I somehow ambled by Chris Martenson’s podcast and listened to his interview with Janet Tavaloli.
What I expected to hear was a rather dry discussion regarding derivatives, what the conversation evolved into was so much more. Next to Chris’s interview with you a few weeks ago this is in my opinion one of his best. I suggest to those who haven’t hear it to take an hour and take a listen.
Here’s the link;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfWTJg–K0&list=UUD2-QVBQi48RRQTD4Jhxu8w&index=0&feature=plcp
Good to hear you’re feeling well enough to be playin’ the fiddle, now get out there and prep that garden…
Later,
This CF’d Nation
Oz, check out Mayer Hawthorne, ‘The Walk’ on YouTube,
(Not to change the subject to something totally irrelevant to CFN)
–WSP7
Siemens ain’t Solyndra
They are a leader because they provide incentives to German dogs to go solar. The role of government there is to facilitate. change not prevent it like here. Americans believe in every dog for himself. Fuck the future, I want mine and I want it now and government had better stay out of meh way.
A black swan event by its very nature is unanticipated.
==========
That is why Taleb wrote a book about, so no one would ever think about Black Swan events, you know, because they are totally unpredictable. Don’t think about pink elephants, either.
You know I am familiar with the book. I have quoted from it about the unpredictable nature of Black Swan events. Nonetheless, several people here think one will happen at some point in time unknown to us.
About Turkeys: Thanksgiving Day, the day our heads are on the chopping block, comes for all of us. There is no avoiding Thanksgiving Day. There is a way to welcome its inevitability and experience it as a happy day.
at least I have something to say.
============
So do I. Your indirect insult is not appreciated.
I had things to say about today’s post. About the Civil War, and about it being 1856 in America now. And I have things to say about death. Because some people here believe if they are heavily armed, they are not going to die. Actually having a good supply of firearms and ammunition will make you a target.
I thought I was rather direct.
I’ve got to admit, James, that you really threw me with your pro-Lincoln stuff. As a person who seems to despise bigness, how you can say that Lincoln was “selected by the hand of Providence” is beyond me. After reading a few books by anti-Lincoln scholar Thomas DiLorenzo, I now believe that the War of Northern Aggression was completely unjustified. The South had a constitutional right to secede peacefully, and slavery would have fallen of its own contradictions, as it did in most other countries, without 600,000 dead. Besides slavery was never the main reason for fighting the war anyway. It was always about trade and dishonest Abe’s obsession with keeping the Union together whatever the costs. Lincoln shredded the constitution and ended our free Republic. It lead more or less directly to the system we have today, with most power centralized in DC and a Pres with more power than the strongest emperor in history.
cheer up and have a bowel movement.
Why do you want to directly insult me?
They accomplish all that solar power with half the sunlight as the SW USA. That’s something to howl about. It shows where we could do more. I met this guy in Boulder who said that we could power the whole state of CO if we put solar panels just in the corners of the irrigated fields (the irrigation systems make big circles in the fields but doesn’t use the corners) in the San Luis Valley (south central CO). I see a lot of windmills going up in the Midwest, farmers are making some extra bucks there. Just every quarter mile or so they lease a small square of land and are making electricity along with their roundup ready corn and soybeans. Droughts have no effect on the windmills, either, and they don’t require increasing amounts of herbicide to kill superweeds. Bonus. Give’em a bone. Lots of action at the European windmill factory in Fort Collins. Can’t we have some incoming technology transfer of our own and start making our own windmills? Put Mitt on it.
I agree with your sentiments, Dirk, but how on earth can a Pres, even one with Obama’s considerable rhetorical skills, possibly explain to the mass of low-information voters that we need to “manage contraction”? Can you say Jimmy Carter? Carter was actually ahead of his time, with his warnings about our nation’s lack of an energy policy, and it lead to defeat after one term. He was right about “malaise” but it was politically stupid to say it. I’ll take Obama over corporate raider, tax evader Romney any day!
Seeing a reference to The Fourth Turning (a book I just got around to reading a few months ago, and one I strongly recommend to anybody who cares about getting things in perspective), one thought comes to mind.
Who might be a Grey Champion?
I correspond with an older cousin, about a range of things. Among other things, I recommended The Fourth Turning. For reference, he’s an early Boomer, born just after WWII (I’m a late period Boomer myself), he’s also been an earnest student of history all his life, and has a political science degree.
Lately, the subject of the presidential election is up. He’s very focused on reelecting Obama. The alternative of Mittens the Cat is to horrid and absurd to contemplate for all kinds of reasons, including the notion that this character is like a fiction writer creating a character by starting with Thurston Howell III and making him a pathological liar.
(reference note: follow the running log of Mitt’s Mendacity – http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/21/14015581-chronicling-mitts-mendacity-vol-xxxv )
I yap frequently about the predicament of oil and energy resources and consumption in general in my own blog (http://jleagan.wordpress.com/ … I’ll be one of the self-promoting critters, not that it matters a lot).
I discuss some of the subject with him, including the biggest item of all; how almost completely the general populace is either completely ignorant or absurdly misled and confused in this stuff.
He’s made comments about maybe being a little obsessive, or “stuck”, about this oil thing, being “your thing”; essentially treating it as if this is just a kind of side item subject that’s just my personal fixation.
He thinks it’s more important, for example, to, if I’m going to write blog pieces, to give the “oil thing” a break (the thing is, that’s only one of many things I yap about) and focus on getting people to vote for Obama’s reelection.
Among other things, he’s arguing that Romney would be worse than useless regarding energy matters (no argument needed there) and unless we get Obama reelected, nothing’s going to get better in the “energy” realm.
I’m having a hell of a time convincing him that while Obama is the only sane choice given the options at hand, the idea that reelecting Obama will improve matters in this particular subject area is, shall we say, extremely naive, failing to really get the picture.
That’s just one item. Not even getting into, for one, the complete evasion of the whole banking and finance clusterfuck.
In short, he remains convinced that it’s a matter of electing the right people to elected office, and then we’ll have the right policies.
I’m still having a tough time convincing him that as long as the predominant portion of the American citizenry understands what’s happening and gets on the case of any and all elected officials, nothing in the realm of “policy” is going to address anything needing to be addressed as is necessary, along with the second part of this. Nobody wanting to look in a mirror and ask we they/we need to do, and change ourselves, never mind “policy” and what politicos are doing.
JLE
Item of interest in the context of collapse: A new JJ Abrams NBC show titled “Revolution”, piloted last week. We are looking at a dystopian future 15 years after power turned off, with some elements perhaps borrowed from the World Made by Hand novels – with militias roaming the countryside, small communities engaged in hunting and local agriculture etc.
In the pilot (spoiler alert), the manner in which power “turns off” is ridiculous – an event in which all cars, trains and planes stop operating at exactly the same instant. Meaning, this isn’t the result of fossil energy depletion – who could believe that? – but rather a mysterious cause which the show’s protagonists are out to discover in the coming episodes.
Does this mean that mainstream culture is starting to accept the possibility of collapse? I don’t think so, but it seems as if some ideas being discussed by JHK and this forum are starting to penetrate to the artistic community if not to any “decision makers”.
2 items:
First, for those of you pulling your hair out because Apple pulled the plug on Googe’s transit mapping, here is what can only be described as THE transit app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-transit-app/id498151501?mt=8 The guy who developed this clearly understand what it is needed to make transit viable: it shows you when all the buses/trains nearby are coming.
Second, the best “fix” for the Citizens United decision I’ve heard is this: we simply prohibit individuals/corporations/unions/etc. from making donations to politicians outside their own districts/places where they do substantial business.
For example: I can:
donate to a presidential campaign
donate to a Senate candidate, but only for running in Florida
donate to a House campaign, but only in my district.
etc.
If my sister got a bug up her butt and decided to run for mayor of Fort Lauderdale and I wanted to blow my inheritance getting her elected, I’d have to move from Miami to Fort Lauderdale to do it. Likewise, my Miami-based could not contribute to her campaign. EASY fix really.
Thank you for the response, but you are missing the point. The point is not what is someone’s ethnicity, but is he or she a producer? A workhorse or a showboat? When our society returns to valuing competence over pizzaz, accompishment over pulchritude, character over style, skill over chutzpah, we might be able to build good roads again.
You cannot build a road or building by yourself; someone needs to hire you to do the part which is your area of expertise and skill, and that person needs to be looking for competence, skill, character and work ethic, no matter what the package which houses those qualities.
Productive people are not necessarily fun. They don’t normally dress for success, they might not laugh at your lame jokes, and they don’t suffer fools lightly. They usually don’t spend money they don’t have to help keep your incompetent business associates going a little longer, and they don’t feel obligated to conceal their awesome skills just because they might hurt some cutie-pie’s or frat boy’s poor tender little feelingses.
Jere it is.
Check out his seed catalogue. Dozens upon dozens of tomatoes, in every possible color, more dozens of peppers, yet more dozens of cukes and squash. And so on and so on. And every last one open pollinated, so you can save seeds if you like, and never buy seeds again. Even if you don’t grow anything, the Baker Street Catalogues are great fun to read. Don’t you just love the “choices” this wonderful Late Modern Industrial Machine Economy has given us?
Grouchy Old Girl,
As a former Repugnican, I couldn’t agree with your sentiments more. Although we may still have a disastrous war with Iran (with Russia & China on their side), the only hope to avoid it is a second Obama term. Do you all remember McCain singing “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the Beach Boys old hit? McCain wants to intervene everywhere, with Romney in his footsteps. Romney stands ready to outsource our foreign policy to Netanyahu. Nothing will bring about our downfall faster than another major war. Vote Obama and pray that he has the guts to stand up more against our MI/Security complex in a 2nd term.
Life after the crash will be tough, but can be a loto fun…here is how to Prep Paradise Style…make sure to bring sun screen!
http://methodlodge.com/packages/method-lodge
Good point ksat,
I’ve been underwhelmed by both candidates but will probably vote for Obama.
It scares me that Romney and Netanyahu went to Harvard together. But Obama got us into the mess with Libya and Egypt. I want the US to stay out of civil wars!
Most people on this blog know that I’m a recovering Mormon whose ancestors came across the plains with Brigham Young. My mom in Salt Lake City loves Mitt Romney. I consider her to be an irrational Mormon. The other day she was quoting the bible, “Those that don’t stand with Isreal will be destroyed.” Ugh.
Hopefully, Mitt is more rational than my mother!
‘… the peevish carpings of the teabags-for-brains bunch.’!!!
And a great, darkly poetic concluding sentence:
‘We have achieved something that few cultures ever have before: made ourselves unworthy even of our own low standards. There is no center left to hold, only ragged edges around a core of darkness.’
You get the optimist of the week award. But the “seeing clearly what is right in front of your eyes” award not so much.
Radu Voda, are you Vlad by any chance?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I fear our rough beast may soon be the flash of a thousand suns which will vaporize the sins of devout and infidel alike.
Free webinar tomorrow (Tues) with JHK. Sign up at
http://www.nourishtheplanet.com
Blueberries jus plant em n dey grow.
Delicious Giant Blueberries. Western civilization is saved. The party goes on.
And here I thought I was the only one who enjoyed reading seed catalogs, silly me.
The Blueberry link.
this is exactly why i only check in here once in a while…
i have no idea what this link proves about infantile behavior. or how this fundraising event is the cause of juvenile or infantile verbiage in this page’s comment section.
Yes all it would take is a bone. Germans are guaranteed to make money from their solar panels by their government. If the same thing were done here we would
.
.
.
stimulate the economy!!!!!!!
Solyndra is interesting because Americans don’t believe in technology if its more than ten minutes old. The nonsense about a Kurzweil ‘s singularity approaching has cause sever brain damage in America. We seem incapable of trusting technology unless it is brand new. Some people say that we can’t build windmills unless we use magic ceramics and metals from China when ordinary steel, copper wire an WWII technology would do just fine.
I smells a rat. There is a lot of propaganda spewed out making it sound like solving our problems is too complicated and hard and requires new technology.
We have technology that people only fifty years ago would have thought was magic. We have more than enough technology now to solve all our nations problems. All we have to do is apply ourselves to use it. We have to have the brains to use it wisely, that’s all.
But that’s the rub. Much better to get people talking about flying cars of the future and fantasies that will be sure to lull them to sleep, sweet dreams and inaction. The corporate bottom line is preserved.
Why? Things are what they are. A Rose by any other name smells just as sweet.
So you agree with what was done to him – and what the Missouri ADL Report reccomends for all Patriots?
You also must agree with what was done to Dresden, Germany. See Slaughterhouse Five by the Liberal Kurt Vonnegut.
This makes you a monster btw.
Well put. Whites are work horses and Blacks are show boats.
Mexicans are good workers but dumb – they don’t produce or maintain advanced civilizations. Whites are the whole package. Sad that you can’t see that.
Jere short for Jeremiath Gettle. Got it. Yes, I love food. The heirloom tomatoes took me a second to like, green and a little crazy-looking, until I ate one. Then, I was convinced. Oh yeah. No problem.
I found this site. Farmaid.com. Not Far Maid, btw, Farm Aid. There’s Willie Nelson, John Cougar Mellencamp (whatever), Dave Matthews, and Neil Young pictured above an article about Jere. That might be an interesting website:
http://www.farmaid.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=qlI5IhNVJsE&b=2723875&ct=7515755
I’ll check it out and the seed catalog as long as I can keep my computer from rebooting (and resetting several tabs), like it keeps telling me it wants to do. I’ll do this later. This is quite a time devourer. 🙂 Peace.
Once you get distributed energy production widespread, centralized energy production with all its waste and monopoly power is lessened. It is obvious that this is a good thing, but, like Tony Blair said recently about climate change action, it has to come from the bottom up, for obvious reasons, like you said, you know…lobbyists.
That said, that’s the beauty of states that allow propositions to be voted on by the people. Something like legalized marijuana wouldn’t make it to the floor for a vote in a legislature, but it’s on the ballot in Colorado and has a good chance of passing. I won’t go into that now, but, secret ballot notwithstanding, I’ll mark yea.
Whatever the future holds, a fidde will still be tuned EADG.
This can be remembered as Gee Dad, An Egg, upside down unless one is left handed of course.
Doc
“You may have written this four years ago but you have been thinking about depletion issues a lot longer because your insight doesn’t happen right away. Your duty and commitment to the ‘project’ must certainly date from longer than four years ago.”
K-Dog, I am not familiar with what you mean by “depletion issues” and the ‘project.” Please, fill me in.
I’ll go into in now but only to the extent that it is relevant. WA state has a proposition on the ballot I-502 and it is terrible not because I appose legalization, I don’t. The initiative places draconian restrictions on driving on the unfounded belief that marijuana causes traffic fatalities, it doesn’t. Further state registration of growers is mandatory in the initiative and the state gets to identify everyone involved. Californians already know that’s a bad idea. They found out the hard way.
I said I’d get into it only to the extent that it is relevant. Here is the relevance. It’s like Obama, once a law gets passed it is really hard to change it or get rid of it. In principle one can agree with legalization of Marijuana but vote for it in WA state this year and you might not be driving next year. A dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t proposition.
A good example is that of prohibition. Prohibition has never been completely repealed, and last I checked there were still a few dry counties in the country. We have seen old black and white photos of people in bars celebrating the end of prohibition but the reality is that there was a lot more too it and the process took a lot longer.
It is extremely important that any laws and regulations we pass to mitigate the clusterfuck be well drafted and thought out and that’s the relevance to your Colorado connection this week.
The initiative process is flawed but Republicans hate it with a flaming passion. Evidence that the initiative process is definitely a good thing.
er…. about the above… brain fart correction.
I meant to say “UNTIL the predominant portion of the American citizenry understands what’s happening…”.
Sorry. Carry on.
JLE
Hey MtGal,
One of the great things about this forum is the freeform nature: anything goes, it is an outright rumble. Perhaps an anarchist riot of a place to express your opinions. That’s why we like it.
As far a today’s topic, the incumbent may be a puppet, but he is the best one on the ticket.
The fear factor for the future is very obvious. Look around, there are no children in the playgrounds anymore. The new generations are programed to behave in front of a tv monitor. Is this the way it will go down, with drones controlled by video gamers killing anything that moves on the ground?
Let the record show that I do not in any way shape or fashion associate myself with these sentiments.
My point, which went right over your head, though not, I would bet, our host’s, was that the roads and other artifacts of the well built America of decades past were built by those very “squares” who were so much ridiculed by the likes of, eg., the sainted Lenny Bruce.
Ok, K-dog, I guess I do have a dog in this fight. We passed marijuana for medical use, but we had similar problems. They added requirements a couple years ago that was basically a written confession for the dispensaries. Who knows what’s up with that, but we are now going to go furthur. 🙂
It’s our duty.
To keep on topic, it’s our duty to end the war on plants.
Peak oil is a depletion issue as we run out of the cheap high ROEI stuff. The environment is a depletion issue because there is only so much atmosphere with which to dilute the CO2 we spew out. Our problems are now acute because we have a depletion issue concerning the amount of earth surface per person that is available to absorb the effects of human activity. That depletion issue is called overpopulation.
I said depletion issue but the way I prefer looking at things is that we are fighting a huge limits to growth problem. This limits to growth problem manifests itself in many ways only one of which is the availability and price of energy but fundamentally this problem is not a technical one at all but a social problem. It looks like a technical problem to most people but people who read Clusterfuck Nation are learning otherwise. Readers here are learning not to accept the current zeitgeist.
Readers here are learning not to accept the current zeitgeist.
I wrote that?
LOL
The following is from an article in today’s Globe and Mail about the free-trade agreement with China that the Canadian government is supposed to be considering.
“For many Canadians, this rapidly evolving new world order is just plain frightening. After all, Canada has had it so easy for so long, with the world’s largest economy next door, bound by a common history, culture and language.
Now businesses and politicians must deal with a plethora of Asian cultures, languages and laws, all of it incomprehensible to many Canadians – at least to many of European descent.”
Looks like European Canada has had its run.
You must be Vlad because nobody else spews out the racist crap like Vlad.
And the sexist crap.
Obama has put out the word that he wants all states to enact strict DWI laws concerning Marijuana. The fact that no scientific evidence can be found showing that it causes a problem is irrelevant. Mr. Obama’s priorities do not lie with the people.
It would be much easier to pass a low that makes it an infractions to be driving ten miles an hour or less below the speed limit. That would certainly nab a few dogs.
K-Dog, you’re sounding like Frences Moore Lappe, the woman who wrote “Diet For a Small Planet”. One of her more recent books, “EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want”, is about what you just said. I haven’t read it but I met her a few years back and (not a big deal) was supposed to read it and critique it, but never did. I know. She was asking everyone to do it, it’s not like I’m a pro or whatever. Anyway, I think this is the same book.
“n EcoMind, Frances Moore Lappé—a giant of the environmental movement—confronts accepted wisdom of environmentalism. Drawing on the latest research from anthropology to neuroscience and her own field experience, she argues that the biggest challenge to human survival isn’t our fossil fuel dependency, melting glaciers, or other calamities. Rather, it’s our faulty way of thinking about these environmental crises that robs us of power. Lappé dismantles seven common “thought traps”—from limits to growth to the failings of democracy— that belie what we now know about nature, including our own, and offers contrasting “thought leaps” that reveal our hidden power.”
Maybe you could read it and give me the details. Come on, Dog!
He admitted it to me a couple of weeks ago when I spotted his unique speech patterns. Yes it is he.
That’s another reason for bicycling stoned.
My book budget is suffering from it’s own depletion issues (another part of the bigger problem) but I welcome your suggestion. Frences Moore Lappe I are not alone. Several anthropologists scientists and writers have been examining this issue as they observe us make no progress on our ‘limits to growth’ problems in the thirty years since Limits to Growth was published in 1972. I represent their efforts.
One definition of insanity is to try the same thing over again and to expect a different result each time. When a solution to a problem isn’t working it is time to reexamine the problem to see if you are solving the right one. That can make all the difference.
First, Mountaingal tells JHK’s readers what they should post. Then Jagger explains to our planet’s seven billion inhabitants their true purpose in life.
People are not supposed to write what they want nor to live as they wish. Is that it?
That could still get you a DWI if there was probable cause to take a sample and probable cause can be faked. Of course to believe that police would misuse a law just to harass people is crazy.
Isn’t it.
It’s a funny thing about that, being one keystroke away from a dark age. I’m in a profession now where the focus has become the digitization of human knowledge (essentially), while at the same time the profession seems to be eschewing the physical preservation of those information-bearing remnants of human culture. Now you’d think people who deal with this on a daily basis would be better versed in how fragile the digital world really is, but I find increasingly the opposite is the case. It’s just a philosophy of “damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”
I mean jesus, if people who deal with the preservation of knowledge can’t even learn from what they work with on a daily basis that what we have now is an anomaly, a blip fueled by cheap energy, what hope do we have?
My book budget is suffering from it’s own depletion issues (another part of the bigger problem) but I welcome your suggestion. Frences Moore Lappe I are not alone. Several anthropologists scientists and writers have been examining this issue as they observe us make no progress on our ‘limits to growth’ problems in the forty years since Limits to Growth was published in 1972. I represent their efforts.
aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrr wooooof Frences Moore Lappe and I are ….
btw, it’s Frances Moore Lappe, don’t know how to put the little thing on the end of Lappe.
Anyway, that’s pretty interesting about the Limits to Growth studies. I’d be interested in a link if you had one.
Obviously, we aren’t trying to limit growth. The result of the recent G20 in Mexico City had them saying that Ben Bernanke and Co. didn’t do enough to “help growth”. I think we just aren’t looking at the right path, too. The whole Heinbergian Power Down. It just doesn’t fit what you see on tv!
As for you reading the book for me, I’ll be alright. I think I have an advance reading copy somewhere. She was asking people on her website, etc., to get the arc, read it, and give suggestions via the website. I saw her talk at the Sustainable Living Fair in Fort Collins several years ago. She was very nice and enthusiastic. She said something I remember now. It was something somebody else said to her, something to the effect of: things are way too bad to not be enthusiastic.
Loneliness can do that.
As for getting a dwi on a bike, maybe in WA State, not heard of much in these parts.
Obama has put out the word that he wants all states to enact strict DWI laws concerning Marijuana. The fact that no scientific evidence can be found showing that it causes a problem is irrelevant.
K-dog
————————————————–
Goodness me, K-dog! Speaking for myself I’ve been so stoned at times that there was NO WAY I would have gotten behind the wheel. I wouldn’t have gotten on a bicycle either.
Allahu Akbar! (???? ????)
Assalaamu alaikum!
‘Obviously, we aren’t trying to limit growth. The result of the recent G20 in Mexico City had them saying that Ben Bernanke and Co. didn’t do enough to “help growth”.’
Nothing is wrong with growth if it is the right kind of growth. The way to respond to BB & Co. would be to make them explain themselves, not that we are ever given the chance.
Healthy reality based growth would be good as long as it didn’t grow more population with the prosperity. I am not an enemy of growth. I am an enemy of unsustainable growth that robs our children of their future.
That is one of the differences between marijuana and alcohol. Drunks can do anything, just ask one. Cannabis users on the other hand know if they are dangerous and can make responsible decisions in spite of being stoned, just like you did.
Nastarana,
Great post. I recall talking to a man from China who told me that nearly 40 years after WW2 ended that the U.S. Army Corp Of Engineers still had an exalted,legendary status in China. Below is some very interesting facts:
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=1522
“We have no sense of anything except the junk-cluttered moment”
Wow. That’s good writing, JHK. Expresses the great angst I feel as being thrust from a childhood of Dick Tracy comics and Mickey Mouse theme songs to an adulthood of 121 images splashed before my eyes in a 2 minute shoe commercial.
Modern American Society. Do NOT think-feel-be conscious of anything of value. Just absorb the crap and react.
“There is no center left to hold, only ragged edges around a core of darkness.”
Another way to say we have lost our souls. Just mindless zombies trudging toward Armageddon.
K-Dog, someone is impersonating me with the handle Asoka_
I am Asoka..
Asoka_ is not Asoka..
I have never done drugs in my life.
You never answered my question: why do you insult people gratuitously, instead of responding to the content of their posts?
I’m sorry Asoka your right I thought it was you. Not even an aspirin you say?
Anyway thank you for correcting me I’ll be more careful. As everyone here can plainly see I was having a rational discussion with the other Asoka and I should have been suspicious. The other Asoka it is very civilized and since that Asoka was polite to me I responded in kind.
Tit for tat you know.
To save you future typing and to help you understand things, I do not answer dishonest questions and I have a mature dogs nose for them. You are incredibly dishonest and if your questions to me are not being answered then it is no officially up to you to wonder why.
The other Asoka impersonates you yes, but his/her questions were honest and I was nice.
You can defect and start being genuine any time and I’ll treat you good too.
now officially
DT:
“it’s Frances Moore Lappe, don’t know how to put the little thing on the end of Lappe.”
Try: (if on XP) Start->All Programs->Accessories->Character Map
There you can find most accents, etc:
Lappé
[can u 3force?]
?
? ?
[i thought not]®
oh, it’s Accessories->System Tools->Char Map
�E9;
Frances Moore Lappé
It is a Latin Unicode character and my attempt at printing it just failed. I’m going to look into this. One way to do it would be to find the Latin character you need on a web page and simply cut and paste.
é
Type
é
To produce é
Start a code with an & then give the character name in this case ‘eacute’ followed by an ‘;’
characters
or type Lappe.
Lappé
haha.
Lappé
Thanks KDog and AK, respectively.
ASUS V9999 GFX Card Issue
I’ve bought a ASUS V9999/TD/128MB 6800/AGP Graphics card. Right after placing it in it is slot (the only real slot it would fit into, so I know it’s the correct slot.) I turned within the Computer as well as the card began screaming at me. I rather really loud screech audio. Absolutely nothing around the keep an eye on appeared once i ahd the monitor plugged into the new screeching GFX card or maybe the previous intergrated GFX. So I have took out the new card and now right here I am, at your mercy.
I have uninstalled the outdated Intergrated Graphics drivers before I attempted placing the new card in aswell.
* AGP 8x, DirectX 9,beauty products wholesale, OpenGL supports further specifics. The following expenditure choices are probable: VGA, DVI, s-video, VideoCinch, VGA+VGA, VGA+DVI, VGA+S video, VGA+VideoCinch,buy mac makeup online, DVI+S online video, DVI+VideoCinch
I have precisely the same video card and I’ve this card tweeked for the intense! I am using RivaTuner and have unlocked the other 4 pipes on that card for a total of 16 pipes. For that driver I do not utilize the ASUS driver I utilize the Nvidia driver; however I do use probably the most current Intelligent Medical professional and also have this card screaming!!! I’m able to practically perform all of the maximum setting in BF2. Fall me a reply for those who have to have even more material! BTW ASUS features a three yr warrenty if there is certainly an issue RMA it to ASUS and acquire that card working. For a subject of is it pci-e or pci or AGP in case you can’t figurre that out you could need to rethink constructing computers. Sorry for your rudness but you’ll want to have the capacity to determine that one particular out easily. Thanks Ritespeed
The first one I did was the é followed by ;. I like the other method, as well. K-D’s version gives a description: “e acute”. Got it. £ Money.
Tit for tat you know.
==============
Yes, but there was no tat to tit. I have been polite to you.
At least I understand why you decided to insult me: you mistakenly believe I am “incredibly dishonest” … not true, but it at least explains your behavior. Thanks for providing that reason.
I realize all I have to do to let you win is not respond and after this I won’t, bye.
But it was ‘Tit for tat’
But you admit yourself that most of what you do is cut and paste.
We both know you have not read the Black Swan Asoka, I have.
I accused you of not being familiar with it. To be absolutely correct I accused you of not knowing the authors work. You turn this into an ‘insult’ and that is dishonest of you.
You didn’t want to fess up and it suits your purposes to claim I was insulting you. Whatever.
You come in here for the sole purpose of derailing discussion every week, exactly like the other one who’s name I shall not speak.
Don’t feed the trolls, pls
Excellent post today JHK.
On my way to work tonight, NPR was talking about that is decade belongs to Africa. A member of the IMF was talking about all the money being pumped into that continent and they are building bridges, roads, airports,and cars, and soon it will become an industrial haven of well fed, educated, peace loving humans as long as they follow the IMF poicy of being friendly to business. NPR host was excited about this, oh NPR has become zombieified!
Do you think that I can get a refund from the government Tourism Board on my tickets purchased from “Time Travel” travel agency?
I think that they might have ripped me off.
“Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.”
I don’t want to travel back into time. I just want to ejaculate my sperm into the past.
My book budget is suffering from it’s own depletion issues
=============
Try interlibrary loan requests at your local public library. They can get most anything except books that were published yesterday.
Helen,
Someone is impersonating me
using Asoka,, and Asoka_
All those false posts make people think I am posting a lot.
My handle is Asoka.. and I do not post a lot.
The posts also encourage people like ak to post this: “Don’t feed the trolls, pls”
So I would say whoever is impersonating me is doing a good job of convincing others I am a troll. Anyway, I don’t deserve the optimist award. That should go to Asoka,,
Thanks, though.
You should do that. Get an interlibrary loan of “Black Swan” and then actually read the damn thing.
Michael
JHK wrote: “…the absence of any sense of duty to the project of being the only self-aware organisms (as far as anyone knows) in the universe.”
What about Big Foot?
Big Foot for President….
On an Apple computer it’s even simpler. Any character you want to put an accent mark over is done by pressing the option and e keys simultaneously, then pressing the vowel you want the accent over.
option e then e = é
option e then a = á
option e then u = ú
option e then i = í
It’s simple. It works. It’s Apple.
Just read ,,’s post from @ noon today. That sure sounds like you. I think he may be doing a cut and paste job of previous posts of yours.
In that case perhaps you should get this week’s optimist award…
Don’t worry, be happy.
Michael
If you send in 5 Bucks to the Big-Foot-for-President-campaign, you’ll get a chance to win an all-expense paid trip to have dinner with Big Foot, Beyonce, and rapper and ex-crack head Jay-Z.
What I object to is the use of the Black Swan metaphor on CFN to always indicate something negative.
A Black Swan is nothing more than an “outlier” or an exception that has the property of carrying a large impact. Of course, another one of its attributes lies in its character of surprise.
But the “large impact” does not always translate to something negative. For example, in the arts, it can correspond to a piece of work that, unexpectedly, captivates interests, spreads like wildfire, and dwarfs other contributions.
Illustrative examples are provided with Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion, Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, The Harry Potter series, or even the wild success of The Beatles.
What all of these pieces have in common is that they were not necessarily expected to generate any meaningful interest at the time, thus satisfying the empirical criterion of “locally unexpected.”
For instance, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu could not find a publisher.
Nobody in Roman times expected the accumulated writings of a rebellious tribe to become a dominant book two millennia later –such prediction would have been deemed a lunacy.
Nor did anyone in 19th Century France conceive that Japanese investors would obsess over what we call now impressionistic paintings, paying for them several thousand times what the average painting would command.
But on CFN, the mention of Black Swan is always in the context of TSHTF due to some completely unanticipated event.
If you were intellectually honest, you would acknowledge that there is an equally legitimate possibility that a Black Swan might be a wildly unexpected scientific discovery, for example, an inexpensive way to desalinate water, immediately solving the world’s water crisis. Just happens, out of the blue. You weren’t expecting it.
No one on CFN expects such a positive Black Swan event to occur. On CFN everyone is inoculated against “magical thinking” … even when it comes in the form of scientific or technological advance that actually solves crucial problems for human survival on the planet.
Mike Hunt, do you care to address the substance of my post, or do you want to continue making me the subject of discussion? Address the content instead of engaging in ad hominem. You risk becoming a troll otherwise.
I make substantive posts, quoting JHK from today’s post, quoting JHK from a 2000 post on Y2K to illustrate his penchant to forecast the worst, in a short time frame, even though his predictions always fail. That is what I want to discuss: JHK’s posts.
You guys are hurling all kinds of things at me, about me, about my posts, impersonating me, cutting and pasting my posts, calling me names.
I think JHK allows freedom on this blog because it illustrates how a clusterfuck happens. Each week the content of my comments is ignored. Each week it devolves into ad hominem attack.
It’s enough to make me suspect there may be some racists here who are reacting to something other than content. Yes, I just “played the race card.”
How else to explain the CFN penchant of attacking me every week while ignoring the substance of my arguments? (Some, like XXX5, deny I even have the capacity to argue logically.)
I hate when I start to barf and nothing comes out. Like the hiccups sort of. You humans don’t have the problem as bad as we do because you are vertical.
Which NPR host was it? If it is the sock puppet I’m thinking about then the words IMF from his mouth wound definitely trigger an uncontrollable spat of dry barf. This concerns the dogs health, I really need to know.
Those proposals of buying back electricity are much better than what we currently have here. The power company buys it back far below what it costs them to make even with coal. Talk about arbitrage. You’d be better to sell the extra to your neighbors for cheap and still come out ahead.
“I have never done drugs in my life.”
You’re attacked every week because we just can’t BELIEVE anyone could be so fucked up and not be “on drugs”.
“Carter was actually ahead of his time, with his warnings about our nation’s lack of an energy policy.”
He has been the only President who addressed this problem honestly. The rest kow-tow to big oil. His real downfall was the economy (high inflation, caused by high energy costs) and the mishandling of the hostage crisis in Iran. He came off as weak. America wanted a hero and in rode Reagan. You believed in his direct approach and believed he would follow through on his words; the world believed it too. Along with Thatcher and the Pope, they were no longer going to be pushed around from anyone (detente was dead), not Iran and not the Soviets. This feeling of “fighting back” hugely worked for George W. following 911. Obama appears to follow Carter. He wants to be the good guy. Our opponents know this and play on it. It isn’t good for America.
It is just possible that you make a reference to the Do-Nothing Party that existed roughly and briefly around 1856? Abraham Lincoln, quoted by University of Massachusetts Professor Stephen Oates, preferred to live in Russia if the Know Nothings ever succeeded. According to Lincoln, “When the Know Nothings get control, it will read ‘all me are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’”
Read more at Suite101: The Know Nothing Party in 1854 and 1856: The Move Against Irish and German Immigration | Suite101.com http://suite101.com/article/the-know-nothing-party-in-1854-and-1856-a104742#ixzz27SfmQnM4
“Each week the content of my comments is ignored.”
Welcome to the club. Many have written volumes of books, and still others don’t read them.
Booming Vietnam’s nouveaux riches bask in luxury
“Our prospects want people today to know that they may be high-class.”
Not long ago, shows of wealth were frowned on in Vietnam. Individuals tire-sandaled troops who bested the French colonial military and outlasted the People in america embodied frugality and egalitarianism. The revolutionary govt snatched up the property of your wealthy and redistributed them for the weak.
But because the late nineteen eighties, a authorities that once micromanaged all financial affairs has been introducing free-market reforms and courting foreign investors, and with them have appear new Western designs and attitudes.
“Members with the new generation desire to delight in daily life and pamper by themselves with lavish items,” mentioned Nguyen Thi Cam Van, 39, that has bought 5 $1,000 purses at Louis Vuitton.
“If I’m able to manage to get something great, it tends to make me feel proud,” mentioned Van, who operates at Siemens and also consults for a Vietnamese import business. “It lets you show consumers your flavor and fashion.”
One particular of her good friends has fifty Louis Vuitton baggage,louis vuitton for sale, Van stated. “I believe 5 is enough.”
A number of Vietnam’s shopaholics are youthful people who work for multinational firms but nevertheless live rent-free with their moms and dads. Other individuals perform for powerful state-owned businesses and quite a few have produced fortunes in Vietnam’s little but booming private sector.
They indulge their urge to splurge at Dolce and Gabbana, Burberry, Escada, Rolex, Clarins, Shiseido plus the like.
Within the two decades considering that Vietnam started utilizing its financial reforms, the nation’s poverty charge has become reduce in half, and per capita earnings has doubled inside the last 5 years.
Nevertheless, most employees within this nation of eighty four million most people nonetheless make just a dollar or two per day toiling inside the farm fields.
Individuals operating low-wage employment come across the new lust for luxury hard to stomach.
“The rich are acquiring richer, and the relaxation of us are struggling to make ends match,” stated Dao Quang Hung, a Hanoi taxi driver. “The income they invest on a Louis Vuitton bag could obtain many cows for any farmer’s loved ones and raise them out of poverty.”
At the new Gucci shop in Ho Chi Minh Town, the flip-flops are amongst the economic climate items.
The black-clad revenue staff, looking fresh off a fashion demonstrate runway in Milan, present a pair of golden, spike-heeled shoes for $765.
Throughout the corridor in the Milano retailer, the display final year highlighted a $54,000 Dolce and Gabbana dress, one particular of just 3 in the world, in line with advertising director Dang Tu Anh, who represents both retailers.
“the idea that reelecting Obama will improve matters in this particular subject area is, shall we say, extremely naive, failing to really get the picture.”
Obama has had 4 years to address energy issues which he has said nothing about. No one in DC does. It doesn’t make them money. It doesn’t make anyone money, not even your cousin. Hence, he and the rest of the world play stupid until someone else comes along and gives them the answer. Then the solution becomes so apparent.
Maybe the real solution is not allowing the “old fool” to play us and prove what fools we are ourselves.
“We’re one bomb-vest or HFT keystroke away from a possible dark age, or at least a world made by hand.”
Jim,
We already live in a new “Dark Age”; as Jacques Barzun called it, an age of decadence. While the Middle Ages had Scholasticism, we have Scientism. “Our” compulsion to privilege quantification has left us unable to handle the nuance and “grey areas” central to our humanity. Thus, we force ourselves and everything we experience into a binary trap; in/out, good/bad, right/wrong, growth/doom, black/white, on/off, 1/0. The humanities have been ignored and neglected, and yes, abused. They lie corroding in the elements like the nation’s infrastructure.
We treat out children like products, our teachers like machines. We buy and sell one another for as little as possible and in so doing, sap one another of our dignity. We treat one another like some much refuse and lampoon those that point out our loss of community. We value nothing. As you say, “anything goes and nothing matters” and when nothing matters, well, nothing matters.
But there are the margins. Look a little closer. You will see a re-localization movement; fledgling and under siege, but it is there. People know something is “wrong” with how we do but for most, it will take events more disruptive than we have experienced to date to bring about the next Great Awakening.
But folks are awakening. From the bourgeois foodies to us over educated farmers, from the right-wing preppers to the “just walking away” neo-primativos, something is afoot. All of us Greenies and Critical Thinkers, us Marginals in the “reality based community” have much to offer even if the only people listening are one another. To the choir we preach and your sermons resound.
So we prep, we plant, we grow, we store, we meet, we share, we teach, we preach, we love, we sing, and we build. As John and Xene sang nearly 30 years ago, “The facts we hate . . . and I must not think bad thoughts.”
Peace,
ward
“People know something is “wrong” ”
Something has always been wrong and will always be wrong: Man is always trying to figure out what is wrong, give him something wrong and he will be happy, give him a problem and he will be happy, man is an algorithm looking for a program, a computer looking for activity, etc. The law of conservation of problems: no matter how many problems you solve and how much you go forward, you will always end up with the same amount of problems and the same situation forever…
APE CAN
To all of you shilling for Obama in CFN this week, did you see him on ‘The View’ yesterday? It took a lot of guts for Obama to appear on “The View’ — the hostile audience, the tough, probing line of questions … all one can say is, what a statesman! Teddy Roosevelt, Ike, Andrew Jackson, they’ve got nothing over this guy. I’ll ask what I asked last week when Obama appeared with Letterman, another brave move, “Were those NYC harpies wearing kneepads”?
–WSP7
Canada Geese, you say?
One flew east, one flew west……
I think it’s time whrever you’re being wharehoused to pull the plug on the internets!
Just a note about dark ages….When a civilization doesn’t think community is relevant, I think you have a problem. When Obama was running in 2008 he was disparaged for having been a “community organizer”.
We all do better when we pool our resources, that’s why societies form in the first place.
The very principle of people having a voice and sending people to government to represent their will is what this country was all about.
Now most people don’t know what the real issues are. We are continuing to export neoliberalism throughout India and the rest of the world.
The only people that don’t know that the Sovereign state is our biggest target is us. Those on the ground who believe this is still a nation-state. Not to Mr. Global.
From:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=180061
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Re: No Solution
Postby nameta9 » Tue Sep 25, 2012 2:16 pm
Kriswest wrote:Take away all news media for one month even online cut off major communications.
Interesting project, , no/ yes?
Information is the Problem
Information creates the problem and problems by its very existence, by being implanted in your head you are forced to find solutions, or to think in terms of solutions, starting points and targets, targets failed, solutions not achieved, problems not solved and so forth, this aggravates you, this creates a feeling of failure since you can’t solve the problems and there are trillions of problems just as much as there is information, the “oil is running out” (is it even true ?), the “global warming” (true /false?) and all of the debates, fights amongst people, all of the work and effort your mind must perform to figure out the problems, to debate, like so many lawyers, everyone protecting their position, their point of view, the point of view becomes more important than what it is worth and then yourself (all points of views are meaningless and worthless in the long run), people embrace their ideology and the way they want to solve the “problems”, so many, “education is a failure” (what on earth does that even mean ? compared to what ? education “to do what” or for “who” or to go where ? totally illogical!) and unemployment is too high and so forth, a never ending stream, the muslims, the wars, the crap that happens 20 thousand miles away (but who gives 2 c*cks and a d*ck! it doesn’t affect me, or even if it does, I can’t do anything about anything at all anyways), not only are the problems intractable, but the solutions are also, and the power mechanisms and political mechanisms necessary to achieve the solutions (by new laws ? by what ?) are also intractable, impossible to follow, get all lost in a foggy haze and so forth and so on.
And information already creates the work for you in your mind as it is compared, debated already internally, compared, figured out, logically connected to other things (even if unconsciously) and so on, and you get another problem you are forced to think about, and all information, all news, all new items and events and situations create a never ending stream of hard and impossible problems to think about, to constantly fail to solve, and even the personal ones, especially the personal ones, the boss got mad at work, the son misbehaved (or the son can’t find a job and so forth), an infinite array of problems, thoughts, impossible to solve, all intractable, all a failure, we are always just a failure waiting to occur, since even if you solved all the problems you ever had for you and everyone for 50 years, there will come that day that just that one bit information, that one small problem will cancel 50 years of success, a flat tire on a country road and you are lost forever and such.
And information is the problem and more information is the solution and no information is the problem and no information is the solution and you try out all the combinations.
We live in an Excess Capacity Economic System, too many people have way too much time on their hands to generate and talk about information and problems worldwide, the Technological Economy has created a huge amount of Free Wealth for all simply through Technology and Networks (Electricity and Transportation and Energy networks especially, more so than the Information networks) so we are left simply to fight each other: Imagine what could be performed and created if all of those millions of idle people where to be really used and employed in manufacturing, in home building, in building cars and all of the basic needs: in ONE YEAR you could create enough homes, cars, roads whatever for 10 billion people once and for all and you wouldn’t even have to work at all for decades in the future: imagine if we could really apply all the technology we have really in an optimized manner, we could solve almost all of our problems once and for all in just one year.
But millions worldwide are used in offices to create a never ending stream of artificial problems that are created and solved, everyone creating complexity for everyone else, just to then solve the complexity and so forth, like what happened in Software: we had all of the best possible programming languages available in software (before the Object oriented Craze that was used to create fake problems, create complexity and let thousands of people waste a huge amount of effort and time towards solving problems that were solved long ago and that could easily be solved in well written structured programs in Pascal or Basic (modern versions would be Perl and Awk) or such) but it would have been too easy to solve all of the software problems 20 years ago, too many idle people and too few programmers would be needed, so they had to create complexity and a mess to allow other thousands of new programmers “work”, since the myth was that there would be all of this “new work available in software”, when the very nature of software and goal of software is to eliminate as much work as possible, and that is what it is doing anyways, no matter how many impediments (always political, power struggle interdictions, office politics interdictions, changing standards, contrasting products, non standard products created on purpose to create work, ever more fake work for fake problems created with the intention of holding back technology more than anything else) and roadblocks are put in its way.
But the economic system is so productive that it must create interdictions, impediments, it must choke the potential productivity it could achieve, since that productivity would destroy structurally all inequality, all of the excuses for inequality, it would destroy the entire concept of work and labor, etc. it would put the Man Brain in a completely new psychological situation where all of the old rules are worthless, it would be a communism achieved without any revolution or communism but by shear inertia of the Technological Economy really expressing itself. We are left with very little real work that could achieve wealth for all (building cars, skyscrapers, homes, jet planes and so forth) and left to play with blogs and facebook and IPHONES, a method to repress the huge productive capacity of our modern Technological Economy: let them talk forever and generate a never ending stream of information across the internet they will be occupied and happy.
And you get the Resource Scarcity Myth and Tree Hugger Thugs, Environmentalist Thughs inventing all kinds of problems and excuses to not do anything, to not build anything, to not build all of the High Speed Trains in California and across the USA, to not build trillions of skyscrapers all across the USA, and rockets to mars and trillions of Nuclear Energy Plants and so forth and so on.
But we need the fight to give meaning to money and to work, we need to force others to do what others want, the status, the power struggles, etc.
And all of this talk of Worldwide Economic Growth is going to crash: how can China keep on building homes when no one there can afford them, and no one can buy the furniture needed to furnish them (also applies to a lot of USA, EU and JAPAN today)? they think they can export their way out, and they think they can keep on selling 10 million cars a year when they are not designed like the USA, the USA is the only country that can really achieve a high level of Consumerism and growth because there is Room, large homes, two car garages, large roads, places to put the cars, the malls, the homes for all of your crap and so forth, no other country has this, the Chinese must create huge suburbs with huge houses that cost very little, huge roads all over the place and cars and then finally they can keep on growing, etc. (not even to mention puny Europe and South America, they would have to tear down all of those puny environments they have and start all over again with huge American Styles suburbs to start really growing, etc. instead they want to ride bicycles, what c*cks, they are going backwards instead of forward, what fairies, etc.).
APE CAN
nameta9
Philosopher
Posts: 1601
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Re: No Solution
Postby nameta9 » Tue Sep 25, 2012 12:27 pm
From:
http://instantsingularity3.blogspot.it
and
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.it
nameta9
Philosopher
Posts: 1600
Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2004 11:42 am
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Top
MM wrote: “..have no idea what this link proves about infantile behavior. or how this fundraising event is the cause of juvenile or infantile verbiage in this page’s comment section.”
The Obama campaign fund raising offer to meet Beyonce and Jay-Z (rapper and crack head) if one contributes 5 bucks manifests what low regard Obama and the leadership has for the mental capacity of the people. They treat the people like junior high school students.
I did it again,
Read all the posts up to this point.
I really must be an idiot.
quo erat demonstrandum
I suppose that the fate of the American people will be to end up fat, drugged-out, TV and football-absorbed blobs who masturbate on Facebook. They’ll be poor and unemployed, but able to survive through their dependence upon the U.S. government.
All Circuits are Saturated
Puny Europe, JAPAN, South Korea, Brazil, China, India etc have a situation where all of their circuits are saturated, expired, they don’t have room, they don’t have enough parking space, highways, wide roads, they don’t have enough McMansions, large homes, they live in tight houses, costly, they don’t have two car garages, huge malls where to buy all the crap they should be buying and then huge homes to put it in all etc. South Korea has small apartments, not enough room to put all the stuff they should buy, they can’t have 2 cars, China even worse, in China they are limiting the amount of cars, too many traffic jams, to many crowds, tight spaces, crowds, too many lines for anything and so forth, so without huge spaces and rooms all circuits become saturated, growth is impossible, like in Southern Europe, not enough room, prices of small homes too high and so forth, traffic jams, lines and so forth.
But in order to really make economies grow you must provide room to grow, large areas, highways, parking, cheap and large homes and so forth, and a lot of high paying jobs (but since work is no longer needed, just give the money out for free and hire them in fake jobs, what they do doesn’t matter at all, only the consumption circuit really counts, all of the rest is due to an old fashion, resource scarcity era, when you had to work to live, something that no longer applies to a technological economy and especially, the myth of work serves only to sustain inequality, to create a scale of who is better and who must hog up more compared to who else and all such BS, but this is all old fashion stone age crap that we must overcome, albeit the masses wouldn’t understand it, they think they have to fight and deserve it, they think there labor really means anything and such), huge consumption and such, consumption is what makes economies grow, so you must build skyscrapers that have very large 3 floor homes inside of them for example, and cheap and so that everyone can buy them or rent them, and many suburbs with large homes, large malls, and all such stuff.
The model of worldwide economic growth can only be the USA model, there is no other possible model no matter what, so that is what they should do in India and China, instead they think that by building puny high priced apartments their economy will grow, it doesn’t work like that, you must create an environment exactly the same as that of the USA, even more so, even larger homes, more highways and malls, more of everything, huge consumption and production, people should have 10 cars, 10 houses, ever more room, and consumption and all such stuff (and hose Nature in the process, Nature is ours to use, it is not a New Religion).
Will it ever happen ? No, so don’t expect the Worldwide Economy to grow much anymore, all circuits will saturate really fast and most of the world will end up like Greece and Spain…(but they both still have a hugely higher standard of living compared to most of the world anyways).
THE APE CAN
From:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=180061
Many young Americans now spend much of their time on those paid, online dating websites. The guys try to “hook up” with “sluts”, who seem to be girls who use sex as a way to get attention.
I’ve got a photo of myself and Santa Claus autographed by Santa Claus. How much do you think that it’s worth?
You can hedge against negative black swans while benefiting from positive ones. CFN never talks about positive black swans.
Hattie McDaniel (June 10, 1895 – October 26, 1952) was an American actress. McDaniel was the first African-American to win an Academy Award. She won the award for Best Supporting Actress for her role of Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939).
The CFN tendency to expect the worst has not been borne out by the facts. The CFN mind set has failed. The mind uses many simplifying schemas that can lead to error.
But once people have theories, they seek confirming evidence; this is called “confirmation bias.” They fall victim to “epistemic arrogance,” becoming overconfident about their ideas and failing to account for randomness. My first post this week pointed that out with reference to JHK’s posts on the Y2K debacle. Even after Y2K came and went with no crisis, the mind wanted to wait and see if one would develop out of Y2K in the coming interval. Or as JHK said: “we really won’t know more until a period of time goes by, weeks or perhaps months.” We really did know… but epistemic arrogance prevented accepting reality.
The other thing that happens on CFN is that to make their theories work, people “smooth out” the “jumps” in a time series or historical sequence, looking for and finding patterns that are not there. The CFN conceptual categories will limit what CFNers will see; this is called “tunneling.” Nicolas Taleb explains all this in his book.
The CFN tendency to expect the worst has not been borne out by the facts. How many times I have read that the pitch forks are coming out and the bankers and hedge fund managers will soon be hanging from the lamp posts in the Hamptons! The CFN mind set I have observed these last 12 years has failed to just see with clarity what is. What is is. What ain’t ain’t.
“Out of that morass of lying connected to immense human suffering somebody had to bring the clarity of real moral duty to broad consciousness…”
that, or perhaps the novel economics of petroleum in its early ascendency at the time made black slavery obsolete, and easier to hate.
Just sayin’.
“Here Spot! Here Spot! Good Boy!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7ezXBEBE6U
“They treat the people like junior high school students.”
After a high school diploma in some areas of the States, that’s about the real level you have, compared to standards in, say, Mexico City. I was going to say Europe or Singapore or something, but I remember a young woman I met who transferred from Mexico City high school to Jacksonville, Florida. She was scared initially, thinking that the academic standards in the US would be something she would have to rise to. Turned out, she told me, it was a lot easier here. At least in this particular school in Jax.
Yes, and there were so many fewer questions when stars were still just the holes to heaven, mmm hmmm.
Jack Johnson
Did anyone else have a Star Wars flashback when watching that video?
Of course these devices are being built for the American Empire.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th president of US 1953-1961
“Yet in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete. The question, then, is how we respond. And on this we must agree: There is no speech that justifies mindless violence.” –President Obama
We are ruled by what Burnham called the “Managerial Elite” except they cannot manage nor do we have a society anymore, as you wrote Jim there is no center.
As for Obama doing nothing, I’m a rightist, and to the morons of the left a “racist”, but I’m honest, Obama had no political capital to take on the people who financed his rise to power so they could loot. And Obama and his inner circle are okay with that because it discredits capitalism.
Never mind the right, they are failing reactionairies trying to patch the Titanic.
Asoka:
The CFN tendency to expect the worst has not been borne out by the facts. The CFN mind set has failed. The mind uses many simplifying schemas that can lead to error.
***************************************************************
That’s because you don’t live in America, you don’t have a clue what’s going on on the ground, and you have no empathy for the suffering of average people. I’ve quoted the macro data, like plummeting real wages, to you a dozen times. Money movement in the economy is LOWER than 2008. Housing starts have gone from 2.2 million in 2006 to 700,000 in 2012 … after plummeting to 500,000 in 2009.
You’re the type of person who wants to focus on that rise in housing starts from 500,000 to 700,000 and “magically” ignore the fact that current levels are still SIXTY-EIGHT percent lower than 2006 and 50% lower than 2000. This is the worst “recovery” in the history of the United States. We live in a country where 11,000 people in Oakland, CA will apply for 700 jobs at Walmart but if we are to believe you, it’s just a sunny day in the US and for average people.
However, I submit that your ignorance is WILLFUL because your circumstances in a foreign country are okay so it’s hunky-dory that the average person’s loss of 40% of their net worth and the impending implosion of most state budgets and pensions is just a small “blip” on the radar screen.
You’ve always been the worst cherrypicker of data on CFN but the amazing thing about your “optimism” is that you’re cheering on a “recovery” where, by nearly any metric you’d care to name, we’re either BARELY above 2008 (and who’s to say that’s not just a CYCLICAL recovery that’s horrid) or we’re not above it at all. Most people who don’t live in la-la land know a slew of people, personally, living hand-to-mouth.
I think you just hang out here to be a pain in the ass to people on the site. Intellectually, you’re just a liar like when you told Helen Highwater that as Asoka.. you “don’t post a lot”. Everyone on this site knows that using your real handle, Asoka.., you LIVE on this site because you’re a do-nothing.
E.
You can spend your time talking or you can shut your mouth and open your eyes and ears.
You can live in the real world or you can live in an ideological bubble constructed of half-baked half-truths, statistical mirages, bullshit, lies and distortions.
Most of us on this site have active minds. We live in the real world. When our experience doesn’t square with the proclamations of academic studies and govt statistics we have every right to doubt.
The Soviets spent decades proclaiming (ie lying about) the achievements of their 5 year plans. But their citizens drew their own conclusions. And you saw the results. Or maybe, having been born too late, you didn’t see.
Don’t like ad hominem attacks? Tough shit. People will generally treat you as you treat them. If you indulge in racist insults, if you disparage entire races, nationalities and classes of people then you get it all thrown back at you.
You vociferously take sides with foreign powers. You stridently proclaim your disdain for your own countrymen. So, when those same countrymen are disdainful of you in turn you’ll just have to live with it. STFU and stop complaining.
You traffic in bullshit like, for example, your having gone to Libya, which nobody in their right mind believes, then you complain about getting crapped on. Same with writing nonsense like living like a king on 12Gs a year with cars and frequent flyer points and all the modern electronic devices. Some of us have lived poor and some of us still do and we know better.
If you don’t like how you’re treated then change your ways or shut your hole altogether. And cut the allahayahoo horseshit. You said that you think people read the commentary to see what outrageous thing you’ll say. But words have consequences. If you act like an asshole you’ll get treated like one.
I read someone else say that the adoption of fossil fuels as a power source made slavery obsolete.
Which raises a question seeing as history never repeats but sure does rhyme. If fossil fuels run short will it make slavery – ie the re-adoption of human muscle power in the place of fossil fuel – economically viable once again?
If it does happen I have every confidence that there will be no shortage of justifications for slavery in the future just as there were in the past.
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I was thinking more of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges.
Won’t be long now before the big-screen turns itself on and we can all watch Guy Montage get the needle.
Guy Montag: Look at that fellow over there.
Clarisse: What’s he doing?
Guy Montag: That’s the information box. He can’t make up his mind.
Clarisse: What does he want to find out?
Guy Montag: He doesn’t want to find out anything. He knows someone who has books, so he got hold of the person’s picture and number and is going to drop it into that box.
Clarisse: But he’s an informer!
Guy Montag: No, he’s an informant.
It’s all good, not!!
An XXX5/Rhino double-team! Excellent!
XXX5 said: “This is the worst “recovery” in the history of the United States.”
I think the historical record would dispute this claim.
Is This Really the Worst Economic Recovery Since the Depression? (NYT, Sept. 25, 2012)
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/10/is-this-really-the-worst-economic-recovery-since-the-depression/
Rhino said: “Most of us on this site have active minds. We live in the real world.”
I also have an active mind. I also live in the real world. I am happy to find we have so much in common.
Very Smokey Robinson-esque, no?
No slouches, fer shure!
“The CFN mind set I have observed these last 12 years has failed to just see with clarity what is. What is is. What ain’t ain’t. “
Here I thought that I was going to have to get rid of this laptop because very soon easily usable software would not run on it. Turns out that I will have to give it away because I won’t be able to carry it on my back. In fact, I now have to sell or dispose of most of my remaining few possessions including my car. Selling the car means the end of portable shelter and probably means the end of what little day labor and temporary employment that I can still get.
I have been able to fight off daily homelessness for ten years now. The fight is now lost. I have been researching where in the continental US I might go. This will be a one way ticket. Winter will soon be upon us so I much choose carefully.
So far, all of the shelters that I have looked into are filled to capacity with waiting lists. They are having their budgets cut and some are closing down completely. They are already saying that there will be less meals served because of these budget cuts and the anticipated rise in the cost of food due to the nation wide drought.
This means camping. When was the last time that you had to do a bear, bug, and snake check the last time you had to move? Not too worried about mountain lions. We’ve pretty much killed them off. Every city that I have checked has people camping outside and they are breaking the law by doing so. Every shelter that I have checked has a state or county residency requirement that almost force me to have to stay in California.
There will be no staying in Los Angeles. The National Coalition for the Homeless has deemed LA the “Meanest City in the United States”. The United Nations itself has called out LA for it’s human rights violations concerning treatment of the homeless. Sacramento had a “tent community” for many years that has been completely dismantled. Just as well. Those people were literally living in a field full of human shit. They recently hired extra park rangers to make sure that it doesn’t reappear. Both LA and Sacramento are trying to get new sports arenas. They say it will create jobs.
I’ve learned that many long standing “tent cities” have been removed in the last few years. They were obviously unsanitary and unsustainable, but I can’t help but wonder if their removals had something to do with the presidential election.
So we have money for bailing out criminal financial speculators. Then they use the money to manipulate the media so that they become “innovators” and “job creators”, while the people they displace become “vagrants” and “criminals”. We have money for sports arenas and huge armies and navies to “intervene” with countries that we give billions of dollars to for, I don’t know, pay for the sins of the past? Bribe to have access to oil? Keep them from going to war with people that they will probably never get along with?
You keep on looking for that goddamn “white swan”. It better get here before the polar ice caps melt.
“Never mind the right, they are failing reactionairies trying to patch the Titanic.” -newworld
You are correct. Most astute.
(If they manage to prevent it from sinking, they’ll rename it “Bismarck” and see how that “floats”.)
Kuntsler– ‘pessimism is the name weak nerve gives to wisdom’–m.twain
Get Real about Lincoln– he was a lobbyist for the Railroads before he was president–His goal and the goal of the financiers and industrialists who supported his candidacy was to industrialize the south-to make it the ‘geography of nowhere’ it has become–to do so the agrarian/plantation system had to be destroyed– enter Lincoln the Butcher who has despaired for the outcome of the enterprise until he could find his killer general… Grant!
During the Civil War Lincoln began the extension
of the railroads west of the Mississippi ultimately all the way to San Fran giving the railroads ten mile right-of-ways both north and south of the tracks effectively making the railroads the most profitable real-estate-developer-land-barons of their time–stop the mythology of Lincoln and witness the next chapter of Manifest Destiny your superior rancor–
witness the next chapter of Manifest DESTINY “without” your superior rancor
Riverton Park
Give me the word and I’ll go check this place out for you.
Thanks for your concern. I have already checked out camps in the Seattle area. They are some of the few remaining. Still, their existence is tenuous at best. It is not easy to get to social services from where they are located. Then there is downtown Seattle. Wow. What a mess. My primary concern is living outside in Seattle during the winter. Fifty three homeless citizens died there last year up from thirty five the year before.
Whoa!
I wouldn’t know what to advise you, X.
When wherewithal to purchase energy is low to non-existent, I’d guess that weather and water to be first priority. Then, access to paid work of some kind, followed closely by access to arable land (to supplement food supply, of course). Periphery of grape/wine country perhaps? I don’t know enough about CA to know where most of the produce is grown; which might be where you’d want to land, if even temporarily.
…Rock and a hard place, alright. I believe you’ll make the right decisions; you’re certainly no dummy. And, screw LA, having been there recently, I see it as the very definition of the Clusterfuck! Best of luck going forward.
Did Blacks build America? Then why didn’t they build Haiti or Africa? They helped – just like asses or draft horses that’s all.
Face it Nasta, America is White or it is nothing. There are other higher races too – like the East Asians. But they can’t be allowed to replace us because they’re not us.
Turns out that I will have to give it away because I won’t be able to carry it on my back.
This is not a problem. Most public libraries in the USA have access to the internet. You don’t need a laptop. It’s better to travel light anyway.
I have been researching where in the continental US I might go.
http://www.dol.gov/vets/programs/fact/Homeless_veterans_fs04.htm
xhalor: Ojai.
No one can replace anyone without it being genocide. But for whites I guess it is payback time from their ex-colonials and ex-Holocaustees.
My WAG is that once the last piece of bread is taken from the bag whites enmasse will say “fuck this shit and stop blaming me for your problems.” Then stand the fuck back because I seriously doubt the Mommy Professor taboos can contain brokedick Amuurika.
Ah, so Piss-soak-ccio is attempting to blow gum’mint-generated smoke up our collective asses (as per usual)?
Here’s a clearer picture of the trajectory we actually happen to be on:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32542.htm
I’ll take Chris Hedges analysis before ‘Soaky’s regurgitations, thanks very much.
Yes, xhalor, ojai and surrounding area.
Our Place Shelter (805) 652-2151
12.09 miles from city center Ojai
Ventura, CA
Western Pacific Housing (805) 604-4528
15.98 miles from city center Ojai
Oxnard, CA 93030
Lighthouse for Women & Children 805-240-1644
17.43 miles from city center Ojai
Oxnard, CA 93030
Ventura County Rescue Mission: (805) 487-1234
17.96 miles from city center Ojai
Oxnard, CA
Rebuilding Together 805-492-1054
18.97 miles from city center Ojai
Camarillo, CA 93010
Choose whatever regurgitation you want. Reality still gonna slap you up the side of the head.
I seriously doubt the Mommy Professor taboos can contain brokedick Amuurika.
My WAG is you seriously wrong. Non-whites have received training in the armed forces. Ain’t about to take no shit from whiny brokedick white America, that, by the way, is shrinking in numbers every day. Your time has done up and gone. Good riddance.
Yes, winter is a problem. Not as bad as the Midwest or East Coast but the tragic souls you mention, those 53, for them there was no difference.
Staying dry in the winter up here is a big problem. Days of biting cold that makes popsicles of dogs are rather few and lobbies of city halls are available here for that. But hypothermia from being wet and cold is bad. Any time soon from then to next June a dog without a tent or doghouse up here will be a cold wet miserable shivering dog. When that happens it is dangerous to go to sleep.
Maybe other clusterfuckers in warmer climes could make a similar offer. If you did come up here I’m good for a tent.
Then why didn’t they build Haiti or Africa?
Maybe they were moral enough not to go to Europe and rip white men out of their families, chain white men to the bottom of boats, and then use white men as labor to build Haiti and Africa.
Thanks for the week’s work, JHK.
As always, many things from this week’s work bear repeating, but I choose this one:
“What a strange privilege it is to live in these perilous times……in the sense of having lived through a thrilling turbo-powered climactic chapter of the human melodrama. Until a few decades ago nobody ever swooshed through these ancient hills in a motor car, on a magnificently engineered minor country highway, and in perhaps less than a decade no one ever will again….” -JHK-
It may be more or less than a decade, depending on events – but the end is certainly at some middle distance.
And yet we run – hell for leather – toward that end. We continue to add population to these United States, almost SOLELY due to immigration.
Evidently, “we” have to. That’s the growth paradigm enabler – and growth “we” must have.
Until it ends.
And the fantasy ends with it.
I see my self in others and in others I see myself. I wish you would take your COININTELPRO ass somewhere else.
How about you take your gear out to the dumpster and throw it in. Then trot your ass down to your public library log in here and complain about how Asoka.. gets picked on.
“This is not a problem. Most public libraries in the USA have access to the internet. You don’t need a laptop. It’s better to travel light anyway.”
And while you are there, preferably before you log on look up the word compassion and see what dead poets have to say about it.
I see my self in others and in others I see myself. I wish you would take your COININTELPRO ass somewhere else.
How about you take your gear out to the dumpster and throw it in. Then trot your ass down to your public library log in here and complain about how Asoka.. gets picked on.
“This is not a problem. Most public libraries in the USA have access to the internet. You don’t need a laptop. It’s better to travel light anyway.”
And while you are there, preferably before you log on look up the word compassion and see what dead poets have to say about it.
“Ah, so Piss-soak-ccio is attempting to blow gum’mint-generated smoke up our collective asses (as per usual)?”
Let me add my voice to those of Ozone, Rhino, and E.
Asoka..lives to argue trivia and undercut any worthwhile purpose that JHK’s weekly missives might accomplish.
Although asoka..’s “mirror of love” (tm that US ex-pat female in Costa Rico whose name escapes me right now) does seem to be a bit scratched.
One can see the Fires of Hell (aka asoka..’s true personality) becoming visible through the scratches – as he glorifies in the thought of loosing trained black killers from the US military upon “white America, that, by the way, is shrinking in numbers every day. Your time has done up and gone. Good riddance..”
Mirror of love? Hah!
There is no limit to the number of white citizens that asoka.. would like to wish “good riddance.”
There is no limit to the drivel that asoka..will spew in his weekly effort to undercut JHK’s message.
That’s a good article, and I mostly agree with it.
Obama overpromised, and given his talking points from the 2008 campaign, underdelivered. Unfortunately, that’s become the norm for any politician who hopes to be elected in America. People want the promise of sweeping changes and fixes, when the reality is that even the president has a limited ability to do this. They are constrained both by the realities of our money-soaked, corporate-dominated political culture, and the details of our tripartite government.
For instance, we hear complaints in JHK’s column that Obama should have “done something” about the Citizens United decision. Well, what, pray tell, do you want him to do? His job is enforcing laws on the books, not determining their constitutionality or passing new ones. It would be the Congress’s responsibility to strike down or ammend this court decision with new laws.
The failures and shortcomings we place upon this one person, the president, are really systemmic issues. It is the Congress’s job to pass new laws or repeal old ones. The courts interpret them. By a strict interpretation of our Constitution, the president is not supposed to participate in these two areas. Somehow though, we’ve become so dissatisfied or disillusioned with the other two branches that now we expect the Executive, or this one guy, to solve all our problems.
Here is the list of problems that Hedges expects one person to be able to solve. We should take them one at a time.
“support the public option in health care”
Sure, he supports it. The health care bill was born of compromise, and it was compromised. Certainly, we are closer to a public option than before, but there was simply too much resistance from lobbyists and others to pass this. Remember what happened when the Clintons tried it?
“close Guantanamo”
I’m sure he wishes he could, but then he’s left with the issue of where to put the people who are there. Which state and which federal prison? I’m assuming the pushback here is immense, and basically no one wants to house these guys.
However, I’m with Hedges. I think these people should be housed in federal prisons. Personally, I don’t see the problem.
“raise the minimum wage”
Congress’s job to pass new laws, NOT the presidents. End of story.
“regulate Wall Street”
This is Obama’s biggest failure in my mind, though the amount of new legislation regulating the finance industry is not legligible. I suppose he supports more radical reform, but I’m not sure what.
“support labor unions in their struggles with employers”
I’m not aware of him NOT supporting them. Again, it is not his job to pass new laws in this area.
“reform the Patriot Act”
Repealing this monstrous leviathan is, again, not the president’s responsibility. That’s up to Congress.
“negotiate an equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians”
Hahahahaha. Really? Obama is supposed to single-handedly untie the Gordian knot of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, all the while completely ignoring the immensely powerful lobbies that don’t want it to be “solved”. Good luck with that.
“curb our imperial expansion in the Middle East”
He ended the Iraq War. We had our last casualty there. He’s pledged to pull out of Afghanistan by 2014. Consider it curbed. However, completely pulling out is not in our best interests or the rest of the world’s (energy politics 101).
“stop torture”
He can’t peak into every CIA dungeon that exists, but from what I understand, most of the old Bush executive orders in this area have been rescinded. Correct me if I’m wrong.
“protect reproductive rights”
Again, what do you expect him to do? State legislators and the Congress pass laws limiting reproductive rights. Obama does not have the power to do much about it.
“carry out a comprehensive immigration reform”
Deportation of illegals is up. Fine by me. I don’t see the problem.
“cut the deficit by half”
Hey, Chris, you see the problem here? You want Super Obama to fix everyone’s fiscal problems, and simultaneously he’s supported to cut the deficit in half. It is a catch 22.
“create 5 million new energy jobs”
Did he say this? Well, energy jobs are up, but, again, his ability to do this is strictly limited by what laws the Congress will actually pass.
“halt home foreclosures”
That’s not up to him. It isn’t federal law, as far as I know. And why would you want foreclosures to stop? People who stop paying their mortgages should just be allowed to stay in their houses? That’s an even more insane proposition.
All that said, I also take issue with these two points.
“Obama’s assault on civil liberties has outpaced that of George W. Bush.”
There is no evidence for this. George Bush presided over the passing of the Patriot Act, which evicerated most of the Bill of Rights and much of due process. He launched two wars, one of which in Iraq was entirely optional and based upon lies and fearmongering. He actually said, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” He helped organize the DHS, which is basically a federal agency designed to spy on and micro-police Americans. So there isn’t much that Obama can do here to be in the same league with him.
“The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under Obama has, meanwhile, expelled 1.5 million immigrants”
Frankly, good riddance. Most other countries on the planet would not tolerate the ocean of undocumented immigrants we have allowed in the past, and a crackdown is past due. I’m sorry, but if you’re not here legally, then deportation is justified and legal. I wouldn’t expect to go to another country and stay there illegally, and most Americans are of the same mindset. So there’s no justification for allowing it here.
Great article though. Hedges is a good writer.
Have you watched him speak about Camden. Too bad our black president can’t do it.
Sacrifice Zones
turkle,
Good post, but you missed one big thing. The Repukes, including Ryan met on the evening of the inauguration and pledged to go against anything Obama was for. If Obama came out in favor of apple pie, they would ass a law in the house to ban it. He should have seen that coming, because they started it when Clinton was around.
They delayed the seating of Franken so he only had a chance for a few months to get anything through the congress. The Ted Kennedy died, and he lost the filibuster proof majority. The Dems in the Senate were fools to not change the filibuster back to the old way, so the Repukes had to stand up and advertise that they were stopping a bill.
Here is another translation of the Hitler video about Hitler hearing about the Romney 47% video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGbkkOaBGLA
German is such a flexible artsy language, that allows so many different translations.
dear evil,
the purpose of life is to help others to treat other as we would like to be treated and to do it all for God who created us.
So you say DUTY, is that a tax on imports or a responsibility and obligation to do the right thing?
We are running out of mineral rescources, but we are not out of psychic energy or the spark of life.
There is nothing better or more important than to be embraced and engaged with another person. That is the kind of energy that launched a thousand ships. People power! The Mind is a serious force.
A great article and if you watched the video you know that Chris does things on principle and has faith that while not one man can solve all the problems be believes one man can light a spark which can light a torch for others to carry. Positive zeitgeist is possible. Currently there is not one politician opposing corporate rule, none. In this scenario anything is an improvement, even me, especially me.
This makes me the best choice out there. When elected Chris will be pulling some all-nighters count on it.
✔ K-Dog
Mr K, I don’t know if you read this far into the comments; just to acknowledge how much this week’s post resonated with me. Bitter-sweet truths, beautifully written. How tragic that, for all we as an intelligent species are capable of, we are such criminally wasteful ingrates. I guess we are only being true to our genetic predispositions, though it’s tough being able to imagine ourselves as being more evolved.
..
K’dogg e, I cannot vote for you, it will be a throwaway. I must venture forth and vote for Mitt.
K-Dog,
THAT was my impersonator. Sorry. You’ve still got my vote, man. We’ll try to get you 2% of the vote this time for some federal matching funds for next time, at least.
Wham bam thank u mam.
The thing Frances Moore Lappé said was something like, “it’s way too late, and things are way to bad to be apathetic!” rough paraphrase.
Interviews with Bob Woodward re his new book are very interesting, he is talking about the national deficit at 16 trillion, and seems to be hailing the pols saying “there is a cliff dead head”…..
You can see the interviews on Woodward’s website with left wing and right wing interviewers, pretty darn interesting.
He is very specific re Obamas failure at leadership.
I dont think anyone in the White House has gotten much sleep since this book was released recently.
Best……
This just in: Madonna announced at a concert that she’ll strip in public if Obama wins a second term. Like we haven’t seen it all before?
Another reason to vote for K-DOG!
I agree and since it is absolutely way to bad to be apathetic let’s enjoy the passion.
❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧
❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧❦❧
She might have some infrastructure I can use. After I win I think I’ll extend the olive branch and determine what she has to offer. If she is serious about her convictions maybe she can throw the ball with me.
? K-Dog
I reluctantly accept that as a good reason. Thanks
My experiences on the roads in Oregon and California this year make me somewhat more optimistic than Jim about the medium-term viability of the American highway network. ODOT seems to have really gotten its shit together this year. I’m ambivalent about the utility of some of its interchange projects along I-5, but it at least seems to be making serious progress on the ones under construction in Ashland. The interchange redesigns that ODOT has completed in Medford appear a bit grandiose for a metro area of a bit over 100k, but they work quite well. In the mountains, ODOT has repaired landslide damage to very tricky sections of Highways 66 and 273 where it doesn’t have the budget to reengineer the rights-of-way and overcome the inherent problems with the terrain.
Of course, for its efforts ODOT has earned righteous anger from people who don’t have a clue of what it takes to maintain roads in the mountains. One incredibly haughty woman who berated me with a lengthy monologue on the road seethed that ODOT should recruit road crews for $8 an hour from among the unemployed so that it wouldn’t have to schedule repairs around vacations for its permanent employees, a proposal that was not only predatory but also stupid given the amount of training, skill and judgment needed to do proper road maintenance.
Several sections of the Bear Creek bikeway were also resurfaced this year, and the Rogue Valley Transportation District implemented major service improvements, including Saturday service for the first time in years. The upshot of all of this is that the authorities around here are finally addressing infrastructure problems that they ignored for years, if not decades. I don’t entirely understand how this happened, since so many of the local politicians and activists seem to live on other planets, but at least we’re seeing concrete improvements to what was a pretty shabby infrastructure.
AMR, thank you for this post.
The USA is the greatest, and we are a long, long way from the nightmare scenarios often read on CFN.
Some of you liked reading Joe Bageant.
A Joe Bageant article has just been published:
In the footsteps of Neal Cassady’s ghost
Enjoy!
“Y’all better vote for fucking Obama, OK? For better or for worse, all right? We have a black Muslim in the White House. Now that’s some amazing shit,” she said. “It means there is hope in this country. And Obama is fighting for gay rights, so support the man, goddammit.”
Obama is Christian and has spoken and written widely about his faith. Madonna’s comments — which may have been made in jest — came in the middle of an extended speech that touched on Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy and traced the civil rights movement from America’s inception to Obama’s election.
“The USA is the greatest, and we are a long, long way from the nightmare scenarios often read on CFN.”
That was not my point. My point related specifically to road infrastructure, not to some unsupportable, platitudinous sense of American exceptionalism.
It is possible for a society to keep parts of its infrastructure in excellent working order while neglecting other parts, and it is equally possible for a society with functional infrastructure to descend into savagery. No amount of competent street and sidewalk maintenance will keep downtown Medford free of drunken knife fights if those frequenting the bars there are a bunch of cretins.
This is not a paradox. Oregon is just lucky enough to have a critical mass of sane, competent, self-governing people who are able to clean up the messes left by the tweakers, the Ed Hardy thugs, the deliberately shiftless sign-flyers, the slumlords, the junkyard yeomen, the underground economy bullshit artists, the sickly unskilled rednecks, and probably some other classes that I can’t think of at the moment, none of whom have their shit together enough to keep this state from descending into Third World disorder. If the demographics that I see around either the Ashland Food Co-Op or Winco were numerically dominant, this state would be totally fucked.
If you believe that the US as a nation does a better job on infrastructure than its peer nations, you’re either ignorant or out of your mind. I’m aware of more cases of local, state or even national infrastructure negligence, most of them totally needless, than I can count. For example, ODOT’s ability to properly maintain roads under its jurisdiction on a shoestring budget, or the even more impressive ability of the Oregon State Police to respond to accident scenes despite an extremely lean force spread out over a large land area, does not mean that PennDOT can’t colossally fuck up road safety every winter and then blame it on the freeze-thaw cycle.
Another example: a few years ago, the Pennsylvania State Police, with a sworn strength of 7,000, had a single two-officer squad car assigned to the night watch at its Shippensburg barracks. These two were responsible for all service calls in a number of rural townships that had delegated their police services to the State Police. They were repeatedly swamped and ended up calling for backup from the Shippensburg Police Department so often that the Shippensburg police chief publicly announced that he would start instructing his night watch officers to stop responding to out-of-town backup calls from the PSP. Even thinking about ignoring backup calls is considered terrible juju among cops, so this threat was a pretty clear indication that the local PSP barracks was FUBAR.
If you’re wondering how Pennsylvania handles winter road maintenance, it’s theoretically handled on the state highways by PennDOT, a notoriously shitty highway department, but in practice even state highway maintenance is often delegated to a patchwork of local townships, most of them too stingy and incompetent to salt their roads in advance of forecast ice storms.
There’s no way that I’ll assent to praise for America or its governmental agencies unless they do something praiseworthy, or that I’ll extrapolate one agency’s competence and diligence onto another agency that is manifestly useless.
Well, I guess it is in character for you to take politicians at their word when they bang on about their religious faith instead of living lives in accordance with their professed beliefs.
Good grief, you’re a dolt. I just wish you weren’t representative of so much of the American electorate.
‘The Ted Kennedy died,’
and The Dead Kennedys played.
cheers.
Good grief, you’re a dolt. I just wish you weren’t representative of so much of the American electorate.
===================
In other words, you wished Romney would be elected, because the American electorate are about to re-elect Obama.
That brings into question who is the dolt here.
==================
Origin of DOLT
probably akin to Old English dol foolish
First Known Use: 1553
anti,
You sure are a fast reader. Even after you put me on scroll by, you can still catch my typos.
It may not be an error, because he was THE Ted Kennedy. There are 83 people in the US and Canada named Ted Kennedy. There are more than 100 people named Edward Kennedy.
I my I am the only person in the US, and probably the world with my real name.
I also used to be the only muddmike on the internet, but others have borrowed my nom de net.
Q & A is still in progress.
Techno narcasism. (I wish two asparins could fix it, it can’t. my comment)
Technology is not energy. One does not substitute for the other.
The global economy is permanently unwinding.
Demographic shifts are a’comin.
The suburban project is over.
Agricultural activity will emerge as a significant part of economic behavior.
A horse of course!!
Small towns will be where the action is.
Inland waterways will be significant.
As sense of place will return, architecture can help.
Graceful transitions in public spaces important, the automobile ruined this.
We have so many places not caring about it has destroyed our spirit. We have been brutalized.
New urbanists and the outdoor public room.
Oh Canada !!
Outdoor room examples Amsterdam Quebec.
Permiable interface to the rooms are important.
Outdoor rooms practice equality, if they don’t they fail,
Examples of public space failures dehumanizing aspect illustrated.
America is s place of spectacular cosmic dreariness.
Brutalizing and degrading suburbia makes clowns of us all.
The suburban joke is over.
Wall mart will soon implode (but we subsidize the waltons my comment)
Main street is coming back.
The street and the block is the basic unit. Properly done it is a rich interesting place.
Main street is not hard to do.
Main street 101
Green brownie point and nature bandaids are bad.
Diversity is not the whole answer.
The correct role of green.
Cobblestones slow down traffic.
Greens space is often nothing more than a waste of money.
Cartoons forests are not good.
UFOs in centers of towns.
Rome had it better in terms of architecure the pantheon.
Presidential cantidates are not tooth faeries!! it is up to you (this is no dress rehearsal my comment)
Q&A
Jim just said;
We are a nation of clowns, we are not a serious people. We are beating a path to a collapse and a far lower standard of civilization.
On Meet the Press, it came out that Pelosi was hashing out something out about the Health Bill with Harry Reid and didn’t want Obama interfering so she put him on mute. This was from Woodward’s book.
We assume he’s on Top but it isn’t very likely – even in terms of the Democratic Party.
Nah, they just didn’t have the wherewithal. You should have said they were too busy eating each other and selling the losers to the Jews as slaves for the Americas.
Of course we bought them so we are complicit, but so are African Blacks, Arabs, and the Jewish middlemen.
Yes, a Black Swan. It’s rumoured that she had an affair with the hideous Eleanor Roosevelt.
The Black Swan of Tuonela by Sibelius is one of my favorite pieces.
Of course we bought them so we are complicit…
===========
Complicit? That’s all?
I’m finding new meanings for the word “dolt”
Welcome aboard Turk. We will drive them from our shores. As Morissey said, “A rush and a push and then land will be our’s.”
The next problem is ending legal immigration. 100,000 a month during a Depression. Insane.
Well the sellers and buyers were. But all Whites -even the ones who didn’t own slaves? And all Whites now?
Asoka you’re an intellectual savage and Whites are very foolish for ever entertaining these kind of vicious Black revenge fantasies.
The gap between machines and man has been breached – and the world is going to get so much worse. Now computers can be built to read thoughts and if so – then thoughts can be implanted. It’s a two way street.
http://rt.com/news/mind-controlled-drone-china-157/
Ann Coulter is on a bit of a roll. On Meet the Press she said that all Nations are Nations of immigratns – the implication being why should America be singled out for destruction.
And on Hannity, I heard she condmened White Guilt for causing alot of problems. She mostly a Republican Shill up to now, but she’s very smart and has some real personal power. A very valuable asset is she can be turned to the Dark (White) Side.
Everything is inverted – a photographic negative of reality. Worring about the future of the Republican Party and not the future of America. Maybe she’s tired of living upside down.
No car to live in? It might be worth buying a clunker just for that purpose. No money for that? Are the beaches down there to dangerous to sleep on? If so –
Personally, I’d buy some heavy weather gear (bag and parka) and camp out in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The city is no longer friendly to the homeless – but there are still alot around and still services I believe. Fantastic Public Transportation and ways to sneak on for free. Lots of free activities, library, etc. Still in California so you wouldn’t need new I.D etc.
Some would advise Portland, Oregon – the new San Franciso in terms of friendliness to the homeless. But much colder and wetter. San Francisco has a cool, misty climate but it doesn’t get that cold and it doesn’t make that much rain compared to the coastal Northwest.
Asoka you’re an intellectual savage…
===========
Yes, your are right. I am fierce and passionate.
Thank you for recognizing that!
An outstanding article on higher education and “worthless degrees”.
“Learning how to learn”…imagine that.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-06/postrel-how-art-history-majors-power-the-u-s-.html
Fables and Faery Tales often teach the highest wisdom. This one exposes political correctness.
http://www.viddler.com/v/6db6ded
France bans use of terms Mother and Father in its official documents. Sanity? No thanks, I prefer my private world of Beauty and Justice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9563543/France-set-to-ban-the-words-mother-and-father-from-official-documents.html
Below is one of the comments from the above article. Thoughts, true, false, a little of both?:
CHINESE NOBEL LAUREATES
Liu Xiaobo, Peace, 2010
Charles K. Kao, Physics, 2009
Roger Y. Tsien, Chemistry, 2008
Gao Xingjian, Literature, 2000
Daniel C. Tsui, Physics, 1998
Steven Chu, Physics, 1997
Yuan T. Lee, Chemistry, 1986
Samuel C. C. Ting, Physics, 1976
Chen Ning Yang, Physics, 1957
Tsung-Dao Lee, Physics, 1957
Did you read about the French GMO food tests on rats?
Apparently, Monsanto only tested GMO food on rats for a mere 3 month period before giving the food to human babies.
I heard that the French rats started developing tumors after 4 months.
Monsanto would have known all of this.
Apparently, Monsanto may be able to use its patent rights to keep independent 3rd party researchers from testing GMO foods. Sick!
Yes, there may be long-term effects we don’t know about, since the crops have only been around for just over 15 years! Maybe health problems only show up in the 17th year?
Did Obongo appoint 3 Monsanto guys?
gimme Dead Kennedys [the band]!!!
Do you know anything about Puckers comment
2 above this?
Tween the outright spams, asoka.. and Kdog…
This whole thing is mostly a scroll by.
Scroll on, anti soak, scroll on.
Scroll on, anti soak, scroll on.
Your comments are turning our darkness to dawn,
Scroll on, anti soak, scroll on.
There of course won’t be any complaining when those abusers reign down our dumb asses.
The Chinese education system is a disaster. That George W. Bush, Jr. would suggest the Chinese educational as a model for American children is worse than tragic.
The Chinese education system only works to the extent that there are so many people. I suspect that if the Chinese had no educational system at all and simply provided the Chinese people with access to books that the China would produce more talented people organically simply due to inertia, a cultural emphasis on education and a huge number of people.
Center not holding ALERT!
The Fluffington Post has announced a pending world wide shortage of bacon this next year.
AAAAAGGGGHHHHH! While this will not affect our non shellfish eating friends, it is a DISASTER for the Larry the cable guy crowd, breakfast buffets, and me (cause I do love bacon so much)
HOWEVER it underscores the problem of corporate agribusiness which is that if it is not profitable to produce pigs… no one will produce pigs because corporations are all that is left to produce.
Nice work world.. turning it all over to the Ayn Rand crowd.
I listened to a talk by a man who described the process by which the FDA approves a drug once. Industry has total control over the process and basically gets to decide on their own test protocol. They do the minimum of five clinical trials or something like that (it’s been a while) and after choosing the protocol for each one and completing the trials that’s it. The system is designed not to evaluate long term effects. Also FDA jobs are a revolving door for jobs in agribusiness. It is a closed shop. The system is totally corrupt, so if you wonder why people die that’s why.
Monsanto Lobbyist
And a-soak can bite me, you hater.
The open letter to Ban Ki Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations by 100 Climate Scientists: they implore him to stop the Global Warming hyseria and deny in the strongest possible terms that “all scientists agree” in man made or even non man made Global Warming.
This is what you get when you combine Eco Religious Fundamentalism with New World Order scheming.
http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/un-signatories.html
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Monsanto can do whatever it wants and right now no one can stop them. I will.
I already linked to your comment once and in it I anchored an external Alex Jones link. I took the names in his article and web checked them myself. Here is what I confirmed.
President Obama appointed former Monsanto Vice President and lobbyist Michael R. Taylor to be Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of the FDA
President Obama appointed former Iowa Governor, Tom Vilsack to Secretary of Agriculture – A Monsanto Shill
President Obama appointed Islam Siddiqui Siddiqui to Chief Agricultural Negotiator in the Office of the United States Trade Representative, formerly a pesticide lobbyist and Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America, an agribusiness lobbying group that represents Monsanto.
President Obama appointed former DuPont attorney Ramona Romero is General Counsel for the United States Department of Agriculture
President Obama appointed former Rajiv Shah to Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development formerly the Director of Agricultural Development, Director of Financial Services, and leader of the Strategic Opportunities initiative for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ; (pro pro GMO).
President Obama appointed Elena Kagan as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Kagan had argued Monsanto v. Geertson before the Supreme Court and defended Monsanto right use genetically modified alfalfa.
Hillary Clinton, is formerly of the Rose law firm legal counsel to Monsanto.
Like washing the dog, rinse and repeat.
Monsanto can do whatever it wants and right now no one can stop them.
I shouldn’t have used bold letters, it looks terrible.
And a correction.
President Obama appointed Rajiv Shah to Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development Rajiv Shah formerly had been the…
Asoka quotes an article which said:
Economists often assert that we are in the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Are we?
Not technically, but it’s still unusually bad.
****************************************************************
This is the start of your article which is supposed to be a “refutation” of the CFN (and my) view that the economy is quite miserable. This is what your supporting “optimist” starts with. She then goes on to say that she can find ONE metric in various areas where this recovery isn’t the worst.
So, your optimistic viewpoint, hilariously if it coincides with her article, which isn’t bad by the way, is that it might only be, like, the SECOND worst recovery ever … if you cherrypick various areas. Gee, that’s such a ringing endorsement of how well the economy is doing. Note that her thesis statement is that this recovery is UNUSUALLY BAD.
I suppose your next gambit is to argue that if I’m wrong and this recovery is in SECOND place for badness instead of FIRST, and it’s merely only as miserable as she (and her graph) states, then your rosy outlook is correct and my non-rosy outlook is “defeated”.
Good Lord, this shows how far you’ll reach to get tepid support for your main thesis yet it does NOT support your thesis that things are doing well and we dour CFN’ers are in the wrong. It’s like having a rousing debate about whether California’s public schools are 47th or 49th out of 50 as if the distinction is huge.
You’re really a shallow, unreasoning twit.
E.
I’ve got a photograph of myself, Obama, and Santa Claus autographed by Santa Claus.
How much do you think that it’s worth?
What was your favorite episode of the 1970s TV show “Hee Haw”?
E.
Perhaps Asoka hasn’t turned his attention to Spain and the riots of the amazing disappearing middle class today.
Perhaps he loves the fudged numbers we’re given which cherry picks what they want you to focus on. (watch the birdie, that’s a good consumer)
Point is the QEs to infinity are only going to be more destructive, while giving some indices a better look.
Charles Hugh Smith questions whether the QE’s will even help the stock market. All this money poured down the zombie bank drain only to eventually take its toll on the stock market and all the cosmetics that made the world economy appear functional.
What could Obama have used all those $Trillions on instead?
E. I think you’ll like this article and I would make CHS a daily read. He nails it most of the time.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
Why QE May Not Boost Stocks After All
Hey Xhalor, sorry about the homeless predicament you find yourself in. You sound like a pretty smart guy, obviously well educated. Its probably a smart move getting out of LA. I haven’t been there in awhile, but I agree with Ozone: that place ain’t made for Human Beings.
A suggestion. Right now gold is going for $1700 per ounce. Why not gather up some gear, head for the hills, and do some prospecting. The original investment wouldn’t be much, and you’re already in California, so you wouldn’t have to travel far. (outside Sacramento) If you took your time, studied up on it in the public library, you could probably make a go of it. What have you got to lose? (I know, I know, mind my own business. But last week, metal detecting on SE Mass. beach, among many other things, found a diamond studded platinum ring) Granted, metal detecting and prospecting are not the same. But metal detectors exist now that can find gold nuggets in slag heaps of mid-19th century long abandoned mines. Read Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug’ and Robert Lewis Stevenson’s account of his California prospecting days (on his honeymoon) before you go.
–WSP7
Ibendet, in that Morris Berman book I was talking about, he says bailouts total $19 trillion to date, most of it to Wall Street. He references Matt Tiabbi quite often.
–WSP7
Astounding numbers, Marlin.
And sadly it’s like flushing it all down a toilet. Also don’t forget there is $23Trllion in off shore banking for the elites. Romney has money in the Caymans and Switzerland. Question is what good does that money do for the dying world economy?
Gotta go now….
The network of global systems that support civilization are on the verge of failure. The idea that endless growth is progress has created multiple stress points within these interlocking systems. Increased production levels have simply produced inferior end products and led to severe resource depletion. Clearly we are at risk of a cascading failure that will bring down Civilization as we know it. Where the trigger point for massive failure lies I cannot be sure. It could be within the financial system or the energy production and distribution system or the Food Production system. As these systems fall into chronic collapse it is going to be one wild ride. I know that I personally cannot even grasp what this will be like for I am a bastard child of Western affluence and post industrial techno ignorance. Part of me just wants to head for the lifeboats as the stringed trio plays on and part of me wants to forget it all and go Hillbilly handfishin. Yet, in the end, we must hang on to our humanity and plant the seeds of love from which a new civilization will one day grow. These are only words and are easy to say. I hope I can live up to them.
LBendet said:
Charles Hugh Smith questions whether the QE’s will even help the stock market. All this money poured down the zombie bank drain only to eventually take its toll on the stock market and all the cosmetics that made the world economy appear functional.
****************************************************************
Well, LB, cogent as Smith’s reasoning is, you won’t get Pangloss to buy it. He ignores things like housing “recoveries” that are 68% below 2006, money velocity lower than 2008, and 16% U6 unemployment so he certainly will not heed Smith’s observations that each QE has a more and more muted effect on the one-and-only thing that is cosmetically appealing … the level of the equities markets.
Oddly, the Fed is, of course, slowly bankrupting … THEMSELVES. The Fed Model that’s still used has never been considered anything more than a theoretical “shot in the air”. I find academic economics to be yet another social science trying to be physics and failing miserably.
E.
Oh yea, one more thing. I meant to ask the academics here, Muddmike and Buck Stud, where all the War Protesters are this election cycle? They were so prominent in 2008. After all, we are involved in a nasty war, one in which Soldiers & Marines are being shot in the back and blown up by erstwhile allies, men we are supposed to be training. I haven’t hear much of anything from Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink or Democracy Now. Is there any organized anti war activity on campus, the incubator for this sort of thing? Or are they just dormant for now, for obvious reasons, poised to magically reappear if Romney is elected President? There used to be a group that rallied every week on the beautiful Green in Litchfield, CT, holding up signs, making deragatory remarks about President Bush, and ‘Close Gitmo’, which is still open, incidentally. Strangely enough, after Nov. 2008 I didn’t see them anymore. Same with the cardboard cemetery on the green in Newfane, VT with a board for every serviceman killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of growing even larger after 2008, it mysteriously disappeared. Where did it go?
–WSP7
“Oddly, the Fed is, of course, slowly bankrupting … THEMSELVES. The Fed Model that’s still used has never been considered anything more than a theoretical “shot in the air”. I find academic economics to be yet another social science trying to be physics and failing miserably.”
-E.
Here, in a short 2 minutes, David Suzuki gives the “science” of economics an accurate and well-deserved kick in the teeth. “Externalities”, my ass; to exclude the very basis of their “economy” is both venal, and the height of cynicism brought to the level of insanity!:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKg_vp6DvTo
From the excellent movie “Surviving Progress”; a level deeper than most want to think about the human condition and self-imposed, dead-end Globalist system as a stand-alone, dangerous experiment. …And (heaven forefend) over-population happens to be a knock-on ingredient!
(Can be watched in its’ entirety on youtube, if you don’t mind sitting in the Kunstlerian Choir for much of it. It’s certainly done well enough to be easily borne, and might be a good recommendation for those who are clueless [but questioning] of the status quo.)
Sorry for the late response. Here is Ralph N explaining only one area of what I find as Obama’s failure resulting from lack of honesty, courage and integrity. What has he stood up for against the opposition besides gay rights? What about commerce, finance, inequality, fair taxation, etc? I would consider voting for one or more of his speeches, but sadly they are not able to run. Barack and Bill suffer the same affliction.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/ralph-nader-says-obama-is-war-criminal-worse-than-george-bush_n_1914154.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009
Lack of exercise in the free-speech zones?
I think it’s a combination of outrage fatigue and realization that TPTB are laughing up their sleeves about it. “Hee hee, lookit these dummies who think that by griping about something, it can prick our consciences and we’ll change the way we do bid’ness. Fat fuggin’ chance, lumpen losers!”
The words “ineffective” and “futile” spring instantly to mind.
(The “protests” in Spain and Greece probably get the elites’ attention in a more focused and direct manner. We’ll have to see how long they can keep the police protecting their asses while, at the very same time, taking away compensations. Maybe it’s a real-life trial of the limits of subservience! Bring the kids; fun will be had by all!)
Obams lastest:
‘The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.’
If you want to hear him say this, the recent UN speech is online.
Much Thanks K Dog.
Its posts like those 2 that make this blog worth reading.
…And, I suppose, you would find this a basis for a reactionary fear that the FUSA is being primed to be a codified region of the coming Islamic Caliphate? That should fly real well with the Cat’lick spics you so despise that [from your LA area vantage] are now TAKING OVER!!! Better make an alliance with ’em quick, a’fore the towelheads make you convert by the sword!
Jeebus wept, man, try and adjust your fear indices to the “slightly probable” setting. Pressing matters demand your attention (in case you hadn’t noticed).
-me, out
…And, yes, I agree that this is a prime example of the POTUS using his direct power to appoint destructive forces (foxes to guard the henhouse).
This refutes the constant whine of: “He can’t DO
anything; he’s being obstructed at every turn!”
Bullshit. He’s “done” plenty; whether on his own, or at the behest of his handlers.
Oh aren’t you cute: your creative spellings seem very particular. You know how to spell Islamic but somehow you can’t spell Catholic right.
You’re just another PC punk. Typical libtard coward.
Perhaps he loves the fudged numbers we’re given which cherry picks what they want you to focus on.
==============
E. did cherry pick from the NYT article I cited, while admitting it is a good article.
First, the article proved E.’s claim was wrong that this is the worst recession in US history.
Second, the article proves E.’s claim in wrong that we are in a depression, not a recession.
Third, the article provided a definition of recession which indicates the current recovery is still underway. When the recovery is complete, then, and only then, can we make pronouncements about the severity of the current recession compared to previous recessions.
“It’s dark! It’s dark!”
Calm down, E., the sunrise is only just beginning.
We need community you said – but on what basis? Without Racial homogeneity, you need at the very least relgious and cultural unity. White groups didn’t get along either until they attained the latter.
But you proudly eschew all of this so again, on what basis? Waiting in line to see the same movie or concert? Using the same brand toothpaste?
You proudly proclaimed “I have nothing against any group” like that was something special. It’s not – it’s the ruling Ideology. It simply means you’re one of the ruled/rubes. In any case, it’s just not good enough: you have to be for Someone just like you have to believe in Some real things that will hold it all together.
To be for everyone is to be for no one since the groups are in competition. The only way for them not to be is to have a real Culture that united them – but this you proudly eschew in favor of Cultural Marxism, which is top down all the way.
M,
Perhaps the “weldschmerz” outlined by Phil (in another trenchant article) would give us an explanation of that persistent, niggling, vague feeling of loss and grief that JHK has written about this week.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32547.htm
Dimwitted followers and nincomtards of the RW authoritarian bent do not seem to feel this (or perhaps it’s consciously ignored); they must be more tolerant of the destructive effects of cognitive dissonance and loss of humanity involved in the building of false idols and grandiose visions of overarching power.
Ah well, reality is not cooperating.
**We now return you to the Piss-soak-cchio and little laddie lederhosen Strange and Purposely False Dialectic Show, regularly scheduled for the remainder of the week! Enjoy.
We need community you said – but on what basis?
==============
We are on a planet hurling through space. What we all have in common is that we are all inhabiting the same planet and we must take care of it because it is our life-support system. It is a question of life or death, a question of human survival. We all must cooperate and get along together, in spite of superficial differences, because we are the human community on this planet.
There is a great deal of wishful thinking in our country–maybe more than ever. One expression of this wishfulness is that the U.S. of A. is “the greatest country in the world.” But seriously, my Fellow Americans, how can that this statement be true considering we are, if not the most, one of the most foolish nations in the world. Our country seems to be more divided (less united) now than ever before in our short history. One of these divisions is between the world views of those who find comfort in wishful thinking versus the discontented critical observers of conventional American society.
Over the past thirty years or so, we have allowed our air, water, soil, food, bodies, minds, and hearts to be polluted, and these are all vital to our well being. How foolish is that? There are thousands of examples of how we go about engaging in this polluting, we need only do some research that is all quite readily available in order to educate ourselves about it. However, mostly it is blissfully ignored.
The following are two examples: We not only accept but celebrate eating “foods” and drinking beverages that we ourselves consider to be “junk food.” These processed-for-profit pollutants line most of the shelves of conventional supermarkets.
The other example of foolish thinking/behavior is that we permit pharmaceutical companies to place ads in our mass media that suggests to any and all that they may be afflicted with a particular symptom or condition, and if so one is entitled to simply buy and administer the drug being advertised in order to mask or temporarily eliminate the symptom, leaving in its wake several new symptoms with which to contend. Of course, never mentioned is root cause, cure, or any other options, as doing so would be counterproductive to selling as much of their drug as possible, the means for securing greater profit.
Two concerns arise if one is willing to confront our own foolishness. One is to ask why have I not felt foolish while engaging in the wishful thinking and foolish behavior. This could have much to do with riding the wave of conventionality which is awfully convenient, comfortable, and offers a delusional sense of certainty and security, all this with very little effort required. Riding this wave seems a quite understandable choice, but, at some point, ends up being regrettable.
Another concern is the seeming lack of control, choice, or input any one individual has as regard the horribly foolish and destructive things taking place. This may be the greatest all-encompassing foolishness of all. That is: why do we allow a relatively small number of wealthy, powerful, selfish, and often cruel and dishonest people to make nearly all of the far-reaching decisions that affect us all?
The final concern to raise on this subject is how are we, if we choose to, going to get out from under our own foolishness and the results it has wrought? First of all, I feel quite certain it won’t happen through wishful thinking. However, our thinking, our own reason guided by the wisdom of the human heart, will play a key part. Establishing new patterns of thinking, unleashing our creativity, replacing competition with cooperation, and ever-blossoming feelings of kinship with our fellow beings will serve as a healing balm on a nation and world suffering from its unrecognized, habitual foolishness.
FORMATTING CORRECTION
We need community you said – but on what basis?
==============
We are on a planet hurling through space. What we all have in common is that we are all inhabiting the same planet and we must take care of it because it is our life-support system. It is a question of life or death, a question of human survival. We all must cooperate and get along together, in spite of superficial differences, because we ARE the human community on this planet.
“As President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, I accept that people will say awful things about me every day. And I defend their right to do so.” — President Obama
Living Under Drones: The Brutal Reality of “Targeted Killing”
Since 2004, up to 884 innocent civilians, including at least 176 children, have died from US drone strikes in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan. A new report from the Stanford and New York University law schools finds drone use has caused widespread post-tramatic stress disorder and an overall breakdown of functional society in North Waziristan. In addition, the report finds the use of a “double tap” procedure, in which a drone strikes once and strikes again not long after, has led to deaths of rescuers and medical professionals. Many interviewees told the researchers they didn’t know what America was before drones. Now what they know of America is drones, death and terror.
This report continues to call into question the U.S. strategy of drone strikes, and presents evidence of profound humanitarian consequences as well as concerns that the strikes actually may have adverse security impacts by fomenting anger against the U.S.
The report is based on nine months of research, including two investigations in Pakistan. The Stanford-NYU research team interviewed over 130 individuals, including civilians who traveled out of the largely inaccessible region of North Waziristan to meet with the researchers. They also interviewed medical doctors who treated strike victims, and humanitarian and journalist professionals who worked in drone impacted areas.
To read the Executive Summary and Recommendations, visit:
http://livingunderdrones.org/
Good riddance? Really?
I seem to remember this kind of view at one time being considered very “with it”. Ended very badly with millions dying in death camps.
And you wonder why you get trashed. You think you’re some kind of intellectual with weighty and substantive things to say. What a joke. Get lost.
Yeah, what you said. But, Dog, I think that Assoka’s researching “compassion” would be a waste of time. Compassion is either there or it’s not and in Assoka’s case it evidently is not.
That’s quite a screed you wrote down there, Ront. It about sums it up … the predicament we find ourselves in.
All I can say at this point is, well, we still got beer, and the buffalo wings are as tasty as ever, even more so.
–WSP7
You mentioned death camps. You lose.
If the population is naturally shrinking, no violence is involved. It is what Gaia wants. Yes, good riddance.
Piss off.
Hey Oz that was pretty good and heartfelt advice you gave Xhalor. I tried to follow up but yours seems more realistic.
–WSP7
Are these the people you want to be in community with?
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=11278
In the dictionary compassion is defined as: Sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.
Which do you want: sympathy, or pity, or concern?
I don’t think you understand what compassion really is, which is why you judge me harshly.
You cannot cultivate compassion. When you are desireless, compassion happens; your whole energy moves into compassion. And this movement is very different. Desire has a motivation in it, a goal; compassion is nonmotivated, there is no goal to it, it is simply overflowing energy.
Piss off
=======
Thank you for your elegant suggestion, but I respectfully decline. You do not understand compassion.
If you don’t mind me scratching at the door.
In my opinion the public is under the impression that Obama is making progress in ending the Bush wars. The PR machine has done a good job giving this impression. The increased use of drones is not a concern to most Americans. The average Americans doesn’t mind at all if millions of brown people become crispy critters so long as ‘the boys’ come home safe.
Is my opinion worth shit? No, but in 2008 I went to a war protest near Seattle. Total attendance was 300 people and a handful of dogs. The metropolitan area here holds several millions of people and several hundred thousand dogs. I think there only a very small group of core dogs who protest war on principle. Daniel Berrigan comes to mind from many years ago. Most, the vast majority, well if the wind blows they change their minds. Weathermen they are not. The rest of us, a very small number are hard core believers in sharing meat and know that under the skin all dogs are the same. When I go to the top of the hill and consult the sun god she tells me that I should love all dogs, I believe her and know it would be blasphemy to think otherwise.
I have not done it but if polled I’m thinking the ‘average person’ would guess the number of drone strikes was less than 100 last year. PR has done it’s job well but if our moats were not really really wide the blowback would toast Zuccotti park warm and it would certainly not be empty.
✔ K-Dog (All dogs eat.)
The protest was forced into the confines of a small park, received no media coverage and total attendance was 1000. Three hundred protesters and seven hundred police. I may not have the numbers right it’s my guess, but police easily outnumbered protesters.
Maybe we just need the crazy cool of Nellie McKay.
All dogs are not the same: they have many different kinds of bodies and therefore temperments that accord with these.
Surely you don’t believe that a greyhound is the same as a pit bull? Or that a Great Dane is as smart as a Border Terrier? Face it: the breeds (races) differ in mind and body.
No death camps are needed.
Census and demographic data shows that minorities comprise a majority of babies in the U.S.
Life Spans Shrink for Least-Educated Whites in the U.S.
Muslim immigrants’ higher birth-rates will replace traditionally Christian Europe with an Islamic majority within this century.
Nature will take care, nonviolently.
Viva La Reconquista!
The ability to communicate with fellow citizens is paramount so don’t forget linguistic homogeneity. Language is one of the primary tribal markers. I can think of a few countries where two major language groups trying to share a state and common geographic space doesn’t work very well.
As far as race goes if I were you I’d spend my mental energy elsewhere. A racially mixed America may not be to your taste but there’s no undoing it.
You said once that I was right, that separate white and non-white countries where the USA now sits would never happen in your lifetime or maybe ever.
So forget about it, it’s not going to happen and if someone does try to bring it about it will end where most ethnic cleansings end: in a horrific bloodbath. Don’t go there.
As I said one other time, the USA can work but you have to remember the phrase “and justice for all”. This isn’t being unreasonable.
So be fair. Fair means fair. You transgress and you go in the slammer. You live on the straight and narrow, keep your nose to the grindstone and you have the right to expect reward without regard for skin color. If white people earned their place in the USA then it would take some major mind twisting metaphysics to deny black people theirs. And Amerindians too for that matter.
They have different kinds of bodies and different temperaments but they have the same right to breath air, be happy, and have a fulfilled life.
That Howard Stern piece was pretty good. I’m giving you a compliment. Take it, it could be a long time before you get another from me.
You cannot cultivate compassion. _Assoka
No shit sherlock. That’s what I was telling Dog. It’s either in you or it’s not. With you it evidently is not. Which accounts for your cruelty to Xhalor.
Which do you want: sympathy, or pity, or concern? – Assoka
Kiss my ass.
Now get lost.
“compassion is non-motivated, there is no goal to it, it is simply overflowing energy.”
Looks like your right. The goal of reliving the suffering of other dogs is seen as nothing but overflowing undirected energy? WOW
correction:
I’m thinking the ‘average person’ would guess the number of drone strikes was less than 100 last year.
should be:
I’m thinking the ‘average person’ would guess the number of drone strikes was less than 20 last year.
Yeah, wow is right. Mind boggling. You literally don’t know what to say to shit like that.
The ability to communicate with fellow citizens is paramount so don’t forget linguistic homogeneity. Language is one of the primary tribal markers.
=============
Bullshit! Europe is multilingual and European countries share a common geographic space with no wars between developed European countries in 67 years.
Belgium, India, South Africa and Switzerland are all officially multilingual and they have endured and thrived without a linguistic “primary tribal marker.”
I know I started to try and then I backspaced over my response. Multiply zero by anything and it is still zero.
You literally don’t know what to say to shit like that.
================
Exactly my point. You literally do not understand what compassion is.
The word “compassion” is composed of passion. To be compassionate means to be in love. Compassion is just a dimension of love. Passion is hasty, hectic, a little violent. Compassion is gentle, nice, understanding — but it is passion after all.
I know I started to try and then I backspaced over my response. Multiply zero by anything and it is still zero.
===============
Very wise doggie. More should follow your example.
The new Apple iphone has a personal assistant called Romnee.
For example, if you tell Romnee: “Call home.”
Romnee comes back with this:
“Do you mean summer home, winter home, vacation home, Swiss villa, island retreat, Welsh castle, or ski lodge?”
If you ask Romnee to recommend a pizza place:
“There are several pizza chains in the area. Which one would you like to buy, load up with debt, and sell off?”
If you ask Romnee what movie is opening this weekend:
“Trouble with the Curve, starring Amy Adams, Justin Timberlake, and that ass-clown who ruined the convention. ”
If you ask Romnee where is the nearest Starbucks:
“Hot beverages are forbidden by the scriptures.”
If you ask Romnee where you can get a hot dog:
“On the roof of your car.”
Romnee, I want to tip my waitress. What is 15% of $50?
“I’m not telling.”
Well, it’s just a question, Romnee.
“And I answered it. Let’s move on.”
How can a simple math question be so hard?
“Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…”
You literally do not understand what compassion is. – Assoka.
No, Asshole. YOU don’t have a clue.
Because if you DID know what compassion is as opposed to some over-intellectualized textbook definition you wouldn’t have kicked Xhalor in the face. At the very least you would have kept your hole SHUT.
I provided Xhalor with a list of homeless shelters, complete with phone numbers and addresses. I told him he could access the internet in public libraries.
You have a funny idea of what it means to “Kick someone in the face” The Japanese Imperial Army could help you out with you misunderstanding.
According to Obama Files, Michelle was being paid big money to destroy her community [keep them away form the hospital] and Obama also had incurred the wrath of the community he was organizing, while he lived a drive across town to the white area.
[far as Ozone goes, hes not worth replying to, RadaKrisna].
Bullshit? Really asshole? You forgot about the Balkans. Oh, the Balkans are “undeveloped”. Sure. Try telling them. Do you actually know anyone from there? Let me help you, do you know any Serbs or Croats or Bosnians? No? I didn’t think so. Apparently they thought it was worth duking it out over age old rivalries. And the divides, linguistic or cultural, never looked to me to be all that deep. It didn’t stop them though.
But never mind, try re-reading my post. Try replying to what I actually said.
So here’s what I said: I can think of a few countries where two major language groups trying to share a state and common geographic space doesn’t work very well.
So you heard of Belgium? Flemish and Walloon. Do you think they get along? Not long ago they went for what, a year and a half without a government because the two language groups can’t get along? Apparently the Flemish political party wanted to split the Flemish speaking part into a separate country.
And the Ukraine. One third Russian speaking, two thirds Ukrainian. And the political class is doing its level best to really fuck things up by sowing division.
Even Canada. The French speaking province just elected a separatist government. And the official opposition is led by a separatist that promises to not revisit separatism. Yeah, right, unless the tribal drums start pounding that is. English and French defacto are two separate countries and they do not get along worth a damn… murders, bombings, martial law, referendums to separate. All that mess over what? The outcome of a conflict that happened and ended 250 years ago?
War is one thing but then there’s discord. Which can be really disruptive as Canada and Belgium have both found out. Yeah even in boring old Belgium and Canada.
In the US you have a historic division between north and south which erupted into a nasty war. And now it looks to me to manifest itself in political gridlock. So besides a cultural divide between people speaking a common language you have a potential linguistic divide. You have enough division and trouble there. You really don’t need more. And do I need to remind you that your countrymen are armed to the teeth? But far be it from me to advise Americans as to what they should do. I’ll leave it to your fellow Americans to deal with people like you.
Asoka:
E. did cherry pick from the NYT article I cited, while admitting it is a good article.
First, the article proved E.’s claim was wrong that this is the worst recession in US history.
Second, the article proves E.’s claim in wrong that we are in a depression, not a recession.
Third, the article provided a definition of recession which indicates the current recovery is still underway. When the recovery is complete, then, and only then, can we make pronouncements about the severity of the current recession compared to previous recessions.
*************************************************************
You show an ASTONISHING lack of knowledge about depressions. Astonishing. Though the Great Depression is conceded to have been from 1929-1939, GDP rose EVERY YEAR from 1933-1939. The American public was so pissed that they voted out Roosevelt’s Democrats in the mid-term elections of 1938 because the NEW DEAL WAS SEEN AS A FAILURE.
So, if GDP rose from 1933 to 1939, why is the ENTIRE 1929-1939 period conceded to be the Great Depression? Nobody thinks it was 1929-1932 … even Wikipedia. The problem is that economic statistics are YEAR-OVER-YEAR so if you’re starting from a highly depressed base, very small improvements still feel like a severe economic downturn.
US unemployment in 1939 was 15% which is LESS than our current 15.8% U6 unemployment. In those years, there was no U3 “fudged” unemployment stat. Finally, Federal debt was NONEXISTENT until WWII and there were no “credit cards” so the individual, while broke, didn’t owe a year’s income like today’s middle class.
The current levels of individual, city, state, and Federal debt combined with a “recovery” in housing, jobs, and spending that’s measly leaving us at levels half or more below the 1990s, this is truly a Depression and will be seen as such in the future after it is over.
Your problem, Asoka, is that you don’t study ANYTHING in depth. You are a dilettante so you probably didn’t even know that from 1933-1939 there, too, our GDP was “recovering” … and MUCH faster than 2010-2012. Total GDP from 1933 to 1939 rose by about FORTY percent … from a very low base. Because of that ultra-low base, the 8% annual growth still LOOKED and FELT like a Depression to the American people.
By your reckoning, we should engage in historical revisionism and say that the Great Depression was only 1929-1932 even though you won’t find ONE pundit or economist of ANY note whatsoever that limits the length of the Depression to less than ten years. Our GDP “recoveries” have been, on average, a miserable three percent since 2009 and now we’re likely near one percent … from a very depressed base. And the Fed has tried mightily to kick-start this mule … which they didn’t do in the Great Depression where the post-trough growth makes ours look horrid.
This is why I never take you seriously as a true scholar on this site because your knowledge lacks circumspection and depth. You are palpably THE most cherrypicking of data miners because invariably, as in this case, you don’t even know the dynamics of what you’re comparing this economy to. Your knowledge of the simple math of the Great Depression … is woeful.
E.
In the US you have a historic division between north and south which erupted into a nasty war. And now it looks to me to manifest itself in political gridlock.
Again, population trends say in 20 years the South will be solidly Democratic due to demographic changes, and it will all happen without violence. Nature taking its course. Viva La Reconquista!
But far be it from me to advise Americans as to what they should do.
Here I agree with you 100%.
This is not a problem. Most public libraries in the USA have access to the internet. You don’t need a laptop. It’s better to travel light anyway. – Assoka
This is about as assholish a statement as I’ve heard. Breezily dismissive. Utterly devoid of sympathy. As referenced also by KDog. Not a problem? Better to travel light? You don’t need a laptop! Jesus H Christ! The man is out of doors! Do you have the slightest idea of the trials he’s going to be facing?
Imperial Japanese Army? Blow me.
US unemployment in 1939 was 15% which is LESS than our current 15.8% U6 unemployment.
XXX5, now you are not providing accurate data.
At the peak of the Great Depression, U3 was 25.2%. U6 was 37.6%. At our current 15.8% U6 we are no where near the levels of unemployment during the Great Depression. We are in a recession, not a depression.
If you cannot get the most elementary facts straight, it is fruitless to continue any kind of dialog with you.
You are purposefully misleading with false unemployment figures for 1939.
SOURCE: Historical Unemployment in Relation to Today.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13282170/Unemployment-1930s-vs-Today
The man is out of doors! Do you have the slightest idea of the trials he’s going to be facing?
===========
Yes. Because I could recognize the reality of his situation and that he likely would not be able to have a laptop or internet access outdoors, I made a suggestion for internet access in a warm space. That is what you characterized as “kicking him in the face.” I think your anti-Asoka bias is showing. My mirror of love is always available.
“As President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, I accept that people will say awful things about me every day. And I defend their right to do so.” — President Obama
Very charming sentiment, Mr. President. However, what if the person says something you consider “awful” about our country, will you consider them an enemy of the state a have that person assassinated? And will you do it without a trial, without letting them know beforehand, without looking them in the eye?
LOL…I’m no academic Widespread. Minimum wage cashiers look down on me with disdain as I walk into their restaurants wearing my oil stained plein air coat mixed with the smell of walnut wood chips.
And I’m not quite as savage looking as “William Wallace” shoving a deer antler through some poor Brits throat, but I do have long red hair with a beard to match. Simply put,I’m a white guy in blue collar clothes.
Ah, yes the beer is still flowing and wings still clipped for cooking, Brother Panic. Enjoy.
There was a swami, some years back, that would often be known to say: Don’t worry–panic!
what if the person says something you consider “awful” about our country, will you consider them an enemy of the state a have that person assassinated?
Not if all they do is talk. When they conspire with others to promote violent action, it’s a different story. When someone joins with non-state violent actors to threaten the lives of Obama’s brave servicemen and servicewomen, then Obama will take them out to protect his warriors.
(This comment does not mean I in any way approve of violence by non-state actors, nor do I approve of violent in response to non-state actors, nor do I approve of anyone joining national armed forces to provide “military service” i.e., hired guns, mercenaries, for killing.)
XXX5 and Rhino,
That’s all you got today? False unemployment data, histrionics, and juvenile name calling?
My response is real data (for which I provided my source), calm and respectful response, and love.
My mirror of love is always available.
There is no limit to the number of people we can love.
No I wont take it because it wasn’t meant for entertainment but instruction. It shows that Blacks shouldn’t be voting.
Good fences make good neighbors. And the Arabian and the Donkey do not make good plow mates. Separation is the key – or would you put goldens in the same pen with pitbulls? Whites in the same cell with Blacks. That is cruel and unusual punishment.
Why was she disbarred? Have you heard anything?
What is your favorite Monsanto GMO food?
I like those giant strawberries the size of baseballs.
Why do they call that Monsanto product “Round Up”?
Is that “round up”, as in “round up” to the nearest decimal?
Or is it as in “let’s ’round up’ the usual suspects?”
No, you’re not seeing the picture. Blacks, Browns, Gays, Women are all part of the grievance alliance against Whites – and there is going to blood bath if we don’t get away from them. Look how they treat us even now while we are still the small majority. Imagine the hell that awaits our children and grandchildren when they’re the minority.
Well said.
I, for one, don’t mind unsolicited advice from foreigners as long as it is reasonably sane and grounded. It’s often foreigners who are best able to appreciate a country’s flaws. This is particularly true for a people as arrogant and unintrospective as Americans. It’s scary how many Americans are puffed up with delusions of national grandeur and righteousness.
The problem I see with my country’s private arsenal isn’t that it exists, but that so much of it is in the hands of unhinged assholes. Some people don’t consider this a meaningful distinction and suggest that those making it are just channeling the NRA’s “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” rhetoric, but I disagree. I think the NRA is right about that, although not as responsible as it should be about the likelihood that many of its members have homicidal or even genocidal leanings. Switzerland effectively has universal armament, much higher than the US rate of gun ownership (we have a large contingent of people who own multiple guns and another large contingent who are unarmed by deliberate choice), yet Switzerland is much less violent.
This is basically because Swiss culture doesn’t celebrate violence the way American culture does. Sure, we claim to be horrified by violence and demand justice, but many of us are disingenuous. We have a huge problem in the states with secretly getting off on the behaviors that we angrily condemn. I doubt I can exaggerate how serious this problem is with respect to sex in particular. We also have feral subcultures–ghetto gangbangers, redneck vigilantes, and, maybe worst of all, a large segment of the police–that we more or less refuse to confront as a nation.
From everything I’ve heard, the Swiss do not tolerate, let alone abet, the sort of outward aggression and public incivility that Americans admire. It sounds like a place where if you grab your gun and run off to avenge some slight, your neighbors will really, truly, deeply despise you for being a thug. You won’t be greeted with the titillated faux outrage that prevails in the States. Your neighbors will leave you no room to think that they’re secretly about to cream their pants at the ballsiness of what you just did.
Actually, I can’t recall coming across anyone in Continental Europe who radiates anything like Nancy Grace’s dark, sexually tinged hatred at the mention of a murder, although the Brits seem to have a few like her. They at least had that bitch who came out of the woodwork at the time of the Perugia murders to libel Amanda Knox.
Incidentally, Switzerland may be the best counterpoint to your point about linguistic divisions, although it’s probably the exception that proves the rule. The Swiss seem to really hold it together in a way that the Belgians don’t. Two explanations occur to me. First, Switzerland is hyperfederalist, devolving a huge number of functions to the cantonal level, where the linguistic divisions are minimal to nonexistent. (This is only a partial explanation vis-a-vis Belgium, with its multiple parliaments.) Second, Switzerland has spent most of a millennium (in contrast to Belgium’s sporadic two-century history as a sovereign nation) in unified peace, often while its neighbors descended into bloody chaos. The nationalistic interest in avoiding military alliances and the resulting carnage probably transcends linguistic differences, particularly since Switzerland’s record allows its citizens to point at neighboring countries and say, in effect, “Ha! We’re superior to ALL you bastards!”
Don’t eat the Monsanto GMO food.
Apparently, Monsanto has been selling its GMO food as safe on the basis of tests done on rats over a 3-month period.
It seems that French researchers have found that rats fed on Monsanto GMO food start growing cancerous tumors after 4 months. Monsanto would have known this. Sick….
From this website, it looks like Monsanto may be designing GMO food to be compatible with other Monsanto products, such as herbicides, as part of a Frankenstein product line. Sick….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)
Whatever happened to the toxic metal hip joint that the doctors implanted in JHK’s body?
That was a weird, creepy real-life story…right out of a Stephen King novel.
How did it ever happen in an allegedly “free market” system that consumers are buying “food” that kills them?
Is it because the GMO food is “cheaper”, or “tastes better”?
In China, some people admit that the reason they knowingly eat food containing industrial toxins is because they say “it tastes better.”
“…you wouldn’t have kicked Xhalor in the face.”
Get at Parade Rest! Both of you dickweeds!
You! Private Rhino! What the fuck is matter with you? I hardly feel like I was “kicked in the face” with his offer of help. There are PLENTY of other reasons to pick on Asoka.
And you! Private Ding-Dong! How compassionate is it to park crude missile launchers and anti-aircraft weapons in the middle of some mud-hut village knowing full well that we will blow that shit up rrrrrrrrrrreal fuckin’ good! Drones? Of course we use drones! Know why? BECAUSE WE FUCKIN’ CAN! Tent cities and flag-draped coffins just don’t look good on TV during an election year.
And you if you two were doing your jobs as highly motivated if not slightly deranged infantrymen, you would take out that one peasant with an antique rifle with one three round BURST instead of having the Chair Force launch an $80,000 missile at him.
Now get back to your primary mission of publicly dissin’ those two nattering nabobs of presidential tripe so that I can get back to MY mission of being denied public assistance or I will put this horseshit in yer 201 files and place you both on PERMANENT barbed wire detail.
That’s an order.
“We are going to have higher benefits for low income people, and lower benefits for higher income people.” — Mitt Romney on his Medicare plan
Mitt Romney believes in redistribution, too.
You have a point insofar as the fractiousness caused by grievance-mongering really is corrosive to American society, but I believe you’re promoting a much more conspiratorial gloss than is warranted by the evidence. Your argument concedes no nuance at all on the part of the factions in the diversity lobby. Your view of them is every bit as monolithic and naive as that of the most foolish leftist promoter of multicultural nonsense. Your claim that gays and women are allied against whites is only coherent in the context of the crudest sort of multicultural grievance-mongering. The idea of separating from women is particularly absurd. Monks do that, but whole societies of men do not.
Is race war a possibility? Absolutely. Is it inevitable? No. Even if the shit really hits the fan, say, as it did in Rwanda, the allegiances won’t be as monolithic as you suggest. The history of the Rwandan genocide bears this out; even in the midst of a national bloodbath, there were individual Hutus who took a stand, at grave risk to their own lives, to protect their Tutsi neighbors. It’s nuts to suggest that white women and gays will align themselves with nonwhites en masse in a race war against white males. That’s the kind of florid fantasy that is found only on the political extremes–usually the muliticulti left, but apparently also the skinhead right.
Crikey.
There’s also an impish, maybe even trollish, question that has been in the back of my mind for a few months. I don’t expect you to answer it, or to be civil if you do dignify it with an answer, but I’ll go ahead and ask it:
Are you Mark Fuhrman?
Something’s all fucked up….
People are knowingly eating food that kills them.
People are knowingly voting for politicians who enact laws and policies that hurt them.
People are knowingly tuned into a mass media that is lying to them.
It’s like watching a football game in which one team, “The Ruling Class”, has somehow arranged things such that the opposing team, “The People”, manage to fumble the ball, run backwards, and score points for the “The Ruling Class”.
It’s bizarre…almost tragic comic…..
Meanwhile, in The Ruling Class coaches booth a young, inexperience reporter asks:
“Hey Coach! How do you manage to get the other team to fumble, and to score points for your team? It’s really amazing!”
“It’s easy. Whenever we notice that The People get that look on their faces that suggests that maybe they’re starting to think, we just press The Fear Button and shock the hell out of ’em!”
Ever hear of something called Yugoslavia? What happened to it, eh?
The Quebecois are White and Christian, but despite that, they don’t want to be part of Canada. And you expect Blacks to fit into the United States? Who the hell are you kidding?
Women have been allied with Blacks as members of the grievance alliance for generations now. Crazy? Of course. What the hell is wrong with White Women to betray their own Race? In Europe, the Left has allied with Muslims against their own People.
Are you innocent? How many times have you bashed White Men in order to fit into the Liberal millieu? Face it – we’re the niggers now and you are the racists. Blacks have savaged our Race and you and your ilk defend them.
It cannot stand. Let my people go.
I couldn’t agree more.
we’re the niggers now and you are the racists.
============
Um, not quite.
The “niggers” arrived here with nothing, were beaten, forced to labor, and denied education and freedom. They had zero privilege in society.
You have enjoyed white privilege, you have had opportunities for education, you have had freedom of movement, you have not been beaten or forced to work without pay for others. You are a NIÑO (nigger in name only).
Or, in Spanish, a niño, a spoiled child, crying about suddenly becoming a demographic minority, and shitting your pants with fear that you might actually receive some maltreatment for the first time in your life.
It won’t happen. You will be well treated by non-whites. But you are such a paranoid coward, that imagined nigger status is all you can think about. You project hatred, violence, and all that whites did to Blacks, and you think it will be the same for you. You are wrong.
In all the years I have read you racist comments on CFN you have projected your fear, but nothing has ever really happened to you.
Yet you live your life avoiding what you wrongly perceive to be dangerous (anyone not like you). You have demonstrated amply that you are a fraidy-cat, scared of your shadow and the shadows you project. It is sad. I feel sorry for you.
No Trillion+ in Student debt, in the ‘Great’ Depression.
Have you read Irv Schiffs book? [forget the title]
It talks about the ‘spin’ put on the 30s.
Also ‘in the good ole days’ did Government create bubbles, like the House Bubble of the last decade?
I heard that Monsanto tried to hire Johnnie Cochran to defend its GMO patents in a Los Angeles court room. Unfortunately, Cochran had already died from eat’n too much GMO food.
“On September 8, 2012, Cochran was accused by Darden [19] of tampering with the glove that was at the center of the O.J. Simpson trial.”
I really like what this dog has to say about the two nattering nabobs.
“He’s gone beyond George W. Bush in drones.”
Ralph Nader, thinks he is sitting this one out. He isn’t and is going to be really surprised when I appoint him Vice President. I may have my dog. Watching this I felt like I was answering the questions not him though he knows the details much better.
✔ K-Dog (Light a candle in the park and write me in.)
I always rather admired those Alabama rednecks I’d see as a kid sitting in lawn chairs at the end of the fishing pier on the Gulf of Mexico. They’d hook a big hunk of bloody rotten meat onto the end of a long 3 foot steel leader attached to a huge fishing rod and hurl it as far as they can into the ocean. They’d then sit quietly all day drink’n beer patiently waiting for a shark to take the bait. That appeared to be their solemn Duty. Just following orders….
In your ignorance you blind yourself and do not acknowledge the same kind of tape can be made of white people and has many times. Jay Leno has done it, David Letterman has done it, Jon Stewart has done it. Many others have done it. There was nothing instructional about it except that their are a lot of dumfucks out there. We already knew this so contrary to your statement all it had was entertainment value. Sorry to tell you this man but your a legend in your own mind.
That’s more like it. An extra ration of rum for you, pollywog.
there are
A lot of money gets spent picking out those silly names. Some people make a living at branding. What they are really rounding up is your brain. Part of the process may involve making up an urban legend on where the name came from.
‘They’ have been doing this sort of thing since the end of the first world war and are very good at it.
I think that my astrologer fuck’n ripped me off!
What is your favorite Monsanto GMO food?
I don’t know if these are GMO or not but if Non-GMO foods advertised that they are natural and we only bought natural one we would defeat Monsanto.
I’m not ordering until I see a Non-GMO label!!!!
Who are their plant experts? I demand to know.
natural ones
Sorry sometimes my tail wags and my punctuation gets messed up.
They are very good at it too and have been doing it even longer.
????????????????????????????????
Regarding GMO foods. It seems to me the public right to be protected from possible harmful effects totally outweighs the right to their use. Simple as that.
People who believe corporations are people will have trouble understanding this elementary simple moral truth but we do not share their delusions. We have rights and it is time for us claim them.
Whatever happened to selective breeding? It worked and was as natural as rain.
There I go again, it’s my big paws.
us toclaim them.
Only whats at ObamaFiles.
Are you Officer Mark F?
We have rights and it is time for us to claim them.
There, I had to get it right. It’s a K-Dog campaign slogan!!!!!!!!
[School Intercom. School Principal addreses the school]
Principal: “Listen up Students! This is ‘The Principal’. We’ve got some new ‘Principles’ for you, and they are:
(1) Men are women; and
(2) Women are men.
Students that can conform to the new Principles will receive a reward. Students that reject the new Principles will be punished.”
Mark Twain wrote a delightful essay on this very subject, although he expresses a different opinion from yours above:
http://www.mtwain.com/What_Paul_Bourget_Thinks_of_Us/0.html
Your U6 number from SCRIBD, an unmonitored site whose starter was a son of a friend of mine, is a BOGUS. There was no calculation of U6 in the Great Depression. His is a mathematical guess.
However, as usual, you cannot READ. My quote about unemployment was NOT at the peak in 1932 but when we were in a “recovery” in 1939 which was MUCH better from 1933-1939 than our current recovery since GDP growth from the July, 1932 bottom average almost 8% per annum.
As usual, you quote my quote incorrectly, set that up as a straw man, and then lie. You’re a horrible human being because you lie WILLFULLY. You’re very well aware that my posts today were about the RECOVERY long after the 1932 bottom and NOT the numbers from that bottom itself.
Fortunately, most others here like BeingThere, Stephen, Rhino, and Vlad can READ and do not try to compare my “apples” points to “orange” statistics. You remain the greatest dissembler in CFN history. There can be no imitators.
E.
7 Mert Alas Marcus Piggott
Few in the imagemaking business wield the form of power that photographers have on the subject of getting a message across. In turn, 1 ad marketing campaign or magazine address can put a photographer about the map and lead to coveted multimillion-dollar editorial contracts and ad campaigns, for example the ones which have produced Steven Meisel and Patrick Demarchelier home names. This period Louis Vuitton’s ubiquitous Jennifer Lopez advertisements have catapulted a young duo from London, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, to the leading of fashion photography’s brief list. Both born in 1971–Alas in Istanbul and Piggott in Bangor, Wales–they fulfilled in England in 1994 after stints inside the worlds of classical music and graphic style, respectively. “Marcus was a photographer’s assistant, and i had somewhat style store,” claims Alas. “We did some tests, and a few had been awesome, so we showed them to London cult style magazine Dazed and Baffled, and next thing you realize, they had posted them.” Alas and Piggott now count amongst their credits many of the fashion world’s most influential advertising campaigns, such as current types for Lancome, Hugo Manager and Missoni in addition to Louis Vuitton. Lopez in the block, along with her mass-market appeal, may not at first be an apparent choice for any high-end luxury-goods manufacturer, but Alas describes, “We were considering of every big-name type, and nobody had the appropriate persona.” Through a gathering with Vuitton’s artistic director Marc Jacobs, it occurred that each one three experienced believed from the similar lady, and when they contacted her, Lopez said sure. “We wanted to do something exactly where it’s not in regards to the small particulars; it really is a couple of powerful, potent yet charismatic woman. She’s pretty, although not pretty inside a sweet way,” claims Alas. “She was rather concerned, especially into it. She’s unquestionably one of many hardest-working ladies I’ve ever met.” Identified for his or her glossy, airbrushed fashion, Alas and Piggott’s images bring a Vargas-like perfection to the billboards they grace. “The difference amongst us along with other photographers, truthfully, is that we care a whole lot about style,” states Alas. “We are within the make-up room, operating using the hair, concerned inside the appear a lot a great deal more than working about the lighting, the cables, the gels. The technical facet is simply 50% of what makes the picture.” Alas and Piggott cite Guy Bourdin’s 1970s-era advertising for Charles Jourdan as inspiration. “The secret of a robust campaign is a great picture along with a outstanding character,” states Alas. “You need to talk an essence without words, devoid of touch, devoid of sound or scent. Naturally, we’re here to offer a product–you cannot disguise that fact–but the trick is always to state that message in an unconventional way,louis vuitton tivoli, exactly where it does not develop into just about that sale. You need to preserve the id from the message and feelings and feelings from the designers. In the finish of the day, the higher the image, the higher the character you affiliate with it. The thing is J. Lo’s bag in Instances Sq. or for the Voie Montaigne, and when you have the exact same 1, you really feel special, a part of the gang. That’s when the picture works.” –By Camilla Morton
I think that the Chinese Feng Shui man fuck’n ripped me off!
And the bottom line is a dog without a job is a sad dog. Every picture tells a story.
Are you crazy or just stupid? We are already last in line for any benefit. We are already being attacked by mobs of Blacks. We have already been abandoned by both parties who are both committed to a non White America.
And all this is going to get better when there are less of us? No the Blacks will only become even more emboldened – especially if the PTB succeed in disarming us via the U.N Small Arms Treaty or one of the vile Brady Bills.
However, as usual, you cannot READ.
=============
Well, let’s see if YOU can read. I will quote you verbatim. And then I will quote the U6 number for 1939 (based on analytical calculations described in the paper itself, if you only read it.) Ready?
Here is what you wrote:
US unemployment in 1939 was 15% which is LESS than our current 15.8% U6 unemployment.
Here is what the unemployment numbers for 1939 actually were (from Figure D):
1939
Civilian Labor Force .. 17.2%
Non-Farm Employees .. 25.2%
I will repeat what I said before:
If you cannot get the most elementary facts straight, it is fruitless to continue any kind of dialog with you.
You are purposefully misleading with false unemployment figures for 1939.
The paper was very clear:
The data in the sets has been adjusted by the sources listed in Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 in an attempt to sync the data sets with the methodology that was put in placeas of 1940 and was the basis for methodologies since.
SOURCE: Historical Unemployment in Relation to Today.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/13282170/Unemployment-1930s-vs-Today
The numbers I cite are not bogus, as you try to claim. You tell us how you get 15% unemployment for 1939 out of a Civilian Labor Force unemployment of 17.2% and a Non-Farm Employees unemployment of 25.2%. We are waiting, professor.
You can try to dissemble and weasel your way out, but I have the facts and I cite my sources, which are reliable sources.
Notice how you have never cited your source for your false assertion: “US unemployment in 1939 was 15%”
You cannot, because you have invented numbers for your argument. It appears you have pulled them out of your ass, XXX5.
You don’t have much contact with Blacks obviously. I have. I know, you don’t. Despite all your dog shit, you are a very small doctrinaire person with your Marxist playbook.
Most Whites shouldn’t be voting either and that too is too obvious for an oblivious goof like you.
You are all about the mass man, the untermensch. The problem is that this creature is utterly unworthy. How can you not see this? He is expoited because he is able to be exploited; he is able to be exploited because he is a fool who wants to be fooled – either because of stupidity or corruption. His rights? To be ruled by better men than himself for his own good.
F Officer Mark F. He got caught!
I’m Kato. OJ did it but so what? He let me crash in his house sometimes. I just dyed my hair blonde again so I can fit in on Venice beach and get chicks. They don’t like grey hair.
Remember Longstreet? I was the side kick. What shows have you been in? What stars have you met or gone to bed with?
He is expoited because he is able to be exploited
============
He/she has the right to choose who exploits him/her. He/she has the right to wake up and choose those who will not exploit him/her. He/she has the right to run for office and exploit others. All those are his/her rights in a democracy.
What you want is Fascism, as you say:
“His rights? To be ruled by better men than himself for his own good.”
And who decides who are those “better men” in a fascist state? And do women have an equal opportunity to become rulers in fascism? And where is your idea currently working successfully?
HTTP five hundred error each and every time when i go to a web-based retailer
When it is time for me to consider and about to create a obtain, it gives me an error announcing that “the internet site can not display the page”. The error is HTTP 500 Internal Server error.
I have tried that with Online Explorer. I also attempted with Mozilla Firefox,?????, but Firefox bears a comparable outcome – the webpage is blank, and nothing at all occurs. One of the most likely triggers were the web page is beneath upkeep or maybe the web-site features a programming error. To my personal viewpoint, it could lie somewhere other than these issues.
So my query would be to you is, which trouble lies on? My pc or simply just the server that may be web hosting the over the internet store? Does one persons have any ideas?
I went into the on line customer help web page down at the internet site in query, and that i questioned them my concerns. Yet, as I’d inputted the credit card details web based (my mother wished me to buy a Louis Vuitton wallet along with a Chanel purse),?????, it will need to have directed me to say that “your transaction has been completed successfully” or “your purchase is being processed” or no matter what that is certainly, however it did not – all of a sudden it all of a sudden misdirected me to some banking web site – based mostly in China for my distinct buy! I have attempted inputting the same bank card data as before, but it failed on me.
It is pretty complex to explain, people. Nonetheless, I’ve examined my e-mail and acquired an buy letter in the web site the assistance personnel in the internet site in question has told me to go. They informed me that “my purchase has been created in addition to a payment confirmation mail will stick to the moment payment is approved at their end”. What does that mean?
CORRECTION
Notice how you have never cited your source for your false assertion: “US unemployment in 1939 was 15%”
You cannot, because you have invented numbers for your argument. YOU GOT CAUGHT. It appears you have pulled them out of your ass, XXX5. YOU CARE NOT FOR TRUTH.
XXX5, tell us how you get 15% unemployment for 1939. (I realize this is not a U6 figure)
The Civilian Labor Force unemployment for 1939 was 17.2% and the Non-Farm Employees unemployment for 1939 was 25.2%. (I realize these are not a U6 figures)
I well understand U6 was not available for 1939, but your assertion was:
US unemployment in 1939 was 15% which is LESS than our current 15.8% U6 unemployment.
You were not quoting a U6 figure for 1939. Neither am I. YOU were comparing apples to oranges.
You provide no source for your 15% unemployment. My source for the 17.2% + 25.2% figures is the Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
What is your source, XXX5? You are basing an argument on a figure of 15%, but you never cited your source. Do you just make numbers up, XXX5?
The Civilian Labor Force unemployment for 1939 was 17.2% and the Non-Farm Employees unemployment for 1939 was 25.2%.
XXX5, your whole argument is based on your claim that 1939 unemployment was LESS than our current U6. How do you get a figure of 15% for 1939?
Here is what you asserted:
US unemployment in 1939 was 15% which is LESS than our current 15.8% U6 unemployment.
The actual 1939 unemployment figures (17.2% + 25.2%) are GREATER THAN our current U6. Your whole argument collapses, as you waste CFN bandwidth with false data once again.
“It is what Gaia wants. Yes, good riddance.”
Yes Asoka…Allah Akbar…Death to the infidels. It’s what God wants. If our enemies don’t get it, then they deserve to be slaughtered for being so stupid. They have it coming.
Stephen, don’t confuse nonviolent birth rate decline & miscegenation with violence.
Slaughtering is wrong. Period.
When it comes to violence, nobody “has it coming.”
If the mass man is being exploited, then so what. If he’s that dumb and doesn’t stand up for himself, then the victor is justified. Life can’t tolerate the lazy and stupid.
My apologies. I misunderstood your statement. Maybe I should have stated it as “non-birth to the infidels” and “high birth to the righteous.” There of course will be no need to slaughter the enemy if he has no children to fight. The infidels will simply die off on their own. Good on them.
Stephen, that is not how democracy works. The USA Constitution says government is to promote the general welfare of citizens, not to exploit the lazy and the stupid.
Government helps educate the citizens, so they can pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
If that’s the way Gaia wants it, then it’s OK with me.
As long as there is no violence, I accept the eventual disappearance OF ANY GROUP over time, as a result of a natural and nonviolent process.
What-Does-Democracy-Look-Like?
This is what Democracy looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-NllT1MigE
Greece for the Greeks. Europe for Europeans. Whites free in their own Lands. Foreigners and minorities OUT!
Some degree of paternalism is necessary for a good society. Otherwise the sharks will rule. You know, scammers taking little old lady’s homes and quacks poisoning people with bogus remedies.
It’s not that authority is wrong, it’s that the wrong people have it. And yes, even the right ones should be held in restraint by law. That’s what the Constitution was all about. But now, Congress lets the President go to war without even voting on it. The system didn’t fail – we failed it.
There are no “white lands” … and some of those Greeks in the video looked swarthy, olive-skinned, not very white, like maybe they are already multi-racial. What do you know about racial purity, Vlad?
To achieve even partial “purity” (that is, a genetic homogeneity that is never achieved spontaneously in populations of higher animals) would require at least twenty generations of “inbreeding” (e.g., by brother-sister or parent-children matings repeated many times).
Such inbreeding would have severe consequences for the health and fertility of the children, and we can be sure that such an extreme inbreeding process has never been attempted in our history, with a few minor and partial exceptions.
In more recent times, the careful genetic study of hidden variation, unrelated to climate, has confirmed that homogeneous races do not exist. It is not only true that racial purity does not exist in nature: it is entirely unachievable, and would not be desirable.
It may be true about how a democracy works and what the spirit of the Constitution means, but for decades, the US government and her citizens have been ignoring those principles. They are into exploiting people, both foreign and domestic. They are selfish. The result is karma; what goes around, comes around. Hence, the “infidels” are doing themselves in. The righteous will not live by their rules.
Lincoln was a third party, sort of. So we need another third party.
But, the blacks brought us Sam Cooke. Listening to some now, good stuff.
Asoka said:
US unemployment in 1939 was 15% which is LESS than our current 15.8% U6 unemployment.
XXX5, now you are not providing accurate data.
At the peak of the Great Depression, U3 was 25.2%. U6 was 37.6%. At our current 15.8% U6 we are no where near the levels of unemployment during the Great Depression. We are in a recession, not a depression.
******************************************************************
Read YOUR OWN WORDS. You are speaking of the PEAK of the Great Depression while my statement, the first under your name above, CLEARLY, talks about 1939. This is your deliberate effort to MISINFORM people and tell lies. Any informed person knows that the PEAK of the Great Depression was in 1932 and NOT 1939. I’m talking WELL INTO THE RECOVERY and then you claim that it’s a GROSS LIE because YOU, not ME, are talking about the Peak.
I did make a small error, the sort you’d never admit to unless it’s rubbed like shit into your face, about that 1939 unemployment rate. Yes, I made a SMALL error, the SUB 15% unemployment was the end of 1937 and the first part of 1939. Then it zoomed back into the 17’s but then you make my small error seem like a totally grotesque accounting of events as if 15.8% and 17% are so vastly different that this renders your “now is a ray of sunshine compared to the Depression” argument a FARCE.
The difference between you and I, Asoka, is that my bellicosity is never subterranean, never exercised through subterfuge, spiritual disguises, and never minimizes the suffering of others. Underneath all of your Buddhism and Vendantism is a MEAN GRIN while you disemble, change the subject, dodge and weave around prevarications large and small.
The very start of your message above is an unethical ruse. You can see from the line of mine you actually QUOTE about 1939 and then talk about the PEAK of the Depression which you damned well know was 1932. This time it’s very obvious … so much so that you should be embarrassed. Usually, you hide your nonsense through evasion, cherrypicking, dodging under a “crazy Buddhistic wisdom” disguise … anything to avoid any admission of error.
Remember what I had to go through to get you to knuckle under about my usage of “hypothecate”? It took several irrefutable and forceful posts to show you the error of your ways and, even then, only because I quoted an unimpeachable authority. You are much like the Christian depiction of Satan … slippery, elusive, wily, tempting people into untruths through verbal sophistry, and whose altruistic appearance hides a mean desire simply to “steal” souls. Winning is the only thing that’s ever mattered to you here but you disguise it with such variety that you hope that we forget what the ten different masks look like.
Your relentless presence here tells me that you’re a man with a failed life and this is the ONLY venue left in that life where you can “win”. I’ve been on many, many blogs and no one who posts twenty times from sun-up to late night can POSSIBLY have any other purpose in life or you’d be engaging in that purpose. So enjoy your “huge” win about my mistaking 1939 for 1938 because I’m sure that a rat like you regards each small morsel of victory in an empty life as a banquet.
E.
Do you remember Tojo Yamamoto? Tojo Yamamoto was a famous T.V. professional wrestler in the Deep South in the 1960s and 1970s.
His real name was Harold Watanabe. He was born in Hawaii. He was as American-as-apple-pie, but he made his living in the Deep South as a wrestler peddling the anti-Japanese hatred lingering from WWII, hence the stage-name, Tojo Yamamoto. I kind of feel sorry for guy.
I read somewhere that he blew his brains out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tojo_Yamamoto
A joke really told by German soldiers in Hitler’s bunker during the final moments of the Third Reich:
“Berlin is a city of warehouses. Where’s my house?! Where’s my house?!”
Dude, it hurts to understand, at least you are making money at it. Rock On.
We live in a kind of woodsy rural-suburban area, productive farmland from about 1640 till 1956, when these house were built on 3 acre lots . On a weekday morning you can hear the low roar of the place, which is the sound of tens of thousands of automobiles and trucks on nearby roads and distant interstates. Sometimes when I hear it I think of the film ‘The Langoliers’, based on a Stephen King novel … the undetermined rumble of a distant menace, from somewhere out over the horizon, fast approaching like a destructive summer thunderstorm.
And then there is the morning news, a lot of happy talk interspersed with tales of blood and terror … just the past few days … overturned semis, flaming wrecks on Interstates 91 & 84 (my God, what a transportation system), 9 year old girl chained to a post in New Haven by her stepfather and beaten, dead bodies found in the woods Glastonbury and Bozrah, both murdered, bursted water mains, arson fires in New Haven and Hartford, leaving a dozen families homeless, fatal stabbings in Bristol and Meriden, (one victim 15 years old), two men inside a car with bullets in the back of there heads near the state capitol … and that’s just for starters. This is the civilization we live in! It must be like this across the United States, probably worse. Anyone of those above events is a life changing tragedy for those involved, and in earlier times would have shocked us. But now life goes on; they are commonplace occurances.
–WSP7
Radu, please get it right so as to not detract from your otherwise cogent post. To wit: ‘As the Greek orator said, “They make a desert and they call it peace”.’ It wasn’t a Greek orator who said this, but Tacitus, a Roman historian, who reported that a British chieftain, Calgacus, said it in a speech. “…solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.” In regard to the Romans’ rapacious behavior.
You still have not provided a source for your 15% number. You make up numbers without respect for the truth. You did not make a small error. You always evade accountability. When someone calls you on it, you say “I’m not going to chase down the source” thereby continuing to evade accountability. When I chase down the truth, you say you made a “small error”
What you continue to show is a lazy mind, a disrespect for scholarship, and a disregard for truth.
“I drove the eight miles from Cambridge to Greenwich, New York, around eight o’clock and the night was bell-jar clear.”
You drove? You drove the eight miles?
Then you lament:
“Until a few decades ago nobody ever swooshed through these ancient hills in a motor car, on a magnificently engineered minor country highway, and in perhaps less than a decade no one ever will again, and at the collective level of a culture or a nation we have no sense of this whatsoever.”
So you, who do have a “sense” of our demise are still out driving around. And that makes you…? Stupid? Arrogant? A nihilist? Or just a fucktard?
“So you, who do have a “sense” of our demise are still out driving around. And that makes you…? Stupid? Arrogant? A nihilist? Or just a fucktard?”
He drives for our sins.
Peace be with you.
mistified, the important part of JHK’s quote is his claim that the drive from Cambridge to Greenwhich is coming to an end, the roads will not be passable… due to roads not being maintained… due to lack of asphalt… due to peak oil.
JHK said:
in perhaps less than a decade no one ever will again [make that drive]
There you have it. A concrete prediction. All we have to do is wait ten years to prove that prediction just as wrong as dozens of others since Y2K.
CFN reminds me of Melanesian cargo cults, but for CFN it is always waiting for the worst.
Someone should write a CFN play, inspired by Beckett: Waiting for Collapse. With the same ending. A character continually returns to inform us not to expect Godot today, but a promise he will arrive the next day, or in “perhaps less than a decade.”
But be prepared. Just in case. Collapse, Physics, Black Swans, blah, blah, blah.
After watching a youtube video that showcased some retarded Obama supporter talking about free phones for welfare and disability recipients, how does one go about getting one of these and is it a smart phone with a data plan?
Are you disabled, or on welfare, or both?
Due to roads not being maintained… due to lack of asphalt… due to peak oil.
There you have it. A “concrete” prediction.
Not, Roads will be made from gravel and crushed rock. Crushing of the rock will be done by hand in a ‘World Made by Hand’.
Vehicles will be used only by the new aristocracy as they rule like pharaohs over slaves who tend the fields and weed the roads.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see we’re up against it. Too many people, etc. Where are the fish in the oceans? Just that one thing will starve millions who depend on fish for sustenance. And, it’s no small thing, ruining the oceans took alot of effort. Give man credit where credit is due. I’ve read that a lot of the Somali pirates were fishermen, but no more fish (ok, there are still fish, you got me, but not many, not enough, anymore, to make a living for alot of these guys.) I believe the Europeans brought in the big boats and really made bank, so they should be honored, right?)
Did you see the Greek video with people waiting in line for a sack of potatoes? Think that can’t happen here, it already does. It wouldn’t hit home unless you were the one with the empty belly looking at that bag of potatoes a little differently than if you were not in need. I bought a 5 pound sack of potatoes yesterday for $.99. Does that mean they’ll always be easily obtainable and for $.99? No. I’m going to predict that won’t be the case forever. Sue me.
Breakin’ rocks in the hot sun, I fought the law and the law won….
Perhaps Asoka hasn’t turned his attention to Spain and the riots of the amazing disappearing middle class today.
Three people were arrested and three injured last night as demonstrators returned to the site of earlier clashes near the Spanish parliament. Rajoy told a conference in New York yesterday that the “immense majority” of Spaniards aren’t on the street and he still has three years to overhaul the economy.
[sarcasm on] Three people were arrested! Spain could collapse tomorrow! [sarcasm off]
Get back to me when the trade unions call for a general strike. That could bring down the 1%.
I fought the law and the law won….
Vehicles will be used only by the new aristocracy as they rule like pharaohs over slaves who tend the fields and weed the roads.
===========
Ever heard of IEDs? Pharaohs are not invulnerable, not even with the largest military in the world.
The Pharaohs have the largest military in the world right now. With no infrastructure to produce explosives there won’t be any IEDs. There will be only blind obedience throughout the land.
Actually we have ‘blind obedience throughout the land’ right now.
Nietzsche talked about the “much too many masses”. It isn’t new, we just seem to be getting better at it.
But, then there’s the internet, smart phones, etc. For some, it allows us to watch cool stuff from around the world, learn songs on our guitars, weather, etc., bbc news, etc., learn physics from Yale for free, etc.. for others, it does, and will always, only mean titties.
I think it is not just titties for them, much more than titties I think. But me, I’m more of a learn physics for free kind of dog though I know a bit about that subject already.
As to watching stuff around the world. Where are the naysayers who have been forever claiming JHK’s predictions never come true? Did we make them promise to eat something disgusting if they were proved wrong?
Greece and Spain are in the dumper, but as dignified dogs we shouldn’t rub it in too much.
Next!!
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
Nietzsche
I dated a girl from Spain during Obama’s election win. We watched the results from a bar in Denver. Afterwards, the streets were pretty quiet. She asked me where were all the people? In Spain, she said, each political side would have thousands of people gather at their headquarters, and the winners would celebrate, en masse. Sounds pretty fun, to me. But, alas, Denver’s streets were pretty empty, no huge party at party headquarters (though I’m sure there was a party), no old town square or whatever would be conducive to such things. It made me feel lacking in a way. She would also complain if we went to see music and everyone wasn’t dancing and having fun, but instead sitting like bumps on a log. I ended up taking her to Red Rocks to see Yonder Mountain String Band. That experience let her know that mountain hippies know how to dance and let their hair down, en masse. After that, she shut up.
Greece and Spain are in the dumper
============
Listen to XXX5! The USA is in the dumper! In a great Depression! The middle class has disappeared! Credit has run out. Everyone is in debt. The highways are empty because people cannot drive their cars. The big box store parking lots are empty because no one has money or credit. The grocery store shelves are empty because the truckers have no fuel and the distribution network has shut down. No one has housing because all the houses have been taken back by the 1% through foreclosures. Without food, housing, or transportation, the corpses are piling up in the streets. There is no fuel for sanitation vehicles or public health workers to do clean up. There isn’t enough room in the cemeteries anyway for hundreds of millions of corpses and diseases like the plague are rapidly killing those who are still alive, so no one will be left to care for the dead, or eat the dead, or pray over the dead. It is all darkness and gloom in the land, contrary to what cornucopians like Asoka say. $12,000 a year? Ha! He’s lying. Anyone can look out there window and see that all life has died, all traffic has stopped, and there is nothing but a bleak and desolate landscape devoid of humanity, except for gangs of Blacks who constantly attack whites. Woe are we. Woe are we.
So in Spain the celebration of politics is public but here the celebration is private.
As you note: (though I’m sure there was a party)
So which country has democracy?
No answers please, just something to think about.
Your lack of compassion is showing again.
CORRECTION
Anyone can look out their window and see that all life has died, all traffic has stopped, and there is nothing but a bleak and desolate landscape devoid of humanity… JUST LOOK! SEE FOR YOURSELVES!
Things are much worse than you imagine. I had my eyes opened by XXX5. We are in an economic depression, the WORST in USA history.
Yes, Asoka is totally lacking in compassion because he refuses to see this truth revealed to us by XXX5.
Asoka is ignorant. How can expect Asoka to be compassionate? He lives in La La Land, blissfully stupid, ignoring the millions of corpses piling up around him. Incredible! CFN has never seen anyone like him.
Its gone round the world!
‘Everybody in Cleveland, low minorities, got Obama phone.’
As Obama, also in Ohio, gets cheers for his
‘You cant write off half the population’
[or whatever crap he said].
Obama, whats a ‘low minority’?
The gal talks hood, is [mostly?] White.
Classic:
Obama Supporter at Romney Event in Ohio Says Vote Obama for …
http://www.theblaze.com/…/screaming-obama-supporter-explain-why-we-n...
Its gone round the world!
‘Everybody in Cleveland, low minorities, got Obama phone.’
==============
Yes! And I heard everybody in Africa got a phone, too! In Kenya everybody got TWO phones, with Obama’s photo on them. That’s proof Obama was born in Kenya. What an egotist Obama is! Low minorities, indeed!
She’s a white half-breed whore. Nobody will listen to her. Nobody will vote for Obama. The polls are all skewed liberal polls. Romney is going to win, just you wait and see.
“You drove? You drove the eight miles?”
When was the last time YOU walked eight miles on a mountain road with recently rebuilt hip?
What the fuck is the matter with you?
CORRECTION
She’s a white half-breed whore. A DISGRACE TO THE WHITE RACE. Nobody will listen to her. Nobody will vote for Obama. The polls are all skewed liberal polls. Romney is going to win, just you wait and see. OBAMA CANNOT GET RE-ELECTED BECAUSE WE ARE IN THE WORST ECONOMIC DEPRESSION IN ALL USA HISTORY WITH RECORD U6 UNEMPLOYMENT, WORSE THAN 1939.
Sir, Private Rhino reportin’ Sir. Permission to speak Sir? Thankyou Sir. Sir, I’m speakin’ fer me an’ Dog.
Right, Dog? Dog! Where you at? Sir, I hear him barkin’. Get to the point? Yes Sir.
Sir, me ‘n Dog see this thing the same way. An’, all due respect Sir, Dog ‘n me think this Assoka fool weren’t bein’ kine-hearted Sir. Nossir, not at all Sir.
An’ Sir, me and Dog weren’t havin’ it. We just weren’t Sir. An’, Sir, that’s all we got to say. Right, Dog? Dog! Where you at!
Yessir, plenty o’ reasons to pick on Assoka Sir. Sir, Yes Sir, nabobs an’ tripe. Please Sir, the nabobs an’ tripe, I s’pose is all in the … nevermind the nabobs an’ tripe Sir? Yessir.
Stand down soldier
Your mission is done
The danger is over
There’s no need to run
You were trained well
To obey each demand
So take this and heed
This one final command
STOP PICKIN’ ON ASOKA!
SEMPER FI!
Hear the call of duty.
Have you been drinking on duty?
Great interview with Ralph Nader. So good, I’m going to re-post the link.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81649.html
I say that the Bin Laden operation was a justifiable exception. Now, before your fur starts stickin’ up, ya gotta admit, the housing of Bin Laden in that particular location in Pakistan definitely smelled of RAT.
I liked the part about Obama not doing enough to promote the Democratic platform. He’s right. As soon as the Dems lost the House, any initiatives Obama wanted to promote became moot.
Shut up ding-dong.
asoka,
Yes, Obama learned this trick from Oprah. You get a phone, and you get a phone …
On the page where the video was posted, the text says that this program existed BEFORE 2008, but it has increased under Obama, as have the number of retired boomers and people without jobs.
Of course that is ALL Obama’s fault. The President creates laws, allocates funds and judges the constitutionality of the laws. Congress and the Supreme Court are just for show.
I wonder if the video was made by a Breitbart wanna be. Is the woman in the video a real Obama supporter, or a hired actor? Inquiring minds want to know.
If one takes anything on the web at face value, then one is a fool.
One has to be a complete fool if one believes anything at a website with the following phrase in its introduction, “It is opposed to a socialist sitting in the Oval Office”.
Sure supporting the bankers and 0.1% sure makes Obama a socialist.
Of course “one” will scroll past this comment.
Shouldn’t you be looking for public assistance, instead of playing on the internet?
Did you check out Ojai and surrounding area? Winter is coming, so you want to be in a warmer clime. Don’t lose faith, even though I have recently learned from XXX5 that we are in the worst economic situation in USA history. You can overcome the odds, but you have to make the effort, instead of sending disrespectful messages like: shut up ding-dong.
I fought the lawn and the lawn won.
Sure supporting the bankers and 0.1% sure makes Obama a socialist.
==========
He is my socialist, my Muslim, my President.
And I am patriotically supporting my President, even though I do not agree with all his decisions.
“Shouldn’t you be looking for public assistance, instead of playing on the internet?”
Yeth Mithus Milquetotht.
After a solid week of net searching, emails, and waiting in lobbies, I’m taking a mental health day. Part of my “recovery” is dissin’ you in a publicly accessible forum. N’kay?
Negative on the Ojai location. I’ll be brief:
Terrain, ingress and egress, not enough employment opportunities in a community that size, the attitude of the community itself. Getting a recent conviction for ANY violation of the law right now pretty much guarantees getting run out of a community like Ojai.
Help! Police!
Right now there is a NEGRO going through my recyclable garbage can (motherfucker those are MY bottles).
Oh well. Guess I’ll stock up on some KARMA.
What I have to say about Bin Laden is this. Since I’m running for top dog I get to say what I would have done.
I would have made sure I got him alive. The first line would have been armed with tranquilizer darts. I would have made that bastard talk.
Obama had a inferior way of getting the job done.
Mental health day?
Jesus H Christ! You are out of doors! Do you have the slightest idea of the trials you are going to be facing? Have you read XXX5 posts? Don’t you know we are in the worst economic situation in the history of the USA?
Or has CFN just been punked?
Damn Negroes! Always lookin’ for bottles. Probably drunks. On welfare. With long rap sheets. This country would be so much better if all the Negroes would just all go back to Africa. Why did they come here anyway? Just to increase the country’s wealth. Now they need to get out and leave the wealth to us.
There’s a great Sicilian film called “The Orange Thief”. These guys bought cameras, read the instructions, then made this film. Anyway, they have 3 orange harvests in Ojai. I visited there at the end of last Feb. and the oranges were just getting ready for harvest. One could eat alot of oranges were one clever enough. Krishnamurti’s old house is there, which has events/talks/film screenings, etc. There is a hippie commune/farm or two there. Otherwise, it’s pretty upscale. I think Ted Danson lives there. There is free camping in the mountains above Ojai, but they get chilly. We got some snow in March.
I liked the part about Obama not doing enough to promote the Democratic platform. He’s right. As soon as the Dems lost the House, any initiatives Obama wanted to promote became moot.
What I got out of that though was his feeling that Obama does not show a lot dedication to the Democratic Party’s values. He said that Obama does very little to help other Democrats get elected, it seems the Obama man is out for himself.
That was my take on that part of it.
C’mon man. You don’t go into a place like THAT armed with tranquilizer darts. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as tranquilizer machine gun. What if you miss? What if the drugs don’t work as quickly as you expect?
My understanding is that a treasure trove of intelligence was removed from that building.
C’mon man. You don’t go into a place like THAT armed with tranquilizer darts.
============
If you are a law-abiding nation, you don’t violate the national sovereignty of other countries to go in and shoot up its citizens. We wouldn’t like it if another country did it to us. If you don’t want bad karma, you don’t kill others. That goes for bin Laden and the US Military.
I have a little more than a month before I am outside full time. Always a good idea to have some kind of plan because…
Nobody EXPECTS The Spanish Inquisition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tym0MObFpTI
I use the word “citizen” in the broad sense: an inhabitant of a city or town (Merriam-Webster), and not in any narrow legal sense of the word.
“We wouldn’t like it if another country did it to us.”
Huh? Is your brain not plugged in? Battery running low? Since you are obviously INSANE, all I can say is Tough Titty New York City. We got the fuck.
Actually, if you had your antennae up, you could have seen the Spanish Inquisition coming, especially if you were Muslim or Jewish. The Inquisition was intended to ensure the orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism and Islam. This regulation of the faith of the newly converted was intensified after the royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1501 ordering Jews and Muslims to convert or leave. If you were paying attention, all you had to do was leave and avoid persecution by the Christians.
CORRECTION
If you were paying attention, all you had to do was leave OR CONVERT and avoid persecution by the Christians.
I would have converted in a heartbeat. If it ever comes to the other way around, I would convert to Islam in a heartbeat. It’s all the same God they believe in anyway.
The following is not an altogether original thought–what is?
I think that the puppeteer powers that be are playing the citizenry (we the people) by encouraging so-called conservative and Republican political players and pundits to spread far and wide the most extreme, really crazy, right-wing ideas in order to make Obama & Co.’s message and practices seem progressive by comparison. They are not progressive, and by the Republican’s proclaiming Obama as their enemy, they are encouraging progressives to believe he must than be their friend. Not.
Money bless Scamerica.
Trick question:
Who would deliver this speech? Romney or Obama?
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/karl-denninger/speech-wins-election
KDog’s bestial base. But how can he steal them from the wily Obmama who has bucks for free phones!
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/09/27/Obama-Phone-Belligerent-Welfare-Recipient-Demands-America-Better-Vote-For-Obama-She-Gets-Free-Stuff
Tough Titty New York City. We got the fuck.
==============
Nothing the US Military did brought a single USA victim of 9/11 back to life.
But the military did create more and more enemies, guaranteeing future 9/11’s.
Is your brain not plugged in? Even the drone report that came out this week admitted the drone bombings are perfect recruitment tools for Al Qaeda.
Is that what you want? You want to help Al Qaeda?
Down boy! I was in Colbert mode.
As if there was a way to pacify Al Qaeda. Religious fanatics, and I don’t care who they are, will use any reason their warped minds can get.
And why not, we are talking about trained professionals who know how to neutralize an opponent. Expand your mind and think out of the box. I know how seals are trained. I never elected for it because I knew I’d have rung the bell before my two weeks was over.
“Vercingetorix was brought to Rome, exhibited in Caesar’s triumphal march, and executed.”
He was slowly strangled in public. I recall the series ROME had a very touching scene about it. Cesar totally broke the man and I think he was kept caged like an animal in solitary confinement for seven years. Only the shell of the man was executed.
There were secrets and they were kept.
Religious fanatics are human beings with the capacity to reason. There have always been fanatics in human history who have gone for blood sacrifice. In fact, almost no culture has been exempt from this evil: the Sumerians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Hebrews, Canaanites, Maya, Inca, Aztecs, Olmecs, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Teutons, Celts, Druids, Vikings, Gauls, Hindus, Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, Maoris, Melanesias, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Balinese, Australian aborigines, Iroquois, Huron, Cherokee, and innumerable other societies ritually murdered their fellow human beings because they believed that invisible gods and goddesses, having an appetite for human flesh, could be so propitiated.
Today most of those groups do not engage in ritual murder… because fanatics are human beings, and human beings are capable of change.
“Expand your mind and think out of the box.”
A bullet in your head will “expand” your mind too. And speaking of the box, there was virtually NO intelligence on what was going on inside that building.
Listen to me. Entering a building under those circumstances is about as dangerous a military operation that there is and it speaks volumes about the raw courage of the people who we ask to conduct these operations.
What about booby traps? What about children with bombs strapped to their bodies? Is there a some kind of self-destruct mechanism that will bring the whole place down? They are fanatics, after all.
Torture is a notoriously unreliable way of gathering intelligence. Truth is, some sunzabitches are so tough you can’t break ’em. They die before you get anything useful out of them.
Who really needs to think outside of the box here?
I most original thought I ever had was the realization (on my own) that originality is a truly rare thing, rare and accidental. What passes for typical originality is the form and template of a previously formed relationship of parts applied to new circumstances.
Of course your right. Madison Avenue is in full control of the campaigns and using fear to the best advantage as they are won’t to do. The added benefit (to them) which you do not mention is that the intellectual core of the authentic progressive movement is shredded in the process.
If circumstances are allowed to continue the trend line this produces is human extinction which no dog wants. No innovation in reforming the structures of society is possible without a real progressive movement because it is the structures of society which are doing us in.
No it was not OK to rake 400 feet off of the tops of mountains. The old way worked and gave people more jobs anyway. The social structure responsible here?
Unregulated corporate power and greed.
If the efforts to develop technology to mine with had been perused as avidly as the efforts to develop technology to kill coal miners would be mining coal with robots and deer would be bounding through the forests on the mountains above.
We have social structures which are not adequate to protect ourselves from ourselves. They need to be changed or we will all die.
wont to do
Caesar will continue to be remembered long after Obama is forgotten.
There were secrets and they were kept.
Romney gets it! He agrees with XXX5!
Today Romney said the economy is headed south and we are on the road to Europe (without its health care) and Greece.
Vote for Romney and bring back Bush’s policies.
“…because fanatics are human beings, and human beings are capable of change.”
You’re right. And Osama bin Laden did change. He went from being alive to being a…
DEAD MOTHERFUCKER
How does that phrase go?
“Change We Can Live With”
The most original
With no grave to pee on.
Dammit!
This must be K-DOG’s blog.
http://barkbarkwoofwoof.com/2012/09/whooping-it-up/
Well said, Brother I concur with your additional points.