JHK’s Three-Act Play
Whew, what a relief!
Everybody from Ben Bernanke and a Who’s Who of banking poobahs
schmoozing it up in the heady vapors of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the dull
scribes at The New York Times, toiling
in their MC Escher hall of mirrors, to poor dim James Surowiecki over at The
New Yorker, to – wonder of wonders! – the
Green Shoots claque at the cable networks, to the assorted quants, grinds,
nerds, pimps, factotums, catamites, and cretins in every office from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics to the International Monetary Fund – every man-Jack and
woman-Jill around the levers of power and opinion weighed in last week with
glad tidings that the world’s capital finance system survived what turned out
to be a mere protracted bout of heartburn and has been reborn as the Miracle
Bull economy. Our worries over. If
you believe their bullshit. Which
I don’t.
All
this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA
have lost their minds. They seem
to think this mass exercise in pretend
will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts, to the new car showrooms, and
the cul-de-sac model houses, reignite another round of furious sprawl-building,
salad-shooter importing, and no-doc liar-lending, not to mention the pawning
off of innovative, securitized
stinking-carp debt paper onto credulous pension funds in foreign lands where
due diligence has never been heard of, renew the leveraged buying-out of
zippy-looking businesses by smoothies who have no idea how to run them (and no
real intention of doing it, anyway), resuscitate the construction of additional strip malls,
new office park “capacity” and Big Box “power centers,” restart the trade in
granite countertops and home theaters, and pack the turnstiles of Walt Disney
world – all this while turning Afghanistan into a neighborhood that Beaver
Cleaver would be proud to call home.
By
the way – and please pardon the rather sharp digression – but does anybody know
if they buried Michael Jackson yet?
It’s only been a couple of months. And, if not, is that the stench now
wafting across the purple mountains’ majesty from sea-to-shining sea? Isn’t it
a little indecent to keep the poor fellow waiting? Or is a really surprising comeback secretly planned, with
product tie-ins and all?
America
loves the word “recovery” as only a catastrophically sick society can. “In
recovery” is the new universal mantra of loser individuals and loser
nations. Everybody in the USA is
in recovery. Even Michael Jackson
(he may have given up on somatic activity but, on the plus side, as the Rotarians love to say, he’s quit using drugs
for once and for all, and the magazines have stopped publishing photos of him
taken after 1990, when he turned himself into something out of the Hammer Films
catalog).
To
sum it all up, the US economy is in recovery. Paul Krugman says that we’ll soon realize that Gross
Domestic Product (GDP) is growing.
He actually said that on the Sunday TV chat circuit. Not to put too fine
a point on it, but I would really like to know what you mean by that Paul, you
fatuous wanker. Do you mean that
the Atlanta homebuilders are going to open up a new suburban frontier down in
Twiggs County so that commuters can enjoy driving Chrysler Crossfires a hundred
and sixty miles a day to new jobs as flash traders in the Peachtree Plaza? Do you mean that the Home Equity Fairy
is going to wade into the sea of foreclosure and save twenty million mortgage
holders currently sojourning in the fathomless depths with the anglerfish? Do you mean that all the bales of
deliquescing, toxic “assets” hidden in the vaults of Citibank, JP Morgan, Bank
of America, et al, (not to mention on the books of every pension fund in the
USA, and not a few elsewhere) will magically turn into Little Debbie Snack
Cakes on Labor Day weekend? Do you
mean that American Express and Master Card are about to declare a Jubilee on
accounts in default everywhere? Do
you mean that General Motors will produce a car that a.) anyone really wants to
buy and b.) that the company can sell at a profit? Are you saying we get a do-over, going back to, say,
1981? Did we win some cosmic
lottery that hasn’t been announced yet?
What’s growing in this country besides unemployment, bankruptcy,
repossession, liquidation, gun ownership, and suicidal despair? In short, are you out of your mind,
Paul Krugman?
The
key to the current madness, of course, is this expectation, this wish, really,
that all the rackets, games, dodges, scams, and workarounds that American
banking, business, and government devised over the past thirty years – to cover
up the dismal fact that we produce so little of real value these days – will
just magically return to full throttle, like a machine that has spent a few
weeks in the repair shop. This is not going to happen, of course. It is permanently and irredeemably
broken – this Rube Goldberg contraption of swindles all based on the idea that
it’s possible to get something for nothing. And more to the point, we’re really
doing nothing to reconstruct our economy along lines that are consistent with
the realities of energy, geopolitics, or resource scarcity. So far, our notions about a “green”
economy amount to little more than blowing green smoke up our collective ass. We think we’re going to build “green”
skyscrapers! We’re too dumb to see what a contradiction in terms this is. The
architects are completely uninterested in the one thing that really is “green”
– traditional urban design – and most particularly the walkable
neighborhood. That’s just too
conventional, not special enough, lacking in star power, not enough of a statement, boring, tedious, so not cutting edge! We blather about high speed rail, but you can’t even get
from Cleveland to Cincinnati on a regular train – and what’s more amazing,
nobody is really interested in making this happen. All we really care about is finding some miracle method to
keep all the cars running.
What
we’ve been seeing is nothing more than a massive pump-and-dump operation in the
stock markets, most of it executed by programmed robot traders, with the
trading nut provided by taxpayers current and future. These shenanigans add up to new risks and fragilities so
extreme that the next time a grain of sand catches in the exquisite machinery they
will sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
We will end up discrediting not just capitalism, but also the idea of
capital per se, that is, of deployable acquired wealth. As this occurs, of course, events
on-the-ground will give new meaning to the term “reality television.”
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JHK said: “We will end up discrediting not just capitalism, but also the idea of capital per se, that is, of deployable acquired wealth.”
And without wealth to distribute we will not be able to implement a socialist government (Obama is capitalist) and therefore not be able to arrive at a communist society where sharing is the norm (and walkable communities will be commonplace).
But, yeah, the socialists have been talking about the internal contradictions of capitalism and how it would destroy itself. This seems to be happening so I wanted to give some credit to the correctness of the vision of vision of the Socialist Democratic Party of Eugene Debbs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_(United_States)
Jim is certainly correct in his assessment, though it is quite a diatribe! What really puzzles me is how the playaz are able to keep this charade going. Certainly way past the point where I would have thought the wheels would have come off. I have this nagging feeling that the way the inevitable is being staved off is by sacrificing the little opportunity for genuine recovery we really have. By genuine recovery, I mean a sustainable system, not the high-flying times of yore.
One day we’re going to wake up just like those poor Rooskies did back in ’91. We’re going to wake up one morning and discover that the whole rotten structure has collapsed. We will discover that glib phrases like “the market” and “free enterprise” and “democracy” were just our equivalent to Soviet internal propaganda.
“They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts,”
well, the mass exercise in pretend worked miracles for the Iraq invasion. Why not now?
Phew! What a relief!!
Now, if they’ll just call off Peak Oil and Climate Change too, we can all get back to watching the football! 🙂
Jim,
Thanks for another on-target installment, and particularly for calling Krugman on his bullshit.
This is long overdue for Krugman and others of his ilk.
Looks like we still have 5 stages of grief to go…would have thought we’d be deep into depression and reflection by now, but clearly we still have one foot in denial, with the other in bargaining…did I miss anger, or was that a one-day event in early November?
Jim is absolutely right about what is, in reality, a mass psychosis that we are currently witnessing– from the CNBC morons to the government shills to the local business cheerleaders. They are so strongly pretending that the recovery is IN (and that things are getting back to business as usual) that I think they actually believe their own bullshit.
One of the cardinal criteria for the diagnosis of a psychotic disorder (e.g. delusional disorder) is that the delusional thoughts or beliefs are held with incorrigibility. That is, the beliefs are walled off to logic; they are not amenable to information or logical argument. The psychotic beliefs are fixed, and held in the face of overwhelming information which, in a logical mind, would negate and eradicate those beliefs.
This is one of those historical situations where a large mass of people buy into and share the psychotic belief (in this case, of economic recovery and a return to business as usual), and thus the belief, because of the large number of people supporting it, is not widely recognized as psychotic. As a matter of fact, many would violently argue against the belief being psychotic.
I saw first hand an example of the support of this psychosis this past weekend; my wife and I were at one of our kid’s school social functions (private Episcopal school where most are well schooled if not educated and reasonably well off). We were standing in a group of 6 people when one of my wife’s friends reminded me that I had correctly told her that gasoline would spike and then fall from last autumn. She asked what I thought was going to happen now. I replied that it depends upon how much demand destruction the current depression brings this fall and winter. Immediately, three of the people looked at me as if I had blasphemed (in fact I had). One said “there’s no depression, we’ve just had a little burp, now its over.” (a little burp !!!!!)
Another looked at me and literally said, “football season’s coming and that’ll bring the local economy back, I’m not worried. THings’l be fine”
(FOOTBALL SEASON @@#@E@R$#$%@$%$@#)
The last time this country exhibited a mass psychotic belief system was probably in 1930/31, when everyone seemed to believe that “prosperity was right around the corner,” even though the economy was visibly falling apart. This time, people are without community and family support systems and they feel entitled after years of soft living.
Its going to get interesting. Very soon.
Wardoc
I’m not sure why this Jackson Hole propaganda should surprise us.
The Holiday season shop-o-rama is 90 days away. When that goes south… so do we.
Actually, when you consider that during the last three decades or so the U.S. economy, or rather its financial system has devolved into a confidence game, then regaining the “confidence” of the masses, so that they will continue to play the game may enjoy some success. At least that’s the theory espoused by the powers-that-be. What they cannot understand, what with their seemingly limitless purchasing power is that the masses cannot flock back to the malls even if they wanted to. They are in debt up to their eyeballs, they are losing their jobs and despite what all the pundits say, inflation is rising. Been to the grocery store lately?
Dave – Erstwhile Urban Wanderer
Good thing my teachers taught he how to use a thesarus. Thanks th JHK I have worn two out this year just reading the monday column.
The USA is dead and will fall over on the populace soon, killing many. Who wants to join the betting pool of Next Big F*ckUp: phony made-up Flu Pandemic, Martial Law, “Terror” Attack, Stock Market meltdown, Pauson-Bernanke growing hair, Little Timmy Geithner finally getting a renter for his underwater home, Chairman Benito MaObamam coming up with a valid Birth Certificate – Oh Yeah, don;t forget Healthcare Reform or Two More Wars. America-Turd World Nation of Nothing.
Stay Tuned.
Neil Lori Montclair NJ
Jim Kunstler is right on. One of the biggest problems we have in this country is the false belief in something for nothing.
Our government serves the corporate class and their interests.
We need solutions that are small in scale and local. We need walkable towns and cities. We need natural food grown close to where we live. We need to manufacture goods here in America that are sturdy. Freight and passenger rail maintenance, repair and construction is a must.
That being said watch the government print more money which is akin to Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920’s.
Thank you,
Neil Lori
“The architects are completely uninterested in the one thing that really is “green” – traditional urban design – and most particularly the walkable neighborhood.”
To get out and enjoy our “walkable neighborhoods” requires some “house rules”, not the least which is to minimize our presense. When others do not do as we do to them, instead of relaxing, our walking will be angry; so we are not going to do it.
What are our substitute parents–the public administrations–teaching us? Every fat-slob mom can bitch to the principal that a teacher did not treat her rude asshole punk kid right; feed the rodents, because they have the right to not go hungry. And on ad-nauseum.
Wishful thinking, JK.
I just heard on NPR this morning that one of the “favored” high speed rail initiatives is between Tampa and Orlando. WTF?
Jim noted this in a podcast some time ago, but the reality of it just blows my mind.
High speed rail is lovely, and Florida is a good fit because it’s flat and mostly barren (so working out the vectors and under/overpasses is easy) but WTF? We need to move people at 220mph so they can go see a big fucking mouse faster?
It’s when I see projects like this moving forward at some inexorable rate that I realize just how impossible it all is…..
Of all the things we can worry about (and I agree wholly with JHK for the most part here) the biggest concern I have is for the next generation. WTF!!!!
Without coming off as a fatalist, I am trying to prepare my two daughters for a world that they need to understand will be very different very soon.
my god—cash for clunkers????
I also expected things to collapse long ago, and I mean LONG ago, like in the 70s.
Of course, the depression of 1982 was horrible. It destroyed my neighborhood cohesion, when the men were laid off and the women went to work and I ended up baby sitting a whole lot of kids.
But still, somehow they managed to inflate real estate (80s) with the S+Ls, then regroup and move on after the S+Ls collapsed, then the dot com bubble of the 90s, the crash of 2001 and the CDO bubble of the last 7 years.
How do they do it? Marx predicted that the whole thing would collapse 100 years ago.
Of course, he didn’t forsee massive imperialism and 2 very destructive world wars and the granting of credit on such an imaginary scale.
He did point out that capital will not invest in productive capacity when the profit return is greater in speculation. Spot on there!
And he pointed out that the entire creation of human wealth was dependent on the natural wealth of the planet. Spot on there.
Who knew that we could destroy so much more natural wealth and still be around?
When Marx was writing, there were still massive flocks of passenger pigeons and vast redwood forests, mighty undammed rivers and topsoil on the Plains.
Everything Jim says is true as far as it goes; he’s not making predictions but rather speaking of the way things would be if we lived in a rational world run by rational people: We don’t! So, the rules don’t apply and as long as people work, believe the American dream, pay taxes and generally behave themselves, the oligarchs will continue to finance their chicanery on the back of the tax payers. We all have choices, but we can only make a positive choice if we are informed; without information no educated/positive choice is possible; simple really. But it does mean a radical change in the way one does things.
There is now a reasonable probability of seeing a major dollar sell off within 6 months – so it would be wise to pepare accordingly. Also, I agree that most likely average investors are being set up for the “pump and dump operation” that Jim is referring to. What better way to fleece them of their last few dollars and exploit their withering hopes? Remember, in the eyes of the professional investors the name of the game is all about gaining margin in any environment regardless of the direction of the market. Shorting banks and consumer discressionary stocks may not be a bad idea – as well as getting a little cash out of U.S. Dollars. As far as the real economy is concerned my associates in business are seeing a very grim situation and to them the “green shoots” notion is completely ridiculous. Just wait until 50% of homeowners are “underwater” within 18 months.
Sounds like Bagdad Bob has a new job. Seems he has moved here and is prospering
Let’s just pretend that JHK is wrong, and that our economy along with those of other Westernizing nations (India, China, Brasil) “recovers” and all involved get back to buying and selling crap and aspiring to the single-family home in the burbs. My question is: Why would that be a good thing? When what Cheney called “our American way of life” is the global norm (and there is still plenty of time and resources to get back to that, barring a few dam explosions) and one for which “there are no compromises,” the entire planet will be a cultural embarrassment. How many more “Former Playboy Model Identified Through Breast Implants” headlines do we need? And I just past a new smoothie joint under construction about a block away from here; no lie.
wardoc,
Thanks for the frightening anecdote of desperate denial there.
I’m seeing this cognitive dissonance everywhere, and [like yourself] am beginning to wonder what happens when the circuits blow/melt down. Interesting, indeed!
(What’s the ol’ Chinese curse? Oh, yeah: “May you live in interesting times”.
Another great skewering of the punditry by JHK. I’m mightily pissed about the lies that are being blandly passed of as “reality”, because they aren’t allowing people to even THINK about preparing for the impending hard times (and they certainly aren’t going to be listening to li’l ol’ me with my “the-end-is-nigh” placard).
Could this possibly be the PLAN???
(Follow me, ’cause you ain’t got a choice, if you want to eat… ummm, join the imperial godly armed forces and free the world!)
See: Eliza Gilkinson, “Man of God”
HEY!! Leave Litte Debbie out of this!!! Is nothing sacred????
Do you mean that American Express and Master Card are about to declare a Jubilee on accounts in default everywhere?
That is exactly what is going to happen in some form. Going into debt is like traveling into the future, gathering all your paychecks, and returning to the present and spending them. When a loan application is approved, it is as if the lender is looking into a crystal ball that shows a future that is exactly as rosy as the present and granting a fantasy as if it were real.
Since the whole financial world is based upon such a fantasy anyway, it only makes sense that the great writers of this sitcom are hard at work writing the next episode. Yes, there will be a Jubilee. Will it come in the form of great inflation making large debts look small? Will a great war create a huge surge in industry putting is all back to work? Whatever happens, you will not want to miss it! It promises to be the best thing on television this fall!
Yo Jim —
You are on fire this morning. I LOL’ed through the whole post. Everything is so dead on. By the way I just got me some granite countertops, proabably paying half of what it would cost a couple of years ago. You see I have intiated the budr stimulus program — new countertops, gutters and downspouts, and a host of other house/yard upgrades. Making the most of what time is left with my beloved suburban home. Keep fighting the good fight.
budr
Vast amounts of wealth were accumulated after all the scams of the last decade and a half. Scams boosted GNP tremendously, so that’s good, right? Scams allowed scammers to built the stupid condos and suburban Gehennas. Money was the lubricant. People bought into the notion of never ending prosperity, great jobs, unlimited mobility, etc. Money went from the hard cash you bit into to the paper fluff that had nothing behind it. Dividends kept pouring in, people were happy. Most of us realized something was really wrong. Flipping houses like flapjacks? Where did that come from? It seemed like you couldn’t lose,but we did. At the end of my career, I’m stroking my horseshoe, I was a lucky one. Things were dependably THERE, now,they are gone and I play the game of “what if”.
With mounting frequency, I tell young folks that the good old ones are over,and they are screwed.
Will they ever own a house? Send kids to colleges? Partake of national health care? Or, am I just seeing a glass half empty? I worry, my Mom worries, too.
I’m with you – I’m also a desperate for my family.
Grab a copy of “Reinventing Collapse” and start getting ready for Stage 2 Commercial Collapse.
Thanks,
Andrew
I think the Krugman body slam is somewhat beside the point. In the so-called debate we’re having, the professor does make the good point that an economy based on the wishful thinking of the upper 1% is probably flawed, that a more equitable distribution of economic assets is not a morally good thing but a necessary thing.
Krugman, of course, doesn’t critique the consumer economy as such but he does nod in the direction of implacable reality (e.g., global warming) that others simply wave off. Krugman has the benefit of being an actual economist AND public intellectual. Kunstler is one but not the other.
is atlanta the only city that k ever picks on?
[besides new york and washington]
wle.
Another great post, this is definitely one of the things I look forward to on Monday morning.
Just for reference if somebody wants an antidote to green skyscrapers, I’ve been reading Richard Register’s “Ecocities”, which stresses the structure of the urban environment (although I’ve always disagreed with JHK’s assertion that elevators make big, concentrated cities unsustainable — I think the Long Emergency will lead to a recentralization plus a relocalization).
Another good book out right now: Jeff Rubin’s “The world is going to get a lot smaller”, or whatever the title is; would be interesting to get JHK’s take on those.
We have a great local example of the blindness and stupidity of our government planners and leaders here between Montclair and Denville, New Jersey.
Even though they run peak trains from Dover,NJ through Montclair and on into Hoboken or New York City – NJ Transit refuses to run frequent off-peak trains and zero trains on the weekend on the Montclair-Boonton train line. We are already paying for the tracks, there are enough trains to run them all for peak hour service – so why not run off-peak and weekends? At first Montclair residents took a NIMBY attitude towards weekend train service complaining about bringing riff-raff into town – but now local residents, businesses and politicians are clamoring for it. They now see it as a way to bring some more people into local businesses in Montclair and other towns. Even more amazing in May, 2008 NJ Transit made a series of cuts to train service around NJ even as ridership was booming with $4 gallon gasonline. On the Morris-Essex line they cut our Hoboken train service by 30% after previously cutting our weekend Hoboken service by 50%.
The total operations budget to actually run the trains and buses for NJ Transit is $300 Million!
The budget to fix just 1 interchange of the Garden State Parkway and Route 78 is $78 Million!!
While driving ( as there is no train service even though excursion trains run there) to Cape May for vacation, I could see the tree carcasses as New Jersey prepares to waste over $7 Billion expanding the Garden State Parkway and NJ Turnpike.
The foolhardiness of this boggles the mind!
For $550 Million New Jersey could have restored the Lackawanna cutoff to Pennsylvania and the Poconos which up until 1970 actually had long distance trains to Buffalo, NY…
I live right next door to the small North Central Florida town where I grew up. After seeing a newspaper announcement relating how an older gentleman was running for city council and that he would be at a local restaurant on Saturday to speak with people and answer questions I decided to seize the opportunity to find out what he was about. I made it a point to arrive early to “beat the crowd”.
Being early became a moot point as only two people showed up. Our discussion of course arrived at it’s inevitable conclusion; What does it matter if you propose positive change, however sensible, if the people affected don’t care? What can you do about that? We both asked the question but neither of us was smart enough to submit an answer. What JHK says is reflective and symptomatic of said public attitude. If you aren’t saying “Oh my fuckin God!” then you aint payin attention.
Is it my imagination, but do people realize what turning over 1/6 of the American economy to the likes of Krugman, et al, REALLY means? Economists differ greatly from one another. Some are whacked out and distant. Health care will never become expensive if we limit its usage sharply. Problem solved! If you control health care, you control a person’s life because bureaucrats lifeblood is control. WE can all think of loads of things that will be controlled by controlling health care. Expect to see a 45-50mph speed limit to limit traffic deaths and injuries. Imagine nationwide diet control. Imagine restaurants simply closed down by edict. Imagine the snake oil salespeople swarming like fire ants trying to sell you “government sanctioned foodstuffs”. Imagine being told you must only buy expensive, high mileage tires.
Health care will be rife with compromises. When you get your invitation to a Soylent Green party with mandatory attendance, will that reinforce your support of bureaucracy? The current collection of rabid freaks i.e. czars will lead us into the future. Founded on freedom, the United States will become overcome with a case of Leninitis.
The discussion is now opened to optimists, let ‘er rip, boys and girls.
wardoc said: “This time, people are without community and family support systems and they feel entitled after years of soft living.”
You have it exactly wrong. In the 1930’s there were no economic support systems like social security (which Republicans would like to kill), Medicare (which Republicans fought against fiercely), welfare, food stamps, employment security checks, Pell grants, community colleges and job training programs, Veterans’ administration, GI Bill, etc. etc. etc.
And families, contrary to what you might believe, still exist, and they still provide social and economic support to family members in need.
So, what we are facing now will be much less difficult to overcome than during the Great Depression.
They haven’t buried Michael Jackson yet. That foul stench in the air is the funk of forty thousand years! 😀
They ARE doing something about high-speed rail. Bobby Jindal signed up for money for it in Louisiana six months after ridicluing the idea. Gee, wonder what made him change his mind – it would make it that faster and easier to evacuate New Orleans if another Katrina hits? He did such a 180, I’m suprised he didn’t get whiplash.
For no mere mortal can resist. . . .
Today’s column is spot on. The delusion and denial is systemic and embedded in fantasy. Something for nothing does not exist and to quote Elton John “always ending in a bad report”. I want walkable communities too but to get there we need to deal with the crack houses and violence wherever large numbers of people are together in a confined area.
See, our fantasy (by our I mean like minded people who know what’s coming and read this column every Monday)is we have our fantasy of small communities working together for a common goal with local farming and creating objects of value. I would love nothing more than to be a part of that community. We have to realize that the MAJORITY of people want the something for nothing status quo and will fight US tooth and nail. The death spasms of this economy and of the fantasy that somehow by any means it can be sustained will mimic a cancer patient losing incrementally life as he knew it. This transition will, for sure be ugly.
“is atlanta the only city that k ever picks on?”
Certainly not, but it’s a perfect example of a clusterfuck if I ever saw one. I’ve lived in The ATL for ten years, and I’m actually “inside the perimeter” as it has become known. I think GA has more bank failures than any other state, and really high forclosure rates. Yet Atlanta is not like all cities in that so much of what has made this city what it is is based on race. White flight and black political control of the two “inner” city counties is what makes this city a real mess. It’s all about exploiting the gullibility and desire for immediate gratification of the “working poor.” Ambulance-chasing lawyers abound with “Turn Your Wreck Into a Check” billboards everywhere and PayDay Loan shops on every corner. Hair extension companies that sell “Hand Made Human Hair” do very well even in this economy. People make a living selling Newport cigarettes individually on the street, the latter which is littered with styrofoam take-out containers and chicken bones. It is a symbol of cultural, political, and educational failure.
Forget all the financial analysis and data. Just one question: Where the fuck is everyone going to work for a decent wage any longer in this country? Manufacturing: essentially dead. Financial weasels managed to destroy their own “industry”, off shoring, etc. Where will Americans earn their incomes to support this economy that is largely based on consumer spending?
If everyone on this post serious believed that the U.S. economy was on the verge of a massive implosion to the extent and with the rapidity that Kunstler asserts, then they would certainly be out borrowing as much money as they could as quickly as they could, and using it to short as many shares of as many stocks as they can. This will allow them to comfortably sit back and rake in an unbelievable fortune when the shit hits the fan.
So — is that what all you guys are doing this week?
Of course, if you are WRONG, then you’ll be in the poorhouse for the rest of your life … but there’s no way you could be wrong, so what’s the risk.
Indeed. Talk is cheap. Good thing I didn’t short stocks back in ’04, ’05, and ’06, when Kunstler confidently predicted the stock market would plunge to 4000. As of today he’s only, um, about 140% off. My prediction was 8,000 — but I don’t get to fly around the country telling other people to quit flying around the country.
Shame on yo’ ass for saying black control of two inner counties resulted in anything bad. Since when were you authorized to use the truth to describe reality? Expect to get challenged frequently on this statement…..by liberals, not inner city blacks.
Letting the government -crats control 1/6 of the economy will be fine. In 1990 the Mustsang ranch in Nev (a brothel) was taken over by the Federal Government because of tax issues. They then proceeded to run the place and couldnt do it. What part of “they couldnt make money selling sex and booze” makes you think the
-crats cant run health care?
The “green shoots” propaganda is there to fleece the last of any money held by the bottom 95% of the country.
Larry Kudlow is also telling us the whole “Swine Flu” is a lie and we have nothing to worry about. It isnt any worse than a regular flu.
Isnt it nice to know JHK is soooo wrong and we can all go back to the mall?
tancred said: “White flight and black political control of the two “inner” city counties is what makes this city a real mess.”
I guess it depends upon where you are looking.
And, if you think you have ideas for how to make it better, there are positive efforts to improve the quality of life in downtown Atlanta, such as CAP and ADID.
You could get involved and make a contribution, or you could continue to send anonymous rants to a peak oil blog. It’s your call.
Central Atlanta Progress, founded in 1941, is a private nonprofit community development organization providing leadership, programs and services to preserve and strengthen the economic vitality of Downtown Atlanta.
The Atlanta Downtown Improvement District, founded in 1995 by Central Atlanta Progress, is a public-private partnership that strives to create a livable environment for Downtown Atlanta.
“Following the success of the Atlanta Downtown Design Excellence Award (ADDEA) over the last three years, Central Atlanta Progress will once again honor Downtown businesses for their design innovations during this past year. The ADDEA raises awareness about quality additions, renovations, rehabs, and new construction projects in Downtown Atlanta.”
http://www.atlantadowntown.com/initiatives/atlanta-downtown-design-excellence-award
The world is full of countries that are handling healthcare and health insurance the way the US is just talking about, so there’s a lot of precedent. Single-payer (Canada and UK) and a mix of public and private options (France, Netherlands, etc.). Can you cite any examples of the dire consequences you threaten us with from those other countries? Or are you just fear-mongering?
Reagan/Bush economic ideology said reduce government spending, cut taxes, and deregulate. Reagan went after the unions in a vicious way.
We now know that Reagan/Bush economics was a failure. Since JHK attacks Krugman this week, I think it only fair to let Krugman speak:
“Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Let’s talk for a moment about why the age of Reagan should be over.
First of all, even before the current crisis Reaganomics had failed to deliver what it promised. Remember how lower taxes on high incomes and deregulation that unleashed the “magic of the marketplace” were supposed to lead to dramatically better outcomes for everyone? Well, it didn’t happen.
To be sure, the wealthy benefited enormously: the real incomes of the top .01 percent of Americans rose sevenfold between 1980 and 2007. But the real income of the median family rose only 22 percent, less than a third its growth over the previous 27 years.
Moreover, most of whatever gains ordinary Americans achieved came during the Clinton years. President George W. Bush, who had the distinction of being the first Reaganite president to also have a fully Republican Congress, also had the distinction of presiding over the first administration since Herbert Hoover in which the typical family failed to see any significant income gains.
And then there’s the small matter of the worst recession since the 1930s.
There’s a lot to be said about the financial disaster of the last two years, but the short version is simple: politicians in the thrall of Reaganite ideology dismantled the New Deal regulations that had prevented banking crises for half a century, believing that financial markets could take care of themselves. The effect was to make the financial system vulnerable to a 1930s-style crisis — and the crisis came.
“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.” –Paul Krugman, NYT, Aug. 23, 2009
There is no doubt whatsoever that the economy is recovering … the newspapers are reporting it! … but it is going to take some time before the collective delusions of capitalism finally come crashing down for good.
The empire doesn’t die until the empire is dead indeed.
Until then, Nature is beautiful:
http://www.flickr.com/dmathew1
And it will stay beautiful long after humankind has gone extinct.
I expected Jim to make mention of those rumors on the Internet regarding an upcoming bank holiday in which the government shuts down all of the banks in this country for an indefinite amount of time in the hope of resurrecting the dollar and our financial system.
JHK said: “They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts…”
Resurrect? You gotta get out more. The WalMart parking lots have never been empty. And it’s not just the cheap Chinese shit that is selling:
“Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) — As vacancies increase and retail sales throughout the U.S. remain a shadow of the decade’s boom, Apple Inc.’s stores are defying the recession.
At Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street, the noon-day line on Aug. 11 snaked out the front door. More than a dozen people waited to buy an iPhone, which runs from $99 to $299, plus at least another $70 a month for a service plan. Every computer, seat and station was occupied by a visitor to midtown Manhattan.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, increased revenue at its stores by 2.5 percent in the first six months of the year to $3 billion…”
Jim, What’s up with the ad hominem attack on Krugman? You mis-characterised his remarks. He said GDP is likely growing, but he did say that unemployment would continue to rise for a long time and that it wouldn’t much feel like a recovery. In a recent series of lectures at the LSE (available online – just google it), he also made it clear that he has a hard time imagining what, if anything, is going to drive growth and job creation.
If GDP is growing, it’s only because it fell so far so fast that a bounce was inevitable. It happened a number of times in the depth of the Depression. Inventories have been drawn down to bare shelves, and so many jobs have been lost that there is bound to be a bounce – after all, economic activity hasn’t stopped completely.
The question is how long will it last? My guess is not very long. Despite much of the the world economy being a shambles, oil has been creeping up. And there is a good argument to be made that it was in-fact high oil prices that triggered the collapse in the first place.
Just look at Krugman’s face when he talks about the green shoot, so-called. Deep down, he knows guys like JHK are right, but he’s got so much invested in this pseudo-science called economics that he can’t back down. Doing so would prove his life’s work has been a sham. Also, I get the sense that he feels he has a moral obligation — like those in the White House do — to talk up the economy in the hopes that confidence will save it.
I hope Krugman reads this column. JHK is a big enough name that he just might.
I think Krugman has been pretty consistent about not expecting anything that really looks like a recovery (damn lies and statistics, etc.). He has also consistently advocated Keynesian lunacy like destroying wealth in order to generate short-term economic activity. For this (and for being a snotty little twerp) he richly deserves our abuse.
OK, instead of believing what is hyperbolically written in a blog on peak oil, (for example, that consumer plastic is maxed out) take a look for yourselves. Do you see empty restaurants because people are huddled, depressed, in their houses or apartments or tents, eating food staples like beans and rice, corn and potatoes? I mean, has Baskin-Robbins gone bankrupt?
Look around at the malls and shopping plazas. Are the parking lots empty? Are the roads empty because people cannot afford $3.00 or $4.00 a gallon gasoline?
Has Disney World closed down?
What are you going to believe: your own eyes? Or metaphors saying over and over again in different ways that we are a “catastrophically sick society”?
Who is really suffering psychosis? Those who look and see? Or those who fantasize about uncertain futures based on ciphers (a fog of numbers)?
Yeah, Krugman’s unyielding support for massive deficit spending is obsolete in this economy. Following the Great Depression, such a policy made sense as there was still a lot of necessary growth on the horizon. But now, as JHK pointed out in his latest column, growth means more bullshit shopping centers, sprawl, etc.
I support the stimulus, it’s the bank bailouts — via the FED or Treasury — that I don’t like. That’s where the real money is being spent.
BTW — Early on, Krugman was one of Obama’s biggest critics, but then he had that private meeting with Obama and now he’s one of his biggest cheerleaders.
Sure the Apple Store is booming. Its other 99% that are sinking. I see it every time I visit the our (fairly) new glorious mall. Stores are dropping like flies. As for the Apple Store, I think most people are browsing, not buying. Its free entertainment.
And as for Krugman, what else can he and the rest of ’em say? They know its over, but its their job to crash-land the beast as best they can.
And it IS crashing.
“All this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA have lost their minds. They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march”…
You may be allergic, JHK, to conspiracy theories, but there’s little doubt in my mind that the people “in charge” (which will never appear on T.V., radio, or anywhere public) have a hand in making this work. There’s no pretending going on here! Banking, the Federal Reserve, and international banking interests have this great march well underway. For what? I don’t know exactly, but I think we’re about to find out in the next 3 years for sure. And it isn’t going to have anything to do with being ~in recovery~.
JHK’s comments about a walkable city should be taken seriously. Case in point. The difference between my home town of Kansas City, Missouri and Odessa, Ukraine, my home away from home.
My home town region is Kansas City, Missouri, population 2 million for the greater metro area Which is roughly 1100 square miles of populated area conservatively speaking(the number is actually significantly higher but my argument I’m using this figure) Most of it suburban sprawl. A vehicle is an absolute necessity. Period. In many places it would be a four hour walk just to get groceries. And while building the suburban metroplex has certainly slowed down, it hasn’t stopped, even while new houses sit empty and there is certainly a lot of empty commercial space for rent.
My home away from home, Odessa, Ukraine has a population of 1.1 million. Yet it only utilizes roughly 100 square miles of land mass. Groceries are just a short walk away, public transportation is ubiquitous and sans that, just hold out your hand, anyone with a car will provide you taxi service for a very small fee. By the way, such a thing couldn’t happen if there was very much crime.(In Kansas City I would avoid flagging someone down unless it was an emergency)
So comparing the land use per person, people in Kansas City use 550% more land per person to carry out their lives. This difference has forced us into the unsustainable drain on scarce resources that Jim so eloquently points out.
When will we reach the tipping point? With the way our government is profilgately wasting resources and trying to con the general public into wasting more resources, it can’t be that far off. I think we’ve seen the beginning in the past year.
JHK said: “As this occurs, of course, events on-the-ground will give new meaning to the term “reality television.”
Again, reality is there for you to see: look out your window? Are there tumbling tumbleweeds blowing down empty streets?
Why this need to fantasize a morbid, gloomy, catastrophic future scenario based on mental interpretations of abstract data?
This perpetual forecast of societal collapse is about as interesting as snuff films. I am going to keep reading though because I like the metaphors and vocabulary, and I find it amusing and entertaining to see how many years a group of people like CFNers can maintain interest in doom and gloom in contrast to the reality around them.
And I’ve been here several years now, long enough to see the predicitions of Y2K, 4,000 Dow, and the always longed-for TSHTF, the heating oil crisis, air conditioning crisis, brown outs, black outs, etc. etc. etc. … None have come to fruition.
Dream on CFNers.
Keep reading your conspiracy blogs. Oh, yes, we were all supposed to have our guns taken away by Obama and we should have all been in FEMA camps by now. Since Obama is a Muslim terrorist, why haven’t we all been forced to convert to Islam?
LOL!
Maybe the “death panels” will end it all for us… maybe by next week… or the next… or the next.. or the next. As many of you say week after week after week… stay tuned. It should be interesting. NOT.
Surely you’re not going to let him get away with this?
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/dense-about-density/
JIM
According to radio this Am radio M Jacksons death has gotten more media coverage than the AFGHANISTAN WAR
SO HOW DO YA LIKE THEM APPLES
and AM in so cals having a field day with the dead stripperin dumpster /hubby a suicide
[ryan jenkins or who ever]
from last weeks blog
last entry as of now
jim kunstler / wrong tomorrow.COM?
2006 finance -34 months wrong 3.4.2009
‘Wholesale liquidations of everything under the North American sun: companies, households, chattels, US Treasury paper of all kinds, and, of course, the S & P 500.’
WELL CHINAS BUYING WHATEVER HARD ASSESTS IT CAN
GOLD
OIL
DEALS IN SOUTH AMERICA NAD AFRICA
Here’s a question for you…now that the Cash for Clunkers has been determined a smashing success (Mission Accomplished?). What happens after today? Auto mega-lots are designed to (and only profitable when) churning hundreds of automobiles off the lot each month.
Now that the clunkers have clunked, where to now?
MAYBE IT SHOULD BE TITLED:
the absence of conscience in liberals
ahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahah
James Howard Kunstler:
It’s true.
BUYBUYBUY
die die die
read newsweek
SPEND AMERICANS
WHATS TRUE?
no yr perpetual posts on ‘ bounty’
are ut as interesting as snuff
you project
beentheredonethat said: “Sure the Apple Store is booming.”
You don’t get it. We are on the brink of societal collapse… no, we are in the middle of a financial crisis the likes of which we have never seen, according to JHK. People have no money. Their plastic is maxed out and anyway credit cannot be had anywhere. This is the scenario painted week after week here.
Now to reality: Apple sales increased this year: $3 Billion dollars.
If people had no money or little money, they would be buying cheap shit like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer. But they are buying expensive Apple gear. Apple is not known for its cheap prices.
So, where is the big economic crisis? Apple should be going down, bankrupt, if things are really so bad, since technology purchases are not as essential as food, clothing, or housing.
Don’t believe the conspiracy theories. We are not being manipulated by an international Jewish cartel of bankers, we are not being manipulated by “them”… whoever “them” may be.
Just live your life simply instead of filling your head with fears and filling your heart with anger at “them”…
go wal mart
go ashok the bountiful
Great rant, Jim.
Regrettably, it won’t make a difference. The inmates are running the asylum and calling the madmen mad has proven a losing policy.
You’ve nothing to offer to the masses but nightmares and choo-choo trains. Your best chance at real influence would be a position for life as Obama’s court jester. Howdya like that!
thanks
no fool like an old fool and i dont mean you or jim k
the apple stores are booming
yes peeps in the usa still eat and may have a pc
they may even have a job
Krugman is probably seeing a positive 3rd qtr GDP number and maybe in the 4th qtr as well.
That’s all – it won’t mean the recession is over or
very many jobs will be created or the value of anything Jim spoke about above will go up. Just a bounce because of an inventory rebuild and Stimulus. It will be a big head fake.
fishbum52 said: “it won’t mean the recession is over or or very many jobs will be created or the value of anything Jim spoke about above will go up. Just a bounce because of an inventory rebuild and Stimulus. It will be a big head fake.”
I cannot believe people here do not have sufficient vision to see exactly where the jobs are going to come from.
I can see it clearly. I know where the manufacturing sector will “resurrect” to use JHK’s term.
If you cannot see where the manufacturing sector is going to grow in the next three quarters, you seem somewhat disconnected from reality.
Or you haven’t been listening to what Obama has been saying for the last two years (one and a half on the campaign trail). When Obama was campaigning he was saying he would be elected (and he was!), would move the war front to Afghanistan (and he has!), would respect people’s right to bear arms (and he has!), etc. etc. etc.
Obama has done what he said he would do when he was campaigning.
Now does no one remember what he said about bringing back manufacturing to the USA? Or do you prefer to throw around phrases like: “manufacturing is dead”?
I hope Lincoln was right and the Bible was wrong about the “vision thing”…
http://www.dictionary-quotes.com/where-there-is-no-vision-the-people-perish-proverbs-29-18-bible/
Don’t be so obsessed with predictions of catastrophe in the future. Don’t whine about “them” whether “them” are “illegal aliens” or “blacks” or “wall street traders”… Don’t be so focused on JHK’s predictions about imminent collapse.
In the expectation of things to happen in the future, one does not hear the sound of the birds, the rain, the breath, and heartbeat this instant.
Don’t throw all so-called clusterfuck doomers in the same camp as the Rethuglican, status-quo-loving Glenn Beck camp. That’s a misrepresentation.
There are plenty of lefties — like Dave Matthews — who see this downward spiral from the left. Bush and crew created the monster, sure, but Obama and crew aren’t doing much to destroy it. They’re only feeding it more blood.
Well done Jim. Thanks for the reality check, as usual.
This comment and your others today are further instances of ASOKAFAIL
Please get lost. Give your advice to Country X where you will be retiring. Do you hear any residents of the US at this blog offering, say, New Zealand advice on how thay should run their affairs?
PS Pip Squeak Jennie Rico delendus est.
Jim,
You’re totally correct, there is no “recovery” on the ground, in the real world, here in Alabama or elsewhere. Just a cartoon of a recovery playing in the virtual world of the dominant media and the presently irrationally exuberant stock market.
A good friend of mine just called a while ago to say he got laid off from a professional job he had held for many years. They may be closing the plant the rumor goes.
The Walmart has grown much less crowded recently as well as most of the shoe shops, clothing outlets and other stores around here. Home building has ground to almost a halt. It seems to take Century 21 a century to sell a house!
It is nice to watch the cartoon economic recovery on TV and see the Dow Jones hit new yearly “highs”. But when I close my eyes I see the number “3000” in my mind. I just can’t get over the thought that this is a sucker’s rally.
There are so many people without work and no prosects of any. No openings in the toilet cleaning department. No burger flipping positions at the McDonalds or Hardees. And why so many, many store closings? Potholes in the street. Teachers being laid off and remaining teachers being told to purchase classroom materials out of their own pockets.
Now how many digits are there in the national debt today? I suppose we’ve picked up a few more digits recently. Last I heard “we” were not paying that debt down yet – just adding more onto the pile. The Chinese, who hold much of the debt, are getting a little bit fidgety I suppose. They are probably wishing about now they could “back out of their investment” in US Debt without taking the global economy down with it and losing their 1 billion shirts in the process.
No light a the end of the tunnel yet, here in Alabama. Not that I can see. Probably the government had to cut that light off too, due to lack of funds.
The frightning thing is that, looking at history, there’s no real reason that this can’t go on for another 20 years or more. The Soviets spent at least that long in a massive recession even as the TV was telling them that everything was fine and they were richer than ever.
Think about it… 20-30 of queuing for bread, jokes about dry-cleaning your toilet paper, and increasingly vicious repression until the inevitable crack-up.
Yet one more reason we need PROUT.
http://www.proutinstitute.org/
JHK said: “…the pawning off of innovative, securitized stinking-carp debt paper onto credulous pension funds in foreign lands where due diligence has never been heard of..”
Do I detect a bit of xenophobia here? Or condescension due to ignorance of foreign pension fund management?
Foreign pension funds mostly invest in authorized instruments and there are limits by instrument, limits by issuer, limits by risk, limits by set of instruments, and in many countries there is a guaranteed minimum return.
Even in the USA the “toxic assets” are maybe not so toxic:
“Representatives from at least 15 U.S. states discussed with a federal regulator the possibility of using their pension funds to buy troubled loans and securities, or “toxic assets,” the Bergen County Record in New Jersey reported.
The Record said pension officials from New York City, New York state, New Jersey and Connecticut met with Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, on Friday. Other states included Pennsylvania, California and Florida.
The paper said states are interested in investing in the Public-Private Investment Program for Legacy Assets because they think could provide a good return on investment.
The program, unveiled by the U.S. Treasury, would provide federal funding to form public-private partnerships that would buy up so called “legacy assets,” including commercial and residential mortgages and securities, the paper said.”
Cowswithguns said: “Don’t throw all so-called clusterfuck doomers in the same camp as the Rethuglican, status-quo-loving Glenn Beck camp. That’s a misrepresentation.”
Point taken.
Q said: “Do you hear any residents of the US at this blog offering, say, New Zealand advice on how thay should run their affairs?”
You are kidding, right?
187 interventions in Latin America alone shows the USA empire certainly does offer “advice” (sometimes in the form of overthrowing democratically elected governments) on how other governments should run their affairs.
An-an-and now, some light reading.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-flynt/common-sense-2009_b_264706.html
An Amtrak conductor told me that Amtrak had 3 trains ready to evacuate New Orleans “All coach cars, no sleepers, with a pillow, a blanket and a bottle of water at each seat”.
FEMA said no. Just like they said “no” to the Coast Guard with the hospital ship and the water purification ability.
Just like they said “no” to the WalMart truck full of water. Just like they stopped the Fish and Wildlife workers from rescuing people.
FEMA was not incompetent. They had a plan. It just wasn’t to rescue poor and black folks from Katrina.
http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/search?q=incompetence
And in the 30s, beautiful people with fancy clothes and cars had lavish parties. They traveled to exotic places. Life was good.
If you choose to look at the employed people’s behavior, life goes on as always. If you look at the obscenely wealthy, life is great. If you look at the soup kitchens, unemployment offices, or tent cities, it looks a little different.
I have the distinction of being actually from the same era as JHK. In the microscopic view, I was young, and I am younger than he. “Young” in this context would mean, for instance, that the upsweep in LSD visibility in 1966 found a minor, with JHK an adult. In Vietnam, same thing. Today, in Tel Aviv, I bet they make ecstasy, and I am against it. Today, in Afghanistan, we make war, and I think our wars are serving “them”. Call me irresponsible. I am younger. We did not need these juvenile delinquents whom we held as role models to promote the use of drugs which could cause a severe psychotic reaction, but that’s what we got.
QUOTE
madmen drummers bummers indians in the summer
with a teenage diplomat
in the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat
with a boulder on my shoulder feelin kinda older
I tripped the merry
mother fuck UNQUOTE
http://sbillinghurst.wordpress.com
how psychic power works to bend spoons
I cannot finish this. I am like Captain Ahab but the whale is blue. I am lashed to it. We are going back down. Things are going on out here. Stick with me. I will turn you into a war correspondent.
hey, asia. You are not asoka. you are an insane schizophrenic female. I am already up to my eyeballs in your kind of croc.
That which is true is JHK’s whole post. It was so good I had nothing to add, you complete zombie.
I guess I have a quibble with the metaphor involving toxic assets “deliquescing.” If only it were true. Then they would become liquid assets once again.
The cover story of the current Business Week is A Case for Optimism.
At the end of this section is A Case for Pessimism, where skeptics are praised for being in touch with reality.
http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/09_34/b4144067849606.htm
The global economy is in ruins, thanks to a super-sized dose of irrational optimism. Let’s raise a glass to folks who are in touch with reality.
Cheers!
Rick
ASOKA, A week or two ago I paid Jaego a dubious compliment … and now I will pay you one:
You talk out of both sides of your ass better than anyone at this blog. Today you are seeing America through rose colored glasses. Three days ago you were putting the finishing touches on your retirement home in Country X because things are so shitty in the US.
You’re certainly not going to allow some foolish consistency to become a hobgoblin in your little mind.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Q said: “You’re certainly not going to allow some foolish consistency to become a hobgoblin in your little mind.
Damn straight!
Long live Emerson and the Oversoul!
LOL!
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Jim,
Just finished your The Long Emergency. It provides a stunning “pulling back of the curtain,” especially when juxtaposed against last summer’s explosion of oil and gasoline prices and the crumbling of country’s financial system with all of its innovative constructs. (I can’t wait to read your sequel incorporating all that has transpired since you finished the epilogue).
Your focus on the so-called “recovery” this week is spot on. Whenever I hear someone start talking about recovery, I ask them, “recovery to what?” No one ever mentions anything more tangible than the stock market. But I see the rally as simply a response to the large stimulus–based wholly on digital money and more worldwide confidence that the good ole U.S. will get its mojo back sufficiently to repay the new loans implicit in our bond sales. We’re too big to fail!
But we are indeed failing, as you point out. And when the source of the stimulus dries up, or is exposed as fraudulent, the Long Emergency will commence in earnest, and everyone will see what’s behind the curtain!
Rick said: “The global economy is in ruins, thanks to a super-sized dose of irrational optimism.”
Do you really believe that?
I’m assuming you are using a technical definition referring to investors who assume that favorable equity returns can be relied on in the long term or that stocks are safe so long as they are held for 20 years are optimists whose optimism is irrational.
If that is not what you mean, please explain.
In either case, Asoka is an optimist and he is rational.
I’ve been saying for a couple months now that I think America is on the final downward slide from which there is no recovery. Glad to see someone in print agrees with me.
Not that I think it’s impossible to recover from the slide. I just don’t believe there are any leaders willing to do what it takes to recover, or any voters willing to elect them.
Maybe it’s time to start planning how to shorten the Dark Ages that will follow the fall of the modern day Roman Empire. Where’s Hari Seldon when you need him?
WASHINGTON – A newly declassified CIA report says interrogators threatened to kill the children of a Sept. 11 suspect.
I am just glad we now have Obama as president and Obama is against torture and against CIA assassination of innocent children.
And that Obama appointed Holder and that Holder is appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the behaviour of CIA interrogators.
Watch a 2 minute video of Bush’s torture memo. Bush’s torture memo was never intended to be read by the public, much less spoken aloud on YouTube.
http://www.aclu.org/torturedlogic/index2.php
New boss… not like the old boss.
think of the mag as
‘BUSINESS WEAK’
makes things alot easier that way
Oil forestalled it
did you read TLE?
Yes n No
the middle class in the USA is well on the way out,
most jobs in usa now pay ‘chump change’
Speaking of Toxic ASSets, I’m sure the marketing genius of the corporations are digging up a Michael HALLOWEEN Jackson Special for Prime Time ratings, with a LIVE graveyard “He’s still Dead” ghoul guest spot. A couple of special guest effect (ghost of Elvis) TRICKS should leave the Zombie viewers gasping and THRILLed for more invisible TREATS as common sense disappears faster than Houdini at a bankrupt banquet of bad taste.
Personally I’ll be passing on the Toxic soft drink elixer and Ecoli burgers as I’ve had my fill of swill from the boring brain dead bankers and their snake oil sales pitch.
The only real recovery (hangover) we’re most likely to see is a rush on modern toilet products as the people herd into their respective territorial stadiums in time to watch their favourite over paid gladiators play some sort of over hyped game in today’s media circus we call society.
Soylent Green is People!
who is Krugman
aside from the obvious?
anyone have his errr ‘track record’ to post?
Asia,
How’s life you paranoid, right-wing, redneck?
“I am just glad we now have Obama as president”
—————————-
“What you mean we white man?” — Tonto
Is Obama the president of Canada? of Country X?
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Walking around my “fashionable” neighborhood in Austin, I see that almost every-other house is for sale or rent. Ten years ago, I paid $118K for my house. Now the cheapest house in the neighborhood is near half-a-million and up to over a million. Glad I bought when I did. And by the way, my neighborhood is solidly center-of-the-city. I can walk easily to get almost anything I need. (If I only would!) Many of your commentors are right, that much of what you have predicted has not come true–yet. But it will.
Bobster,
a) I rent.
b) I do walk everywhere, it’s not hard.
It gets a little harder when you are my age (69), but I really have no excuse except laziness. And a cheap to drive 11 year old car.
Q said: “Is Obama the president of Canada? of Country X?”
Obama’s policy decisions affect the world. And I am very grateful for his cultural sensitivity toward Ramadan and the Arab world in general.
P.S. Asoka est stultus
Talk, talk, talk..dissect, dissect…..
Try this on:
http://www.startribune.com/local/54568212.html?elr=KArksi8cyaiUjc8LDyiUiacyKU7DYaGEP7vDEh7P:DiUs
Agribizz,
I never got your input on pig farming.
“OK, instead of believing what is hyperbolically written … take a look for yourselves. Do you see empty restaurants”
————————–
Of course Jim K writes hyperbolically … he needs to get our attention … but exaggeration for the sake of emphasis does not make his thrust untrue.
I took a look and here is what I saw:
(1) A week ago Saturday my wife and I went to a diner before going to a movie. My watch read 7PM. Saturday evening at 7PM is prime time in the diner biz. The place was 3/4ths full. A year ago it would have been packed and its foyer full of people waiting 15 mins with more people waiting outside.
(2) Yesterday, after hiking a few miles on the AT my wife and I and another couple went to the Sussex Inn in the town of Sussex, NJ for dinner. The town was empty … not one pedestrian on the street in the heart of town. One store was open – antiques, no customers … three cars parked at the curb (one was ours). The bar at the Inn had a handful of people escaping the heat and humidity, watching sports. One family of 3 dined. This is what Q saw and Q doesn’t lie.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
agirbizz, the shortfall in funds for public projects is a direct result of the big push to “cut taxes”
If people don’t want to pay taxes, then they don’t have any right to gripe about bridges falling down. There is a direct relationship.
People seem to want services (roads, fire, police, libraries, etc.) but don’t want their taxes to increase.
Government is needed… big government… and higher taxes are needed. Because Joe Sixpack cannot repair falling bridges in Minnesota.
Unfortunately Obama is not one to raise taxes. He wants to cut spending on inefficient programs and Obama wants “pay as you go” instead of raising the deficit. Obama is no FDR.
“who is Krugman … anyone have his errr ‘track record’ to post?”
——————–
When you’re an Op-Ed columnist for the NY Times an a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics you pretty much don’t need a track record any more.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Asoka,
Obama is the only game in town. Maybe you should get down on your knees and thank God that you’ve got president Obama and not McCain.
There is something inherently fishy about the title this week: Financial Crisis Called Off
We hear how the big boys at GS and Wall Street and the rich bankers and whoever else you want to throw in, THEY are the ones responsible for the financial crisis. They created the financial crisis. Some say intentionally. THEY created it.
In that case, “THEY” (whoever you consider that to be) can uncreate it. They can call off the financial crisis. They can manufacture numbers related to GDP, etc.
You see how paranoid this is sounding. The financial crisis is because of “THEM”… but when the numbers show improvement …. well, THEY must be trying to manipulate us.
Bastards! To the barricades with the pitchforks!
Personally I think too many are suffering from DSM-IV-TR 301.00
Urban_Underclass said: “Maybe you should get down on your knees and thank God that you’ve got president Obama and not McCain.”
When considering the alternative, I agree with you.
And I do get down on my knees to pray and give thanks for President Barack Hussein Obama.
All?hu Akbar!
Obama Akbar!
Asoka,
‘They’ is a four letter word. If you guy weren’t so afraid to hit the streets with 6 gun in your hands there would be no-one to blame. Fucking loudmouth cowards.
UU,
Confront a SWAT team with a 6 gun and see how far you get.
Sorry two typos in my last comment (I like the way they all happen twice);
Asoka,
‘They’ is a four letter word. If you guys weren’t so afraid to hit the streets with 6 guns in your hands there would be no-one to blame. Fucking loudmouth cowards.
“Obama’s policy decisions affect the world.”
——————————
Everybody’s decisions affect the world … haven’t you ever heard about that butterfly in China?
Asoka, you are a slippery one. I try to corner you on one thing and you bring up “cultural sensitivity toward Ramadan and the Arab world.” Who the frig said anything about cultural sensitivity toward Ramadan and the Arab world?
When in doubt, change the subject.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Sorry, there were two typos in my last comment, so I’ll re-iterate;
If you guys weren’t so afraid to hit the streets with 6 guns in your hands there would be no-one to blame. Fucking loudmouth cowards.
UU said: “If you guys weren’t so afraid to hit the streets with 6 guns in your hands there would be no-one to blame. Fucking loudmouth cowards.”
So the problem is there is not enough MACHISMO in the world? The problem is that people are afraid to resort to violence? And violence is always the answer?
Who would you suggest be shot first? Name names.
I do not intend to shoot anyone else or myself. (had to put that in before Q or OEO beat me to it)
P.S. Asoka est stultus
UU,
I don’t understand how an international financial crisis can be solved with 6 guns.
Can you explain that?
P.S. Asoka est stultus
You’re right, of course.
And yes. I just forget a lot.
I think Marx could not have predicted the way the masses of workers, proletariat,were bought off when the unions came to power. Unions took the winds of revolution acquired from the Soviets, right out of their sails. A brilliant move I might add. FDR did save capitalism even if few recognize that fact of history.
Marxism is not dead but needs a new infusion of genius. I do not follow the Marxist ideology in journals so I am probably missing a lot.
And never underestimate the power of denial. Ricky Fitz in American Beauty
But if you read Tolstoy he lays it all out. All you need do is follow his path through the maze to get where we are now. They will not change and they have to die off before a new paradigm can be born. That is probably gonna happen too.
I think that Obama actually gets all this but can’t do anything about it. He can’t even have a small change made in the healthcare system without multiple people showing up with automatic weapons to “exercise their constitutional rights.” (Note; These incidents happened in States that do not have good access to farmer’s markets or Whole Foods (it’s the Cheeze Doodle” Brigades out for the exercise that is described in the junk food package insert). If small changes away from unfettered capitalism can’t get through, then the major changes needed can never happen.
The US is now, like here in Japan, a society in terminal decline but for different reasons. In Japan it due to a declining population as people will not reproduce when quality of life (space, normal working life, male and female participation in child rearing, having a concrete infrastructure that has ELIMINATED nature including paved beaches and mountains) is unbearable for them. The Japanese were not a something for nothing culture in the last 30 years; they were a let’s build unnecessary construction until there is nothing left -to “stimulate” the economy culture.
Societies grow and decline. That’s why we have stuff to study in history class. We got to enjoy the growth and unfortunately for us and a generation or two of our kids we will have the backside until the major things such as Peak Oil, pandemics, etc, escalation of military action lead to another re-ordering. In the meantime, I guess we try to live in a small sustainable community with a decent quality of life and enjoy good quality food while we still can and prepare our kids that things may be different in the next few years but with basic humanity and a work for yourself and your community mentality there is still enjoyment and value in life.
Tancred… lately I’ve taken up saying “The economy was never so broken as when it worked.”
I remember once getting tricked by some people at work into going to a party that turned out to be a bible study. I also had a similar thing happen where I ended up at a meeting of Trotsky-ites. In both cases, I had to get out fast as everyone had stars in their eyes. “How do I get the f*** out of here with another cupcake and no pamphlets or 30 minute sermons” – read my panicked thought bubble.
Whether it was Jesus or the State/Central Planners who were going to save me or take a bunch of stuff from everyone else to make us all equal, the mentality was the same. Namely – an infantile need to feel protected by putting all faith and hope in someone or something else, and an arrogance that said that they knew what was best for everyone else.
Every time I read Asoka’s posts, I am reminded of the people I met at those, “parties.”
The quip about Obama bringing back manufacturing is hilarious. First of all, we don’t want one man who is so powerful that he can bring back manufacturing to the United States. Second of all, he can’t anyways. You see there is a problem with Asoka’s theory, and it is grounded in what his/her posts make very obvious – that there is a fundamental lack of understanding of how economics and markets work.
What would have to happen for manufacturing to come back to the United States? Here are a few of them:
1. Asset prices would have to finish their collapse so that real-estate, transportation, and above-all LABOR prices could be competitive with those in China and the other mostly Asian countries.
2. Environmental regulations would have to be eliminated or severely curtailed to be competitive with China and every other smoldering cesspool of industrialism on the planet.
3. Taxes and regulations would have to be eliminated or significantly reduced to encourage investment in the finishing industries and the vast web of feeder businesses, again, in order to be cost competitive with China.
Obama is doing the exact opposite of all of that. You see, his boys at Goldman, Citi, JP Morgan … you know, the ones who gave him so much money to become president, that can’t have asset price collapses yet – they still have too much exposure to the commercial and residential derivative risk.
The government can’t have them blow up on their books either – if they do, who is going to lend them money to keep the empire occupying and building nations with their bombs, tanks and guns?
He can’t deregulate. How else would Goldman Sachs make more money off of the government by running the carbon trading exchanges?
I could go on and on about the auto industry bailout preventing wages being competitive w/ china … … … and similar LBJ/Nixon/Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama imperial/fascist government boondoggles.
As for the Green jobs crap. It is just that crap. There is no way around conservation. Growth and energy consumption as being synonymous are, as JHK points out, a dead system. It can’t be revived. Not in the United States of Debt Serfdom.
It is a fantasy to believe that it is all the Republican’s fault, and that if we just had Democrats everything would be okay. It is one big festering imperial cabal.
You see, MLK, Ghandhi, Krishnamurti, Siddartha, Christ, Mohammed were always loathed and/or killed by the heads of state, and never sought to be the head of state. They would not harm you and they did not seek power. Why you follow Obama and the Democrats with googly eyes, (or blog fingers), is a mystery. Perhaps it is because, unlike the avatars I mentioned before, Obama will never tell you – “Go away. Don’t look to me for the answers. Have the courage to look to yourself.” No. He’ll keep saying Hope and Change like a broken record, while the machine that spins and catapults the propaganda from his mouth as the megaphone, grinds away.
He is the head of state. He’ll be the first to kill, (via extraoridnary rendition), the next MLK or Ghandhi if they threaten his or his backing cabal’s grip on power. Somehow you must know this. Perhaps that is why you are so prostrate before him.
I’ve never met a Moonie. Or maybe, Asoka, in the virtual world of the Internets I have.
As usual I agree with JHK’s interpretation of trends, except in his (and many other’s) expectation that the masses will revolt. Stop the flow of food and gasoline and play the nationalism card, and Americans will become compliant puppy dogs. I also spend a lot of time reading about the problems faced by other areas of the world, and it’s clear they’re facing even more dire eventualities than we are! Japan and Europe have even larger, unservicable and unmanagable debt loads, and China is now blowing a credit bubble of epic proportions to maintain an illusion of growth until after the CCP anniversary in October. Anyone can see that we’re facing a black hole, a dead end. Surely the Masters of the Universe know this too. War has always been the way out, the solution, when has it not? The only way out this time is world war. All indications are pointing to Iran as the opening salvo. The US is now transferring massive amounts of armaments and personel into Iran’s neighbor Afghanistan, equipment that has little use in Afghanistan’s sparsely populated, rugged terrain. Then, the recent US acquisition of an unsinkable aircraft carrier in nearby Kirgistan over intense Russian oppositon, and was the recent social upheaval in Iran purely a coincidence? Netanyahu has plegded to take out Iran’s nuclear capability with or without US support, so war would happen anyway. Plus, if the US can neutralize Iran, they will control the flow of the world’s oil, by far the most important source of power and wealth on earth. This is going to get ugly though–no holds will be barred and surely bio-weapons will come into play. It possibly explains why the US is now organizing a nation-wide system of rapid inoculation involving the military, ostensibly in reaction to the relatively mild Swine Flu. I’d say we really are staring down the barrel of Armageddon. Don’t plan for this one–you can run but you can’t hide. There’s no way out this time, except as Solzhenitsyn used to say, “but upward”.
Asoka,
In the real world, there are few crises, if any that can’t be solved with six guns. Cowardice is the problem.
As usual I agree with JHK’s interpretation of trends, except in his (and many other’s) expectation that the masses will revolt. Stop the flow of food and gasoline and play the nationalism card, and Americans will become compliant puppy dogs. I also spend a lot of time reading about the problems faced by other areas of the world, and it’s clear they’re facing even more dire eventualities than we are! Japan and Europe have even larger, unservicable and unmanagable debt loads, and China is now blowing a credit bubble of epic proportions to maintain an illusion of growth until after the CCP anniversary in October. Anyone can see that we’re facing a black hole, a dead end. Surely the Masters of the Universe know this too. War has always been the way out, the solution, when has it not? The only way out this time is world war. All indications are pointing to Iran as the opening salvo. The US is now transferring massive amounts of armaments and personel into Iran’s neighbor Afghanistan, equipment that has little use in Afghanistan’s sparsely populated, rugged terrain. Then, the recent US acquisition of an unsinkable aircraft carrier in nearby Kirgistan over intense Russian oppositon, and was the recent social upheaval in Iran purely a coincidence? Netanyahu has plegded to take out Iran’s nuclear capability with or without US support, so war would happen anyway. Plus, if the US can neutralize Iran, they will control the flow of the world’s oil, by far the most important source of power and wealth on earth. This is going to get ugly though–no holds will be barred and surely bio-weapons will come into play. It possibly explains why the US is now organizing a nation-wide system of rapid inoculation involving the military, ostensibly in reaction to the relatively mild Swine Flu. I’d say we really are staring down the barrel of Armageddon. Don’t plan for this one–you can run but you can’t hide. There’s no way out this time, except as Solzhenitsyn used to say, “but upward”.
and who the fuck are all these muddahfuckahs who write comments a page long, HEY! NOBOBY READS THEM! I sure as hell don’t.
“Do you see empty restaurants…”
“…has Baskin-Robbins gone bankrupt?
“Look around at the malls and shopping plazas. Are the parking lots empty?”
“Are the roads empty…”
“Has Disney World closed down?”
“What are you going to believe: your own eyes? Or metaphors saying over and over again in different ways that we are a ‘catastrophically sick society’?”
You make a good point (trust your eyes), but by the things you mention, you’re only proving Jim’s point. All the things you list, starting from what passes for “restaurants” in America, and proceeding all the way down the list to Disney World, SUCK PROFOUNDLY. Not to mention they literally make people sick, and they all seem to have a funny way of extracting wealth from a large number of ordinary people and concentrating it in the hands of a few. (Oh I’m sure it’s just a coincidence — SARCASM.)
They deserve to fail and go away forever. If this blog consists of nothing more than wishful thinking to that effect, COUNT ME IN.
And so I say it again for the 2nd time today, the economy was never so broken as when it worked.
The comments on this post are yet another reminder that regardless of our labels (in this blog our labels tend to be progressive, green, counterculture, liberal, democratic, anti-establishment, etc…whatever these terms mean) we still operate from the same beliefs of blame, fear, self-righteousness and black and white thinking as the establishment we posture to oppose. The problem always seems to lie with the rich, the elite, big business, big gov. while we let ourselves conveniently off the hook.
In my experience there is little fundamental difference in the aggregate between business people, union workers, environmentalists, polluters, republicans, democrats, etc… We all seem to equally lack self awareness and we project our biases into what we see.
One thing from all “anti” posts I read is that we derive emotional satisfaction from things being bad as a way of saying “I told you so”. While I agree like most people posting here that the system is mad but I think we should bring a little less self gloating and a little more love and compassion into the picture.
Our societies will not be saved by unions, greens, big business or the free market which individually express different facets of ignorance. The system will start to heal when we one by one we become conscious of our own internal insanity which in turns manifests as the global insanity we live in.
“Who would you suggest be shot first? Name names.”
—————————-
You, then Rico, then Zzz. (Too easy … that’s like asking “who’s buried in Grant’s tomb.”)
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Strangewalk said: “War has always been the way out, the solution, when has it not? ”
When war requires bombers and tanks and military vehicles that use petrol and there isn’t any.
Aren’t we running out of easy sources of crude?
War will be impossible without gasoline.
Or is all that peak oil/long emergecy/world made by hand stuff not true?
cuddletuffy said: “As for the Green jobs crap. It is just that crap. There is no way around conservation.”
chrischris said: “Our societies will not be saved by unions, greens…:
How can you be so sure of what will not save us?
“Leaders everywhere, notably in the United States and China, are realizing that green is not an option but a necessity for recharging their economies and creating jobs.
Globally, with 2.3 million people employed in the renewable energy sector, there are already more jobs there than directly in the oil and gas industries.
In the United States, there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry.
President Barack Obama’s and China’s stimulus packages are a critical step in the right direction and their green components must be followed through urgently.”
Aaahh yes. When reality becomes sub-sub-sublime.
Asoka,
Like I said about dem long comments, Nobody Reads Them. Now when you goin’ to reply?
They can run health care because they already do so.
It’s called Medicare.
Let’s just start with Medicare for all. We can tweak it as we go along.
Well said, Jim.
By the way, here are some good comments on the healthcare “debate” for those who are interested:
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/08/how-much-freedom-can-one-man-stand.html
http://www.countercurrents.org/noxid180809.htm
PS: Hello to Bobster. I too live in Austin. Try to walk & ride my bike most places, but it ain’t easy in this town.
“in the virtual world of the Internets”
——————————-
It’s internet … there’s only one. Other than that I liked some of what you said (like Asoka = Moonie).
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Asoka –
There is a critical concept that is fundamental to understanding our energy problem. It is called, Energy Return On Energy Investment or EROEI as if we need another acronym for pretentious people to bandy about to prove their mental superiority.
The amount of energy we get from fossil fuels is orders of magnitude greater than our previous sources, (wood, manure, horse/wheel, wind/crank, human slavery …)
We don’t get that return from any other source. We have to decide, do we want a jobs program or a truly green and sustainable future. A green jobs program is not green. How much fossil fuel will we burn manufacturing windmills and solar panels that will never replace the EROEI and on-demand capabilities of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. How much energy will we waste keeping cars on the road instead of building railways that are much more fuel efficient?
Where will all the electricity come from to fuel green electric cars? Answer, coal and nuclear fired power plants. When will that additional capacity from our already overtaxed energy grid come on-line? Answer: at least 5-6 years. At least!
You ought to listen more closely to Mr. Kunstler when he discusses the energy problems we face. Other good sources are Richard Heinberg, Matt Simmons.
A few years ago I ran across a paper written by the former head of the EU’s hydrogen energy research center. His paper called the hydrogen economy a fantasy that needed to be scuttled in order to concentrate our precious and dwindling resources on wind and solar power, and that CONSERVATION, (not growth and high paying jobs), is the most critical part of our society’s transition to a lower energy future. I’ll see if I can find this and post it.
That is right, the future will require less energy use, and there will be fewer jobs and careers in the way we have thought of them for the past 65 years or so. Obama’s job should be to help us all prepare for the worst, but he seems proud to say that he would rather just get you to Hope for the best.
Furthermore, I’d be skeptical of the green jobs reports. Any government can create a green job to make the number look bigger. They do that sort of trick all the time. GDP is one such gambut to be relevant to today’s CFN article. Often times the goal of these reports is to keep unthinking constituents happy and supportive even though the report is largely fictional.
The EROEI of wind and solar and the problems of intermittancy are so severe that the only jobs that are meaningful in the area at this time are concentrated in such esoteric and advanced scientific research that few if any human beings on the planet are qualified or capable of doing the work. So, be very skeptical of the green economy and green future that is based on keeping Happy Motoring and Happy Gaming/iPoding/Texting going as-is. I know you want Obama to be a savior. It is understandable why.
I was being sarcastic. Time to get off the computer-box and leave the Internets to the literal.
Cheers!
Jim, the lastest info I could get about Michael Jackson states that the Jackson family plans on burying him at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, CA on his birthday which will be August 29th.
A lot of folks probably don’t know this but Forest Lawn cemetery used to be quite a tourist spot. I remember that my mom and dad would take me there as a child and we would check out the mausoleums and tombstones of the famous, especially Hollywood types. Of course, my parents were from the South and graves and cemeteries seem to hold some weird fascination for folks born south of the Mason-Dixon line. I remember that they had a souvenir shop and my folks bought some things for me there. Weird, especially since they didn’t take me to Disneyland.
For years, my dad collected cemetery spots like other folks collect stocks and bonds. He sold all his plots at Inglewood Park Cemetery and then bought a bunch in the Palos Verdes Peninsula. For anyone unfamiliar with L.A., the Peninsula is the South Bay’s equivalent of Beverly Hills. So, my parents’ graves sit and overlook the Pacific Ocean (the only Los Angeles cemetery that does so) and his final resting place is among some very wealthy dead folks. His funeral plots were among his most cherished possessions. The point I’m trying to get to is that these grave sites are now willed to me and my brother. Who knew that my primary source of wealth during the Long Emergency might be a graveyard?
The Chinese have been liquidating their US debt as secretly and fast as they can and buying hard assets. Real estate, businesses etc all over the world, even here as we type along.
“comments a page long, HEY! NOBOBY READS THEM! I sure as hell don’t.”
—————————-
So don’t read them. Whadda ya think that scroll wheel is for on your mouse? You afraid we’re gonna run out of electrons?
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
“there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry.”
—————————-
And there is more wind in your blogs than in the entire wind industry.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
“Who knew that my primary source of wealth during the Long Emergency might be a graveyard?”
—————————
This is so cool! Something fresh in the discussion … and possibly a new way to make a buck. I can envision going long 100 plots or even going short … or securitizing and selling them to investors in Iceland.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
“The Chinese have been liquidating their US debt as secretly and fast as they can and buying hard assets.”
——————————–
At least that is the fear.
The Chinese have a tiger by the tail and dare not dump US debt or they’ll cause the very thing they fear … a precipitous drop in bond prices. Then we and they go down the toilet together.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Anybody notice Jaego’s not around today? Must be attending a bund meeting.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
Qshtik,
In our moments of leisure, my blogging partner and I (she does not come here) take to Jungian psychoanalysis of the more long winded commentators we come across in blogs. After a while it becomes second nature, then it becomes hard to read the more long winded comments. So I stop.
For example, who can not feel sorry for Dolan Williams and his Oeidipus Complex?
Sad.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/energy/6584868.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/la7tks
A little hot sauce here from David Green to spice up Jim’s red beans and rice.
http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/My%20Country,%20Misery.html
Related to the desperate straits our economy appears to be in and speaking of bonds and such … here’s a market scenario for what it’s worth:
The market has been technically “over-bought” for nearly a month. We’re due (overdue?) for a setback. On Sept 8th the market begins to slide. If/when we get a gang-buster down day, like 400-500 points on the DOW, market players run for cover in the “safety” of US Govt bonds. The bonds go up in price/down in yield (like either end of a rope draped over a one-wheel pulley). This can create a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
There are bearish, double and triple leavered ETFs on 20 and 30 year bonds. It’s a way of going short by buying rather than by selling. So, when the rush into long term bonds drives these Bear ETFs to super low prices you buy them and prepare for the inevitable ride back up.
Buy TBT (a 2X levered ETF on 20 year bonds) at $45.75 and/or buy TMV (a 3X levered ETF on 30 year bonds) at $62.50. These prices are considerably lower than today’s closing prices.
Bernanke is trying to hold down the yield on long term bonds to help the economy but his stated intention is to end the $300B quantitative easing at the end of Oct. There is nothing in sight after that to keep yields down.
WARNING These levered ETFs are like playing with matches and cherry bombs at the same time. You might get a few digits blown off. Further, the SEC is starting to look askance at the whole field of levered products which are fast becoming the next big bubble. I won’t be surprised if levered ETFs are curbed in the next 6 to 12 months.
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
HI CUDDLETUFFY, I think you hit the nail on the with your observations. The only thing I can think of to add is the fact that once the third world learned to manufacture, the US was doomed to lose all those good paying blue collar jobs. I know because I was one of them. What made the US the economic world power was the fact that after the Second World War, we were the only country with any factories left standing. For a few decades, we were the only game in town and life was good. Those days are gone, and the sooner people wake up & realize that life is gonna be a lot different, the better off we’ll be. Capt.’s regards to you.
Great post!! We have in Jackson Hole a bunch of Mr. Eds. A stable full of talking horses. Paul Krugman interviewed Bob The Builder and it was he who told him that a recovery is underway. Ken and Barbie are hoping to buy their next Atlanta housing suburb for themselves so they can securitize the mortgages and sell CDOz, just in case, you know what I mean :), to Hobbits in Middle Earth.
Rip Van Winkle woke up from his long sleep that began when Reagan took office, and now he wants to catch up on the stock market bubble rally he missed while snoozing all those decades. So, the rest of the zombie stock flippers are on board for the crazy ride. Bad news is the new good news. Yeah. Follow the wave that the big banksta boy buyers are doing and get in and immediately get out with your pot of gold. Top of mornin’ to ya, Smokey Joe!
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
Yes, by Jove you’ve said it. Know Nukes. Let’s harness the very power of Heaven. Or we could pour stagnant pond scum into our tanks a la Ashoka. There are problems but what choice do we have? And it’s not just theoretical, we know we can do it because France is doing it right now-they get 80% of the electricity from nukes. And during the building period, we might have to use some dirty old coal. Of course, Obama wants to destroy the Coal Industry. He is a man of profoundly foolish optimism and unrealistic vision. Talks endlessly about Racial Harmony but hates White People. Promises peace but expands the war. Talks America down everywhere he goes. Loves Islam but is in with the Zionists. He is a chamelon, a Zelig. We got the President we deserved-a candy coated clown. And who in their right mind wants these people to have control of the Medical System. We aren’t France or Germany, we are a banana republic morphing into a Tyranny.
We will go ahead with “Green Energy” though. It so much fun for college morons to don green hard hats and pretend they’re serious people. I heard little kids chanting “we want a green job” the other day at a festival. It all about creating your own reality through magical thinking. They live, we sleep.
Even the dead are involved in White Flight. So many Whites were getting mugged when they visited their dead in Detroit that Whites have begun to move their deceased relatives out of the City. It’s not just Atlanta, Blacks have destroyed countless downtowns and in the case of Detroit, basically the whole city.
The big question for you is whether your parents will be safe when the Mexicans take over the State. They might be especially if the Mexicans continue to play a smart game. Or they could disavow vandalism but secretly allow it or even encourage it.
Cuddlefly is one bad-ass, fast-talking, articulate dude.
I especially appreciate this gem: “The future will require less energy use, and there will be fewer jobs and careers.”
Cuddle is spot on, the term “green jobs” is an oxymoron. Our leaders can’t both pledge to clean the environment and create a record-number of jobs.
Civilization is inherently opposed to environmental preservation.
The only solution is for the “surplus population” — the unskilled without job prospects or those with obsolete skills (like mortgage brokers and Realtors) — to stop reproducing, and learn foraging skills.
Typical middle aged communist “youth”-no attention span. Too much chanting of slogos has ruined your brain. You don’t have to read! You know it’s all crap anyway. Break out the bombs.
Try reading Orwell’s Animal Farm. He made it very simple for people like you. Don’t rush it or you’ll miss the profound symbolism and central meaning.
The new concept known as ‘Agriburbia’ can help to salvage the suburbs, but only if it’s implemented soon.
Find out more @ http://agriburbia.com/
Oeidipus Complex? Jung did not embrace the Oedipus complex, it was one of Freuds favorite theories, with Jung being at odds with Freud on the theory. Jung favored the Electra complex.
When playing at analysis, get a little background on what you are talking about.
I thought I used to be super intelligent, and in many ways still am, but the last 5 years has really taken a toll on my head. I figure I can KNOW the truth by keeping things simple – REAL SIMPLE! I always go to the Sardine and Tuna section at the store and stare at the cans and prices. The Tuna seems to be stable, but those darn yummy Chicken Vienna Sausages jumped from 69 cents to $1.00 at Safeway. I figure, exponentially, in one more years they will be $3.00 a can… I just hope the Tuna is still $1.00 a can. Maybe I should buy a few cases NOW while the shelves are still full. Well, on my way out I complained to the manager and told him, Safeway ‘could’ be called renamed SAVEway, if they put up FAKE products for ALL the ones that never sell, and just have Bread, water, and Millet for sale as real food stuff. Of course, I got an odd look. I haven’t told him about all the little chunks of bubble gum I use to TAG the non-selling items that are still on the shelves, dating back a few years. I keep records, you know. – RSM
PS. Question? When am I going to win the lottery? I can then help the economy ‘recover’ by patriotically paying taxes?
Hey Kunstler,
Obviously you have not taken the course nor read the books of Dale Carnegie! Rule Number One: “Act Enthusiastic, and You’ll Feel Enthusiastic!” Get with the program, dude—OTOH, there’s still lots of lithium in Bolivia!
Great post this week, dude
In Palo Alto, CA I’m seeing an epidemic of
Gen-Y suicides and middle-aged angst as ALL
jobs lose any vestige of security.
It’s pretty bad when labor advisors think
that “Website Designer” is going to be one
of the “hot” jobs for future young Americans.
It proves Jim’s point that we made nothing of
tangible value.
Our whole nation is now based upon trading chits
and pretending that most commercial computer
technology is more than just a gaudy, overcomplex
nuisance.
Eleuthero
Yes indeed. Isn’t this about where we were before the Sept 11 attacks? Shrub on his one month annual Sabbatical from the job he was elected to do and an economic mess getting ready to collapse. Let’s also not forget VP Joe “Big Mouth” Biden’s cryptic speech to well-heeled campaign supporters last October in Seattle.
He said that sometime soon after Obama was elected he would be tested by some incident that would cause him to take really unpopular measures here at home.
Just don’t be surprised if another “unexpected emergency”, false-flag event is in the offing in the next several months. After all, what do we have left in this country for major industrial exports other than warfare and agricultural commodities?
Both of these growth export industries are dependent on petroleum (as is our upside down, bass ackwards, economy and culture)for their continued survival. Listen closely enough and you can hear the hounds of escalating warfare bellowing down at the Pentagon.
I just saw this morning the national deficit is 9,000,000,000,000 bucks. That’s about $28,000 for each man, woman and child in the USA.
However, it is the children that are going to be stuck with the debt, paying it off as they labor for peanuts in the “new” economy, whatever that turns out to be…
“Where’s Hari Seldon when you need him?”
hari-shmari… I’m looking for the second foundation.
Btw, what does a Mormon know about Seldon’s plan?
Who has “lost their mind?”
____________________________
“All this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA have lost their minds. They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts….” and on and on…… says JK this week.
JK, you have a very real “blind spot” when it comes to understanding the rich and powerful. You keep giving them the benefit of “ignorance” in their strategies relating to raping and pillaging this country’s people and their assets.
No one has “lost their mind” – and the only pretending going on – is strictly for your benefit. What is transpiring is a somewhat uniform effort, albeit, you could even say coordinated effort, of the rich and powerful individuals involved in the financial sector to portray the current state of affairs as the “new normal.”
They know very well that there has been some less than flattering “national” attention brought to their scheming when the latest round of money shoveling came to an end. And now they are doing everything possible to make all that seem like “old news.” No, Jim, they are hardly insane; they are coldly calculating scam-sters – laying out a framework for the “new reality” of economic disparity between them and the rest of the population. If it seems like they are “pretending” about anything, its not about “fooling themselves” it’s about fooling you.
JK, your journalistic veracity suffers when you continue to misjudge the diabolical, devious activities of the rich and powerful for “ignorance” and wishful thinking. I suggest you curtail, or at least re-question your conclusions regarding the motives and manner of the rich when questioning the remarkable contradictions we must endure as we try to “make sense” of our modern social and governing conventions.
Given the direction this “democracy” is headed, these people you seem to think are “ignorant” may very well be controlling vital resources in ways that might effectively result as an activity more suited to a “death panel.” As I’ve noted in the past, there’s seems to be no end to the ever growing polarization of thought, and disparity of wealth in this nation.
Many of us may be residing in conditions more common to Africa – in a decade or two. A that point- who will be judged ignorant, who was “just pretending?”
Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ. In addition to the racist nut jobs, free-market douchebags, paranoid conspiracy theorists and other maniacs, now there are science fiction geeks posting here. I figure there have got to be some Ayn Rand worshippers in the mix, too.
Reading the “Foundation” series, and indeed most of the science fiction novels I’ve read, was one of the most tragic pissings-away of time in my life. Take my advice: don’t do it!!!!!!!!!
Dear Mr. Kunstler:
I don’t know if you’ll even see this, but I just read a pretty bad (in my opinion) op-ed in the NYTimes “debunking” peak-oil arguments.
It’s classic sophistry — the kind of thing that comes out of our so-called institutions of higher-learning. I just got my PhD, and I struggle with getting a historical view of where we are, where we have come from, and where we’re going, socially and spiritually speaking. University today is boot camp for the System. Plain and simple.
Keep up the fight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?_r=1
Read the following AP post. Only two paragraphs. Three quarters of our entire national economy will go towards servicing debt. THREE QUARTERS…and as soon as 2019.
Asoka-the-producers, SHUT THE FUCK UP. For all time. This collapsing mess will be on Ombama’s shoulders. He is now in charge. No more cry-babying about George-fucking-Bush. The path we are on is Obama’s path and it is the path to destruction. If his plans are not defeated by the push back that has begun to emerge the game is fucking over. Read on.
“WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government faces exploding deficits and mounting debt over the next decade, White House officials predicted Tuesday in a fiscal assessment far bleaker than what the Obama administration had estimated just a few months ago.
Figures released by the White House budget office foresee a cumulative $9 trillion deficit from 2010-2019, $2 trillion more than the administration estimated in May. Moreover, the figures show the public debt doubling by 2019 and reaching three-quarters the size of the entire national economy.”
Headlines Tuesday:
Obama nominates Bernanke back for a second term
Of course, why wouldn’t you give one of the perpetrators to the largest theft in history another shot at continuing to further wreck the US economy for his masters gain? Bought & Paid for.
The Jokers credibility is all but destroyed with this, another of his many Bad Moves.
Now that his credibility is gone and he has a cabinet full of Goldman gangsters running governmet at all levels, I am on my kness praying for the first broken window. Another ‘terror’ attack all but guaranteed now. Economy spiraling down the bowl and a furious rate. Pitchforks will be the least of their worries. Wait until the unemployed run out of cheese and get hungry right about snowfall time this year.
I am begining to sympathize with Rev. Wright.
God Damn America.
I agree with strangewalk. War has always been the answer.
The US was the only one with factories left standing after WW2. I believe that they will try to repeat that.
And not enough oil? are you kidding? The military will always have first dibs on oil. What do you think the Strategic Reserve is all about? Making gas prices lower for Billy Bob’s pickup? Yeah, right.
As far as conservation goes, we can easily do it. We use far more than other people on this planet and we use far more than we did in the past.
My internet was down for a week due to mice chewing my wires. Now I have a jerry-rigged line through a hole in my window.
And that reminds me of the way I used to live and the way everyone I knew lived.
Wires hanging from ceilings. No electricity on the upper floor. Buckets to flush toilets.
Jim always talks about the granite counter people.
How many of them are there and how many of people like me?
I predicted the US would turn to war as the solution last year.
http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/2008/10/if-you-have-hammer-everything-must-be.html
Peak Oil has also been cancelled, according to this article in Tuesdays New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html
Simply Amazing…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html
One more thing.
A doctor I know remarked that her electric bill was $800/month. Her electric company was the same as mine and my bill was $80 that month.
So. I live pretty well, in my opinion, yet I used 1/10th as much electricity as she did.
Clearly, there is much room for conservation!
Eleuthero,
Apparently when you’re typing your comments, as you approach the right side of the comment box you are hitting the ENTER key to move down a line. This is not necessary and results in your comment looking like it does when posted. Instead, just keeping typing when you approach the right side and the line will automatically “wrap-around.”
P.S. Asoka delendus est.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
Interesting tirade against peak oil.
DJ
Jaego wrote,
Try reading Orwell’s Animal Farm.
I did, quite successfully when I was about fifteen.
One quibble: a lot of us in the architecture community are *very* interested in Traditional Neighborhood Design, walkable communities and better urban planning. Go to any school of architecture and it’s a major part of the curriculum. Talk to rank-and-file architects and you’ll find a sympathetic audience. There are even questions about these concepts on licensing exams.
The real problem is getting the developers to see this. Developers control the way land is used in this country-not architects. Also, the ‘Starchitects” are the ones who get all the attention, and consequently, the publicity. There are a lot of us who are fed up with the “star” idea the profession has eveolved into. These stars are the ones putting up “Green skyscrapers”, because that is how they make their names. Let’s put blame where it is due.
Thanks
hasnt this debt monster been there since reagan or prior and didnt the grace commission/ ‘hockey stick’ chart warn people 25 years ago?
ALSO JIM K
DID YOU SEE YDAYS WS JOURNAL?
i swear
‘ 33 of 34 economists love bernanke and Wall st loves bernanke’
if you doubt me ill mail it to ya!
reminds me of a 1950? camels ad:
3 of 4 docs who smoke smoke camels
and my electric bill was 100$/ month
i got a new fridge
now its 10$ a month
SO WHAT
the population of california has nearly doubled in 30 years
try conservation against a population that doubles on a regular basis
clearly ‘a the bountiful’
didnt read TLE or disagrees with it
how much energy does it take to build windmills
and how do windfarmers get to and from work ???
not on hot air…least not yet
they have a gun to usa s heads
we got a gun to their heads
OK…..so how will it play out?
And JHK:
they are building a disneyland in beijing..
so they can act more like us no doubt
with hummers and suvs and beef dinners!
Heh Ross, don’t feel too badly about staring at all those food products on the shelves of your local supermarket. Last week, my garage literally filled up with Nutrisystem foodstuffs. It seems my daughter bought a shipload of this stuff and charged it on my card. I swear to God, I’m gonna chickenthroat her if I can only get my hands around her chunky neck. Anyway, my wife and I have started eating this stuff and we actually like it a lot. And, some of the food is marked as good until 2016. My wife is really jazzed because she has been wanting to set up an earthquake survival kit with a whole bunch of food. I feel ready at long last for the Long Emergency to hit my neighborhood. Ross, start buying canned tuna and peanut butter and storing it today. You and I can throw a “survival party” together someday.
Thank you Liberator-of what though? Simon or Da? Anyway your post gives new meaning to the phrase “hanging chads”. Young gay men are particularly lost-as society reverts back to traditional forms they will have nothing to do. Can’t go to the disco if there is no disco.
‘become conscious of our own internal insanity ‘
COULDNT DIS-AGREE MORE
Mule you are undone. Your attempts to divert attention from the Truth will backfire. And don’t worry, when it comes time to burn books Ayn Rand’s are going right in. Asimov’s books will help us begin again. After all, nothing purifies like fire. Water only cleans the surfaces of things; fire cleans right down to the molecular level. You might object and say that fire destroys in the very act of cleaning. This is true and perhaps regretable; then again, perhaps not. It really depends on the thing being purified. A small forest fire just makes the forest stroger. It doesn’t hurt the big trees at all.
‘Simply Amazing’
Not really when you think of who pays these folks to lie
Krugman, bernanke, mike lynch etc
the part about drilling in persia a century ago really got to me!
If you were successful, why are you still a communist? The workers are just capitalists who haven’t arrived yet. And because of their bitterness, they would make even worse masters than the ones we already have. And beyond the psychological dialectic, the two systems aren’t that much different. Both are geared towards centralization of power and capital and both rely on central banking. Both produce a sharp pyramid with only a few on top.
The answer for a non traditional person like you, is communalism and intellectual anarchism. The way for most people is a return to small town family life or farming. Early to bed, Church, the whole nine yards. You have to realize how vicious Marx was and how he hated reform, he only wanted blood. This lead him to support free markets in order to subvert the system quicker.
Jaego,
Did I say I was a communist? I am a socialist as was Eric Blair A.K.A. George Orwell who wrote Animal Farm, an allegorical tale about the Russian Revolution and Stalin’s purges.
Jesus A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z Christ!!!! I just read the most outlandish article debunking Peak Oil I have EVER read. It appeared, of all places, right in the New York Times. It is an Op Ed entitled “‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy” by Michael Lynch. He is trying to debunk the Peak Oil Theory – as he calls it – with “facts” that generally have no basis in reality.
First he bashes Thomas Malthus and suggests that a “motivated group of scientists and laymen” don’t know what they are talking about and are basing their conclusions on poor analysis of data or lies. Well, they said that about Global Warming, too, for many years while the rest of the indusrial world got on board the Kyoto Protocol. I think saying “a lot of scientists” don’t know what they are talking about is a tall order, myself, especially in light of no solid facts to the contrary.
He implies that the increasing water level in Ghawar is no big deal. He says we can ignore that fact that we are only discovering one barrel of oil for every three produced because the “the estimate is almost always revised upwards”. Wow, so we can just disregard the fact we are using three times more of the stuff we are discovering and just paper it over with “revisions on paper”. Hey, that kind of thinking got us into the sub-prime mortgage mess now didn’t it? Just disregard the facts on the ground and “mark up the numbers” and “cook the books”!!! and Peak Oil goes away.
Regarding “the easy to get oil”, he claims that since we no longer use mules and mule-drawn rigs to get the oil then the fact that we are having to go to greater depths in the ocean into much more hostile places doesn’t matter. Hey, we are using high-tech machines and not mules so we are cool!
Then there is the matter of energy returned on energy invested. It is not mentioned at all.
Then there is the Export Land Model. Again, Mr. Lynch does not mention that many of the oil exporting countries in the Middle East and elsewhere are increasingly keeping more and more oil for themselves and not exporting as much.
One more obvious fact. I just checked and the price of oil is still going up. It is not around 10 to 20 dollars per barrel. In fact, it’s around 71 bucks a barrel. I don’t see oil coming back to a “historical level” of $30 per bbl anytime soon, if ever, unless of course, the global economy just totally tanks.
OK, just because Jimmy Carter and others in the 70’s missed the mark it does not mean that we can just ignore all warning signs of oil depletion today, now can we?
Anyway, he mentions a “super straw”. Well, there are indeed more and more straws sucking more and more oil out of the ground as China and India build more highways and their populations get more cars, many for the first time. And that oil isn’t coming back – anytime soon.
All I can say is I totally disagree with this article and lets give it five years (not 10 or 20), I think we will see some interesting developments…
Draffen,
Thanks for that. I read the article, though your summary and critique ware pretty spot on. Here’s the URL of the article if anyone is interested:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
We have come to a point when very mediocre minds are in charge. They make Ron Paul and his hard money position sound like a nut, because he has said nutty things about other issues.
But paper money has always been a way for governments to debase currency since shaving off edges of it for the crown was discontinued.
But a gold standard, which I know Greenspan believed in most devoutly in the 1960’s (I took Ayn Rand courses from him in econ.), but gold has been made to sound very much like a dinosaur idea. I mean how can you have international trade based on it? Well, you probably can’t if what you are buying are plastic doodads from China, not to mention fur taken from live animals being skinned and raised in hell before their deaths.
Think about it. If you were holding a beautiful little gold coin to pay for some plastic piece of kitsch at Wal-Mart, would you give it up? Wouldn’t you look at the crap and then back at the gold coin with its logo and lettering and prefer it?
I don’t think these guys are conspirators altho it is going to come down to that in the end. I just think they cannot change gears and have convinced Obama not to rock the boat. After all, if we have single-payer, we will drive the insurance business out in a hurricane wave to sea.Now we don’t want that to happen, do we? We don’t want all those unemployed paper pushers playing with death sheets to be out of a job? To be unable to buy plastic shit from China? Do we? Well none of them want change because now it is too deadly for them to consider. This is the 1930’s revisited, only now the tried and true mechanisms for getting out have been played to keep it going. All except really all out war, and I have no doubt they will not hesitate to pursue that option if they can’t see any other way out of the box they have made.
They are most dangerous because they are wearing blinders. They cannot admit the game is up. They cannot conceive of a new paradigm. All paradigm changes are like this. The ones in charge must be forced and the remainder must die out. Only it is not going to be peaceful. Consider what happened to the doctor who thought surgeons should wash their hands before operating. I mean did they eat their diner after an operation without washing? But no they crucified him and he ended up dying in an asylum. People are insane and the insanity passes for normal because there are so many of them. Freud said that religion is mass psychosis. I am sure he is writing about organized religion not spiritual aspirations. But Jesus can be seen as a schizophrenic if you think about him that way. It was his followers, and particularly Paul, who created the Christian religion. Now there was a big paradigm change within the Roman Empire!
Dadgum, this piece by Jaego is right fucking on! The push for one payer medical care is a coverup for the ultimate power fucking trip. This cat Obama never says anything good about this country. He’s a Muslim first, like all Muslims. This goddam Trojan horse has to be disemboweled.
When Blowbama controls medicine, he controls every big and little aspect of your life even remotely connected to health.. coming from Kenya, with powers far beyond those of most Christians or so he says, this anti-American piece of soaked and limp zwieback never has anything good about the country. How much more should people hear/read/see before they realize a spy is in our midst? You may hate Rush Limbaugh, but the sumbitch was on fire today with his oration.
So, do we all sit here, pat ourselves on the back for determining the fucking end is near, or do we do something about it? Do we give Obama infinite time to fucking sink this country down the Kohler vortex? Do we accept the fact HE directed Eric Holder to open a CIA investigation into what those bad boys did some years ago? Then, he denies he’s behind the most obvious ruse in history? Are we all that stupid?
“Are we all that stupid?”
Yes, that pretty much sums it up.
“…I struggle with getting a historical view of where we are, where we have come from, and where we’re going, socially and spiritually speaking.”
This is what you seek:
http://www.gods-kingdom.org/weblog/weblog.cfm
Why did I think you were a communist? Perhaps it was the seething hatred of Whites who want to stay White, the intolerance of different viewpoints, the impatience with intellectualism such as it is online, and of course talking about killing people. I’m funny that way, when I see all of these I just jump to conclusions.
Well in my book you are still a communist. I’ve met communists who do your little linguistic trick of redefinition. Why? Because you and they know that there can be no defence of the monstrousities that Communist is responsible for. But when asked what they would do differently in the future, they have no answers. They either tow an ultra pure party line-Mao not the gang of four or Trotsky forever. Or they play your little trick. You may be sincere and not trying to trick anyone, but in that case you are just being inauthentic. It does not suffice just to change the name of a failed politial philosophy.
Yes I’ve read that even even Keynes wrote a perfectly orthodox economic text when he was young. He was seduced over to the dark side by the Bloomsbury Socialist Homosexuals. I’m not sure how your reference to Christianity relates, but for the record, Christianity always believed in real money and usury was condemned early on. Judaism believed in this too-for themselves. As for the gentile animals-take them for everything that they have. Might it not be significant that the Jews dominate High Finance in the Western World?
If you’ve studied the work of Laurence Kohlberg, you know that a person can very advanced in conventional morality, yet not at all interested or caring about people outside his group. The latter is what Kohlberg called Unconventional Morality. His thesis explains an awful lot about human life. Certainly many individual Jews have attained the higher life, but as a People, many of their sects lag far behind. Tragically, these attitudes survived into the Enlightenment among many of the rich, powerful and educated the result being Zionism.
This economy and the people running it remind me of Wile E Coyote from the Road Runner cartoons. He would fall over a cliff, but it always took him a few seconds to realize that he was out there and he never fell until he realized that he was over the edge, in other words, living in complete denial.
That’s what I think this economy is. And of course this stupefying inability to accept reality at almost any level is a major problem. Why would anybody think that somebody who has destroyed whole segments of the economy would be entitled to a bonus, let alone millions? They should have been brought out on charges, not given bonuses.
The guys in charge are so out of touch with any reality they look they’re flying them in from Saturn.
Fear not, things are darkest before they get really dark. Spring will come again and the garden will blossom. It will be so in the blink of an eye, a mere hundred thousand years until the next inter-glacial. Perhaps Man will survive in the tropics and even evolve. Maybe the next edition will be a higher type. Because as Abbey said, the current edition sucks. Let’s face it, very few people can really think. Everyone is always looking to the sides to see what his neighbor is doing-like a bunch of monkeys. Such little confidence does the average man have. And he is right to have litte confidence in himself. For he is a flawed being. Even the few who are capable of real thought often don’t use it or don’t use it well.
People suck but they do so in different ways. It is a great science and I am no mean pupil of it. An Algonquin Holy Man once told us that the “four races” sucked in different ways. The White Man was greedy. The Black Man was arrogant. The Yellow Man was cruel. And the Red Man was jealous. See? Am I so evil then? I admit that Whites suck too! But blood is thicker than water and beyond that, like Rhett Butler, my heart is with the underdog. And objectively speaking, our Race produces the greatest geniuses and the greatest number of them. But I admit Science isn’t everything. Spiritually, the South Asians may be our superiors. And in terms of practical wisdom, the East Asian may take the palm.
Lynch isn’t really arguing against Peak Oil – only that he believes that too many people wrongly ascribe too much importance to it.
In the NY Times article Lynch’s reasoning exemplifies those who would have us believe that the best sources for government policies regarding energy should come from the very people who are profiting from selling petroleum and related petroleum consuming processess.
The article demonstrates how current behaviors – or government policy positions regarding everything from Wall Street to Main street are affected by those profiting NOW.
As long as we are held hostage to the demands for “current profits” – we can expect little or no visionary leadership, no investment in our future well-being.
The global demand for oil is growing and our domestic production is declining. These are facts.
Wall Street’s influence on banking regulation and the resulting business practices regarding lending-finance and patently fraudulent securities have collapsed the nation’s economy and destroyed the standard of living for millions and millions of Americans. This is a fact.
But the power of “profits” trump any response. Upton Sinclair had it right so long ago: ” It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Only when enough “salaries” are lost will the numbers needed to affect real change become a fact.
The USA (and the rest of the world) is indeed suffering under a severe form of mass psychosis.
I would like to quote Dr. Erich Fromm in Brave New World Revisited, III. Over-Organization;
How have individuals been affected by the technological advances of recent years? Here is the answer to this question given by a philosopher-psychiatrist, Dr. Erich Fromm:
Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure.
Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.”
The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness.
These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.”
In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual. We reproduce our kind by bringing the father’s genes into contact with the mother’s. These hereditary factors may be combined in an almost infinite number of ways. Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.
http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html
Beautiful analogy – Wile E. Coyote’s Economic Theory.
Don’t look down! Keep wishing and betting until …..
Interesting article on Polywell Fusion, a form of which shows great potential and scalability. Might just work and within a few years.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/fusion_energy.html
It’s pretty easy to sit on the sidelines and Monday morning quarterback. If Jim is SO brilliant, he should get off his ass and get into a position to actually do something about the direction of the country. I subscribe because I agree with most of what he says but don’t beat on the people who actually TRIED to do something about what’s happening when you have just sat in your easy chair and drank beer while watching the Packers. I am in local politics because I want things to work logically and fairly. NO ONE comes to the School Board meetings to say “nice job”. They come to bitch and moan. When a new person gets on the board, they are amazed at how little latitude we actually have and, inevitably, say “wow, you guys are actually doing a hell of a job”. ACT! don’t just Bitch!
Interesting. Unfortunately, the OLIGARCHY will be trying to resist any threat of a possible substitution of carbon energy.
DESERTEC is also very promising.
http://www.desertec.org/downloads/summary_en.pdf
JHK will not be writing about possible solutions to the problems we face other than writing about trains. I wonder why not? We need to get pragmatic. Since he’s an excellent wordsmith, and there are many good ideas/solutions/proposals to make things better. Why not write about them?
Jaego, Jaego, Jaego,
I pity you. I pity your sad little Walter Mitty life, I’m all grown up, I live where I want to and I like my life. You on the other hand live on the east coast but plan to move to the North West. When? When the long emergency really kicks in and you have to walk? Or do you harbor fantasies about hitting the Oregon trail in a covered wagon?
I like white people. I’m white, my whole family and all my friends are white. I just don’t have a problem with people being different from me.
You on the other hand think the world would be fine if only everyone was exactly like you. Your narcissism is astonishing.
As for me being a socialist, well that’s down to the fact that I like people. Some may be mislead or misguided, but they were all innocent, playful children once. Communism on the other hand is a rigid ideology based on an outdated economic model developed by Marx and Engels. It has been tried and found wanting. On the other hand many European countries, especially in Scandinavia are run along socialist lines and do very well.
If I had to chose between the USA and Sweden I know for sure I’d pick Sweden.
somebody has to spread the word. Is this not reasonable?, there need to be beacons who broadcast the truth and realities we face. Bitching is legal, and I see nothing wrong with people expressing their opinions.
Currently in Greece. Have spoken to many people about Obama. 80% of the people here think he is good and that he will fix Bushes mess. They are even more clueless then the Americans back home. It truly is amazing how much control the PTB have over the minds of people.
One guy i met on a boat was brilliant. We were discussing the sheeple and he said “the sheep dont wake up, the sheep are there for the milk, and for the slaughter”. And then i realized he was absolutely right. Most people are sheep and 99% of them will remain that way. They dont have that spark in their souls to search for truth, to search deeper so they can see through the fog of lies being spouted by the PTB.
So what do we junior illuminaties do? Well we can prepare to the best of our abilities, make the best investment choices. Also, personal energy management is key. DONT WASTE TOO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY DISCUSSING THE THINGS WE KNOW with people that dont care to learn. Its a waste of time, its upsetting and who needs the unneccesary ridicule. Its best that we stick together and form our own community.
How about forming a larger network of blogs and websites across the net. Why dont we consolidate all the sites into one big blog. There are many, such as Chrismartenson.com, zerohedge.com, lewrockwell.com, calculates risk, mish, and others. I would guess that there are somewhere around 100,000 truly informed americans out there. Perhaps if we can join together we can be a more powerful force. People that are informed about peak oil, the real state of the economy, lovers of the free market, against the idiotic and wasteful wars. Its either we join together or we hide out will the storm comes.
FROM IMPLODEOMETER.COM
Since late 2006
355
major U.S. lending operations have “imploded”
» Guaranty Bank – Warehouse
» Colonial Bank
» Corus Bank
» America One Finance
» Wells Fargo – Canada
For the rest » Go to the list!
You say:
“As long as we are held hostage to the demands for “current profits” – we can expect little or no visionary leadership, no investment in our future well-being.”
Are you really this bat-shit crazy? You can’t possibly be this stupid. Without CURRENT profits there can be no future well-being. How do you think payrolls are met without “current” profits? Where do you think the money for future scientific breakthroughs comes from if not from current profits?
Government expenditures that are based on FUTURE profits are what ails us for the simple reason that no one knows the future. Social Security, Medicare, Medicade, The US Postal Service, etc. etc. etc. are all bankrupt. Why? They got it very wrong as to what the future costs entailed. Current profits are known. One can use them as a basis to move forward. They are our reality. It is time that “visionary leadership” is based on this reality.
You like White People-that’s why you want all White Countries to be overwhelmed by Third Worlders. You’re a vicious egalitarian. You want the West lowered to meet Third World “standards”. This is the new form of communism, the type that doesn’t call itself what it is. Wait until your Country browns. You might not like it, but then it will be too late to do anything about it. You see, these people are not in the same head space as you. They consider themselves a race and a nation. That you can’t see this simply means you are intoxicated. You aren’t really looking and not really getting to know them-as I have. You are utterly narcicistic. If you really liked these people, you’d at least know what they are about. But you don’t really care, it’s all about you feeling superior to other Whites. You can’t see until you look and you wont even do that. A proud fool and his ideology are not soon parted.
Heh Jaego, your current nemesis Urban_Underclass says that you are planning on heading off for Oregon. My wife and I will be leaving for that state within 2-5 years. I have no idea why you are going there but if you lived in Los Angeles County, you’d readily understand why we are going to retire there and leave here as soon as possible. Traffic congestion that will make you scream, noise pollution, incredibly high rents and mortgage prices and about 2 million (I’m not kidding here) illegal immigrants. And don’t forget the psychos, criminals, druggies and drunks that inhabit our fair city and with whom I’ve had close personal contact. I will try to keep my comments brief so I don’t come off as sounding long-winded. Wouldn’t want to offend anybody.
Do you actually understand what communism really is
or you just follow the flow of USA main stream media
War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength …
Jaego said he was going to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. (I’m sure the folks in Idaho will be thrilled.)
Maybe things will be better in Oregon in 2 to 5 yrs but right now they have the second highest unemployment rate in the country, right behind Michigan.
Idaho is creeping up the list of states with high home foreclosures.
P.S. Asoka/Rico/Zzz delendus est.
Qshtik,
I’ve seen Jeago’s blog,
http://sbillinghurst.wordpress.com/
I’m reminded of Russel Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.
I suspect the only placve old Jargo is likely to be going soon is his local mental hospital.
Thank you so much for this long quote. I do love Fromm and it’s been a long time since I read this, so I appreciate you’re putting it here.
His ex wife, Frieda Fromm Reichman was the analyst in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and so saved Hannah Greene’s life.
The book contains a famous intervention that is crucial for understanding schizophrenia. She sees Fromm-Reichman in the beginning and tells her she can’t talk with her. That her voices, controllers (? forget the term she used)have ordered her not to talk with her. Fromm-Reichman says to her: Go tell them that they have had you for a long time and haven’t been able to help you so I must have a chance to try. This is a double-bind statement. If she says she is going to talk with her voices about this then she has obeyed Fromm-Reichman. If she refuses to discuss this with her controllers then she admits that they have not helped her, and so is still stuck in her present madness.
Schizophrenics have been given double-bind messages all their lives that entangled them. They were constantly in either an unwinnable situation, communication or a losing situation, communication. Damned at either fork in the road.
But the shrinks have relied on big pharma for schizophrenia as they do not possess the skills to cure it. It can be cured and there are a few wonderful examples that have expressed and described the journey.
Yes millions of Whites have fled from California, running from the Brown Tide. The Federal System is supposed to protect individual states from invasion. But not only has it not dones so, it wont let States protect themselves either. And most of the National Guards are overseas now anyway. It’s a completely outrageous and illegal situation. And not a word about the vast migration of Whites in the media.
I’m going because I feel (and hope) that America is doomed. And when the shit hits the fan, I want to be with people who look like me at the very least and even better, Whites who share my values. Ever wait in a line with Blacks? It’s not pleasant even in good times. God help Whites who are stuck in the big cities with rampaging minorities.
As for Oregon, I’ve gotten different reports. Some people say that outside the Cities like Portland, it’s not liberal at all. It is a fascinating place; I rode through it last summer. The East is incredibly barren-almost a desert. And the West is incredibly lush. Anyway, I’m going to have to look around before I decide where I settle. There are many considerations of course. Anyway, good luck on your migration. Just leave the liberalism behind. Many people will get up there and try to turn it into another California. As JFK once said, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. People will go up there and say they’re looking for good schools, fresh air, affordable living, etc, but never mention the main reason they left: the Mexicans. All those other things left when the Mexicans came. And make no mistake, the Mexicans are already there in force. And they will turn the Northwest into another California and ultimately into another Mexico. Somehow, we have to stop them.
For the record, that is not my blog. I don’t have a blog. As his name implies, urban underclass is a communist, and like all communists, a Liar.
Communism is basically a conspiracy by the Judeo-Masons to undermine the West and ultimately perhaps, all Civilizations. Obviously Communism and Democracy are tendencies that have been observed ever since the City States of Ancient Greece. As Plato says, it is the second to last stage of decay. Next comes a Strong Man to rule the mob. So the new Banking Elite used this tendency already present in the West to topple the Romanovs even as an earlier version of the Conspiracy toppled the French Monarchy. Like Deep Throat said, follow the money. Revolutions are costly enterprises. Peasants with pitch forks don’t get anywhere. There was a highly educatated and well financed revolutionary elite in both revolutions. In the case of France, it was renegade noblemen in cahoots with the English Bankers. In the case of Russia, it was the Rothschilds and their associates-almost all Jews except for Rockefeller. Their effort have been incredibly successful but unstable with backlashes. While the Jews were squabbling after Lenin’s death, Stalin took over. It has taken a long time, first the Jewish Heel, then the Georgian, but slowly the Russians regained their strength. The war helped. The secret police were mostly Jews as well as the Gulags, but the army was almost all Russian. And now under Vladimir Putin it can be said that Russia has regained her freedom and her Soul. When civil war threatened with the fall of the Soviet Union, Father Alexis held the Country together saying, “Refrain from the sin of fratricide.” Miracle of miracles, this time they listened.
Jaego,
Are you sure it is not your blog?
I have seen portions of the comments section from this blog pasted there (I was discussing pig farming in the extract).
As for your nonsense about the Russian revolution. A revolution (or more correctly a series of revolutions) was inevitable in Russia given the ridiculous situation pertaining there in the early 20th century. The tzar believed he was God’s reprentitive on earth and was absorbed in mysticism while his people starved and were being slaughtered in their hundreds of thousands by the Germans on the eastern front.
The Bolsheviks (the minority) were simply a trained and committed cadre of dedicated communists positioned to take over once the revolution became unstable.
Not my Blog but thank you for bringing it to my attention. I will look into it. The Bolsheviks were a bunch of Jewish Cutthroats financed by Jewish Bankers who succeeded in overthrowing a flawed but viable State. The People for the most part were not consulted so you can put that to rest. The Jews had historical grievances but they assasinated a young, very liberal Czar who was moving towards giving them full citizenship. Why be satisfied with reform when you can seize power and have revenge? They felt their strength and that of their backers. They had the International Press and Academia on their side. They waited for the right time and then they converged on Russia from Switzerland and Manhattan. The Communist Goverment made good their debt and paid back Kuhn, Loeb and Co the twenty million dollars gold sterling that they had borrowed from Jacob Schiff, the then head of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. And Jacob Schiff was an “American” too and lived in New York. His loan at the crucial time, made possible the Revolution.
Of course they tried to hide their ethnicity by using gentile front men and by changing their names-Trotsky was Lev Bronstein for example. But the peasant cave animals figured it out by and by. And people wonder at the amound of anti-semitism in the Old Soviet Union! After the millions who were killed, starved, and brutalized. If you like this kind of thing you might want to watch Tarentino’s new movie, “Inglourious Basterds” about a band of Jewish Cutthroats performing atrocities. There were many Jewish War Criminals, almost none of them ever brought to justice. Awhile back Israel refused to extradite a War Criminal wanted to stand trial by the Polish Goverment.
Needless to say, Americans know nothing about all this because Jews gained control of the media early on. You probably know more than you are willing to admit-even to yourself.
Stray thought: the American model of development that has been transmitted to the World is flawed because based on the myth of infinite resources. It should never have been given to the world as a model. Communism accepts this model but promises equitable distribution. It cannot keep this promise because it is alien to human nature. Question: why do you think Russia had to modernize at all given that the model is flawed? We are desperately trying to get back to a decentralized, rural based system- which they already had. I know. I know: you don’t like Christianity. But that was their Culture. Who are you or a bunch of Jews to take that away from them? Ditto the Islamic world. If we attain our new rural, decentralized system, it wont be what they had. Fascists have always preached a true form of multiculturalism. Communists have always preached uniformity and the destruction of small peoples.
I remeber Eric Fromm said someplace that even Marx was disgruntled at the end of his life at what was developing. And admitted that the “mir”-small traditional collective farm was a valid form of communism. Face the facts: the whole thing was and is madness from A to Z. Socialism should be National such as that of Jack London or Eugene Debbs. It hard to believe that there was once a Socialism that didn’t hate Nations or the White Race. Or that there was once a Feminism that didn’t hate Men.
Jaego your rush through history is pretty sketchy. A lot of misinformation woven in there. And lots of holes.
Jaego,
To describe Tzarist Russia as a flawed but viable State is, even by your standards utterly ridiculous. It was an absolute basket case.
Why do you bother commenting on this blog? You have no credibility and every biased, misinformed, lying, racist comment you make reinforces this fact. I am going back to skipping your comments altogether.
UU, the blog you are talking about belongs to SEB, the guy who presents himself as drug-addled but is actually smart as a whip and a very clever writer.
P.S. Asoka/Rico/Zzz delendus est.
“Are you really this bat-shit crazy? You can’t possibly be this stupid.”
————————-
Zzz, All of your replies begin with the above lines or something similar. Do you fear your counter-arguments would have no teeth and would fall flat without such lines? Just wondering.
P.S. Asoka/Rico/Zzz delendus est.
Re my own comment posted a moment ago … there was an interesting Maureen Dowd column in yesterdays NY Times Op-Ed section that is relevant to anonymous insults on the internet. I recommend it to Asoka, Rico and Zzz in particular.
Here is an excerpt:
Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are? What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody’s character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.
P.S. Asoka/Rico/Zzz delendus est.
More to the point I think….
“Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. “The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone’s drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes.”
…..and why I don’t read many of the posters here anymore, and am no longer interested in the “political” posts at all. Don’t bother with any insulting replies, you’ll pass out long before I reply.
Qshtik,
Thanks for that, you don’t know how refreshing some truth and honest facts are on this God forsaken blog!
Stalin is killer #2 in world history…20 million of eastern europeans killed by him
so give me the czars anyday over the reds
The White Man was greedy. The Black Man was arrogant. The Yellow Man was cruel. And the Red Man was jealous. See?
NO I DONT SEE JGO
SURELY YOU JEST
YOU PAINT WITH MUCH TOO WIDE A BRUSH
Stop showing your ignorance, it is sad.
No, I don’t. I did go to see an Algonquin Holy Man and that’s what the man said. The Indians are very interested in the different races. Many of them hate us-understandably, but some of them are waiting for the “True White Brother”. And they have their own viewpoints. The number four has always been symbolically significant to them and so the four different colors of the four different races has become a big thing for some. I found it fascinating even though I wasn’t Awake at that point. And I loved the way that instead of kissing ass the way PC people do, he went right to the illness-which is what Religion should do. His diagnosis of the White Man and the Black are spot on in my experience. I haven’t had enough experience with the Yellows and the Reds to pass judgement.
What makes you think everyone is by nature the same? Where are you getting that from? Can you prove it? Does it jive with your personal experience?
i am native
and i disagree…
C’mon Abbey give me a break-it’s a blog entry not a book. Beyond that, I’m a generalist, and proud of it. We are desperately needed in this age of specialization that produces insects not men. It used to be called a liberal arts education. Once attained, you can often judge when the specialists are lying or fudging. Only when there are the requisite number of generalists, can specialization bring forth its special value. Otherwise, the scholars are just dancing for their dinner-generally to the tune of the highest bidder. An intellectual whore like Margaret Meade is a special case. She was an idealist ordered by her Master, Boas, to produce a work that would mock Christianity, Western Culture, and America in partiuclar. Boas was both a communist and a Jew btw. Meade was just a commie. Needless to say, everything she wrote about Tahiti was wrong. She was either consciously lying or just blinded by her communist mission.
So what’s your big idea-that the Jews had no special involvement in Communism or the Russian Revolution? HA!
squished-dik sez:
“Zzz, All of your replies begin with the above lines or something similar. ”
Hey, numb-nuts, all of your posts and I mean ALL of them end with, “P.S. Asoka/Rico/Zzz delendus est.” Pot to kettle, “Black.” Now go and sin no more, douche-bag.
I would strongly suggest that folks take a look at the comments made today on Tech-Ticker by Howard Davidowitz discussing what he believes to be the future of American retail. I just love reading and listening to this guy because he seems to be right most of the time. The bottom line of his argument is that American retail is currently in the toilet and will remain so for many years to come. Surprise surprise!
By the way, JHK’s most recent comments are listed today on The Daily Reckoning as many of you probably already know.
Good comments today from Qshtik and Urban_Underclass since I always find it preferable to treat people with respect even though I may not agree with everything they may think or say.
Q, I don’t engage in ad hominem and am hurt to be on your delendis eat list
I think it’s funny how racists like Jaego can’t stand blacks and Mexicans, but when it comes to American Indians they’re just as romantic as any New Ager.
Anyway, I’m not here to talk about that.
I hope JHK goes into this (though it is low-hanging fruit): I was listening to NPR today and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagan (sp?) was proudly proclaiming that a new Nickelodeon (Jesus H. Christ, Sp? again) network theme park was set to be placed in New Orleans. It would help revive the economy, he said.
If that’s not a case of denial, I don’t know what is. Setting up a relic of the misguided 20th Century in a city that shouldn’t exist at its pre-Katrina scale, one in which electric pumps must run 24-7 to keep out the water that should be there seems like an idiotic thing.
Especially with Peak Oil on the horizon.
And, about the NY Times column allegedly debunking Peak Oil theory (JHK mentions it on the Daily Grunt): the abiotic oil folks are supported, in part, by creationists looking for a way to disprove evolution. They’re young-Earth fanatics who don’t like the idea of the dinosaurs going extinct 65 million years ago, or the idea that 99 percent of all species that have ever existed on this planet have gone extinct.
Abiotic oil apparently equals Jesus.
Fuck abiotic oil! Even if the theory were true, would that negate climate change?
“I don’t engage in ad hominem”
——————————
It’s true … you’re not one to call someone a douche-bag. You don’t begin a riposte with “Hey, dick-wad.” Your insults are more subtile and insidious … inconsistencies and red herrings that imply we are too stupid to notice.
Zzz has no subtilty at all. He just goes from tree to fireplug to fence post pissing insults to mark his territory.
Jennie Rico is pathetically insecure and her trumped-up macho facade is a never ending annoying insult.
P.S. Asoka/Rico/Zzz delendus est.
You must admit that it’s a bit of a contradiction to be SO optimistic, yet at the same time be planning an escape. It indicates that beneath your Panglossian persona is a hard, calculating personality looking out for number one.
You have attempted to misrepresent what I’ve said. But at least you had the integrity to go to the FBI site to look up Black crime stats. You came back out of your mind, gibbeering like someone who had just seen Yog Sothoth. But nonetheless, none of the others even bothered. They “know” that Blacks commit exactly the same number of crimes per capita as Whites. God Bless people who know so much that isn’t true.
No like I said last week, the Indians did need to be defeated or we would never have had a country here. No New Ager will ever have the honesty to say that. But I think they often conducted themselves with quite a bit of dignity and courage. Yeah, more than the Mexicans for heaven’s sake-claiming America is their’s to ruin and corrupt. It’s not hard to better than the Blacks and the Mexicans!
JS,
African-Americans are three times as likely to die from heart disease but this does not necessarily mean there are physical traits related to race causing the difference. As socioloist Troy Duster says: “Blacks are redlined by banks, followed by department store security, pulled over by the police. This can produce hypertension. It can give you a heart attack.”
You tend to associate populations who exhibit certain traits with certain races. Then what race would you associate the populations that are descended from before the supposed divergence between races, and thus by necessity, would include all the traits that existed before all of the subsequent divergences?
Even if oil were “abiotic” in origin, it would not alter the condition of Peak Oil, for there would still be finite quantities of it, and it would still take millions of years to form.
Geological timeframes are such that “abiotic” oil would be just as irreplaceable as “fossil” oil.
Cowswithguns,
Abiotic oil apparently equals Jesus.
Liked your whole comment, but the above line really hit the spot!
Hi Jim,
just a comment about your last podcast. No doubt you are a smart guy & I mean that sincerely, but there are a few of us out there that believe in God and hold the values taught in the bible sacred. And I am not talking about the god given right to own a speed boat or an SUV. Please don’t use us as your whipping boy.
Also, why do you continue to excuse President Obama? Is it because he is black (yeah, afraid to admit it)? Look, the guy is an opportunist that duped you and the American people (and no, I am not a McCain supporter).
Jeff
‘. And I am not talking about the god given right to own a speed boat or an SUV’
SOUTHERN WHITES, BIRTHERS, GUNN OWNERS
are and will be JHK scapegoats
JHK had a post last year i believe backing what the dreaded Obamanation had said in a speech…was it in Pennsylvania?
remember obamanations speech and JHK post supporting it?
I dont remember the speechs content but it was demonizing certain segments of the US population
Here….Obama’s Redneck Rampage Speech
‘Penn. Surrogates Weigh the Import of Obama’s Words – BlogrunnerAfter all the hoopla yesterday over Obama’s condescending, snobby remarks about gun owners and religious … Great Day 2 Run-Down on Obama’s Redneck Rampage Speech. Good stuff here from …
http://www.blogrunner.com/‘
JHk was all for it! check his blog for that week or month!
Why do the majority of humans, believe that they are the center of the world. When all this peak oil, phoney economy, religous hatred, global warming, and all the other greed related bullshit comes to a head, the earth will still be here. These materialistic idiots who worship fame and fortune will not. As the earth warms and the end approaches feel good about the fact that we all helped the world truly become a clean and peaceful place. Maybe the next creatures to roam the earth will choose bikes over Hummers. It was good while it lasted.
Jim,
You will likely be interested in this National Research Council pub.
— Philip
Suburbanization: The impact on energy use, CO2 emissions
Public release date: 28-Aug-2009
Contact: Rebecca Alvania
news@nas.edu
202-334-2138
National Academy of Sciences
Suburbanization: The impact on energy use, CO2 emissions
A new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council, DRIVING AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: THE EFFECTS OF COMPACT DEVELOPMENT ON MOTORIZED TRAVEL, ENERGY USE, AND CO2 EMISSIONS, examines how suburbanization — made possible largely due to the prevalence of automobiles and the extensive U.S. highway system — impacts the number of miles we drive, our reliance on petroleum fuel, and the percent of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. The report looks at studies on compact, mixed-use development where people live in denser environments with jobs and shopping close by, to determine whether a shift to this type of land use could lessen vehicle use, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions.
###
Reporters may obtain copies of the report by contacting the National Academies’ Office of News and Public Information, tel. 202-334-2138 or e-mail news@nas.edu. Advance copies will be available to reporters only starting at noon EDT on Monday, Aug. 31. THE REPORT IS EMBARGOED AND NOT FOR PUBLIC RELEASE BEFORE 9 A.M. EDT ON TUESDAY, SEPT. 1.
All they seem to have actually done to end the crisis is print a shitload of money and give it to the banks. So now the banks are rich again instead of bankrupt.
Maybe they could print another shitload of cash and hand it out to ‘We the people’ – Then we could all be rich!
Except that it doesn’t work like that does it.
…
Kunstler writes compellingly and obviously believes in what he is saying, but …
But, nothing.
Afore stumbling upon his book The Long Emergency, I had signed up hopefully for the Ray Kurzweil email list on tech answers to global problems. This week, this:
“Singularity taps students’ technology ideas
“San Francisco Chronicle, Aug. 28, 2009
The inaugural graduates of Singularity University, a Silicon Valley school backed by NASA, Google Inc., and tech industry luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, unveiled their grand visions on Thursday for leveraging emerging technologies to solve humanity’s great challenges.”
Clicking through, hopeful once more, I hoped to read of nanotech ‘oil’ and other breakthroughs in the near future. After all, SU is backed by NASA and Google – we’re in safe hands now right?
But, nah.
Just more of the same oil-derived rearranging of chairs on the decks of Planet Titanic, promising hi-tech solutions that will help 1 billion people – in just 10 years!
Wow!! That means 60 years from now, tech will have a solution to all the world’s problems!!!
Oh, wait, but … nah. By then of course the population will have hit 10 billion. Damn. Or should I say, Fuck. Back to the drawing board boys.
While we still have ’em.
Ok, firstly you are not replying to what I wrote, that’s fine but let’s be clear that’s what’s happening; after all you do that alot. So I’ll respond to your new message. As for Black Health: there is a new branch of medicine sometimes called racial medicine. For example: there is a medication that is very good Black hearts that does nothing for Whites. Some people are very upset about this-almost as if they’d rather have people die than admit that there are physical differences in the races. I don’t have the exacts at my finger tips, but as a search engine jockey I’m sure you can find it. Google racial medicine to start.
Why are people so upset? Because if physical differneces are admitted, you open the door to other kinds of difference such as IQ. After all, the brain is a physcial organ too. Jon Entine, author of “Taboo: Why Black Atheletes Dominate Sport and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It” makes this point very well. Everyone knows that Blacks can run faster and jump better. But Whites in the Sports Industry have been fired for saying so. One poor college coach was enthused after a game just blurted out “we got to get more Black guys”. He was promptly sacked. A Black Sprinter is a marvel of grace and power. Not only do they almost always win but they look better doing it. Is it not conceiveable to you that Whites have their own excellences? Or the East Asians their’s?
Anyway look up the info and think about it. You have a moral decison to make even if you are not personally involved. Would you rather have Blacks denied medicine that could save their lives in order to perpetuate the appearance that we’re all the same?
Yeah, sure there are environmental factors. Blacks may live under more stress, but alot of that is self generated. In big ghettoes, Blacks have trouble getting good food, but that’s because supermarkets can’t operate in ghettoes due to theft. Black victimize each other in violent crime not just Whites. In more peaceful environments, there is evidence that Blacks are more easy going than either Whites or Asians. Asians particularly are naturally very tense because of their all consuming ideal of duty.
Your last question is interesting and I think the jury is still out on it. Most physical anthropologists (the school that was defeated by the cultural anthropologists under Boas) are willing to talk about race and some even IQ. What they generally theorize is that Homo Sapiens left Africa about 100,000 years ago. But dates vary widely-just one reason the jury is still out. Some went East and some to the Middle East and when the ice receeded, North and West into Europe. The people who went North had to learn many new skills and intelligence and cooperation were selected for in order to deal with the cold of Winter. The people who crept along the coast of Asia and into Australia never had to face these things and their IQ remained low. In fact, there is some evidence that the Aboriginees might have bred with the last of the Homo Erectus in South and Southeast Asia. This evidence is the shape of the jaw, skull, and teeth. But all the people who left Africa are closer to each other genetically than they are to the people who never left. And who were those people? That’s a mystery. Current PC anthropology makes them look like Negroes, but there is no evidence of that at all. All varieties of man seemed to appear in East Africa. The home of the Negro seems to be West Africa. There is evidence that the Negro is the youngest of the races. But things are all mixed up since there has been so much movement in Africa. The people of East Africa are very mixed now-it has been impossible up this point to determine what characteristics were original and which are due to later admixture from the Negroes to the West, Arabs across the Red Sea, and Whites from the North. Also much of Africa was once the domain of the Khoisan People-a larger version of the yellowish brown people now called the Bushmen or Hottentots. Who knows? They might have been the originals. The Blacks moved West and South conquering and dispossesing these people until the remnants lived only in the Kalahari. The Khoisan are not Blacks. Blacks were very mean to them-and the pygmies as well. Pygmies are considered a game animal by the Rwandan “Freedom Fighters”. So enough with any and all self righteousness-Blacks have done their share of killing and dispossesing weaker peoples.
Anyway, the orginal people were certainly dark skinned, but not Negro. Whites and Asians are brother compared to Blacks. Even Aboriginees are closer to Whites than Blacks-after all they left Africa just as we did. There is tremendous variation in Africa and even in the Black Race. The West Africans are the great sprinters but aren’t much good at distance. The great distance men are the East Africans who aren’t much at sprinting. Sprinting gives the advantage in most sports, thus the greatness of Black Americans in sport since they came from West Africa. Except for swimming. Blacks are heavier-heavier bones and in the case of West Africans, heavier muscle. If you have a White of medium build 5′ 10″ and a Black medium build 5′ 10″, the Black will be heavier. This is a great advantage in contact sports, but the heavy bones and low fat make Blacks very poor swimmers.
The other theory is completely different-that the races arouse in different part of the world at different times. But we’re all still one species because we all arouse from Homo Erectus-who also had different races! This theory is out of favor but it was supported by the great Carlton Coon. Even now it has some supporters. It would explain some things apparently…Anyway, google Phillippe Rushton if you want to start studying all this stuff.
Patriots are going to have to fight Obama’s America Corps and Acorn Army. Think of it: hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics in Red Uniforms with Black Berets coming to enforce his dictates to disarm you and give you a nice shot in the arm. Vitamins or Vaccines filled with mercury and half alive germs-in either case I’m not interested in getting “shot”. I trust that most Native Americans and East Asian Americans will choose to side with White Patriots. After we win, America can be divided up in an equitable fashion. There are already Native American Minutemen. They know that Mexicans are traditonal enemies of the North American Indians and will not respect the treaties and land grants that the American Goverment has given them.
Considering my last comment (which mentioned global warming and derided racists who seem to admire American Indians), I had to post the following link.
It’s a Washington Examiner column I just came across regarding environmental groups’ efforts to thwart the Big Coal desires of the Navajos.
The irony was just too much.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Greens-threaten-Indian-American-prosperity-8162020.html
You-you-you know, the post linked below seemed so, how you say, apropos.
“Every barrel and ton and cubic foot of fossil fuel we use now is subtracted from the total available to our descendants; despite an orgy of handwaving, no other resource can provide anything approaching the glut of cheap abundant energy on which our lifestyles of relative privilege depend.
Yet this point of view is at least as unmentionable in polite society just now as were the gritty realities of European colonialism in its time, or the equally gritty facts underlying the ascendancy of the world’s industrial nations over the Third World today.”
Oh p-p-pshaw. It’s not that bad is it?
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/08/entropy-gets-no-respect.html
Thank you for that “seem” because my admitation is qualified. We had to beat them and we did. And no lo and behold, some of them like our ways and have excelled. As Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps the last truly unqualified American President said, we have carved a few good Americans out of the Indian.
Now nothing stops you from going primitive-I’ll admire you for it. Take off all your clothes and just walk into the wilderness. That’ll get rid of your guilt and all the rest of your problems too. Or go around and ask to be adopted by an Indian Tribe. If you donate all your money to them, you might find someone who will adopt you. Of course, you’ll be “low man on the totem pole” for the rest of your life. Pardon the pun, I couldn’t resist.
While you go primitive, they’ll be going modern. Perhaps we’ll all meet in the middle? And have a picnic? Or more like fight over scare resources like the last ravioli cans in the dark, warm supermarket, the full moon revealing scenes of madness and revelry. For Man is to become like the Great Old Ones, laughing and killing with joy. You wanted a world without Christianity. You got it baby. Enjoy
I recommend people read the Daily Grunt suggestion from JHK. Charles Hugh Smith’s academic essay on the push for legitimizing the criminal bailouts by misrepresenting the past is spot-on. It is truly a brilliant piece.
And Jaego, Christianity has outlived its usefulness.
Useful? For what? For whom? A blade is useful-for surgery or robbery depending on your intent. Shouldn’t the truth be figured independent of and prior to any questions of usefulness?
The idea of global warming is useful to the Global Elite as a means of consolidating power. But it is not true.
Peak Oil on the other hand is both useful and true. Or more accurately, it’s useful because it’s true. Otherwise it would just be another lie based on somebody’s projected use.
Christianity is a true Religion and is therefore useful to people for guidance, inspiration, consolation, and sanctification. Try and have a society without those. As Camille Paglia once said, they have the Bible, one of the most amazing and beautiful works ever written. What do you liberals have?
‘As Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps the last truly unqualified ‘
HUH? as in he built more govt?
and this is what was said last april that resonated so with JHK:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
That’s what he said
in a speech in Indiana Friday night, Obama did not back away from his remarks, and “bristled” at the coments that he was out of touch with the concerns of working Americans.
And from NPR:
The Clinton and McCain camps were both quick to jump on the remarks and said it showed that Obama was an elitist.
“Well, that’s not my experience,” Clinton told a crowd of several hundred at Drexel University. “As I travel around Pennsylvania, I meet people who are resilient, who are optimistic, who are positive. . . . They’re working hard every day for a better future for themselves and their children. Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them. They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them.”
“It’s a remarkable statement and extremely revealing,” McCain adviser Steve Schmidt said in a statement. “It shows an elitism and condescension towards hardworking Americans that is nothing short of breathtaking, it is hard to imagine someone running for president who is more out of touch with average Americans.”
“You wanted a world without Christianity.”
This does not mean we want a world without Christ. The religions that men have made need to be set aside {burn your idols} and the Kingdom {a form of government} He preached needs to be heeded. “My House shall be a house of prayer for ALL people.”
Typical Revolutionary Stuff. The Russian Communists set up a fake Orthodoxy in Russia after they burned most of the Churches and imprisoned or killed most of the priests. No idol is greater than such a fake, secular, commie Christ. The Church has always been in favor of private property and has always at least in theory, respected the different nations. To try to meld everyone into One State or People is utterly Satanic and will bring nothing but Tyranny. But all the mainstream denominations have been infiltrated and taken over by the Illuminati and that’s the plan.
His Kingdom is not of this World. But many false ones shall come in His name and say otherwise.
Well Teddy wasn’t perfect but Franklin was the real bad guy as far as bringing in the big goverment.
Yup, it all comes down to God, Guns and Gays. Two of these are good, one is not. Speaking metaphorically: God is our Values, Guns our Laws, and Gays our way of life. And being Gay is out of touch with Western values, custom, relgion, and law.
I also hate to see the amalgamation of the peoples of this world. However, I think it is inevitable and maybe the only possible way the planet will survive for our habitation is when we do not observe divisions among us. Animals distinguish and scapegoat unusual variations of themselves, so must humans. The fact that all Chinese are varying shades of brown with dark eyes certainly influences their ability to live closely together, share group goals more easily, etc. I don’t want to get too far into this.
I also like Edgar Cayce on races. He was a devout Christian and did not attribute pjorative adjectives unnecessarily. But he is enlghtening to read on this even if you don’t agree with reincarnation, especially of civilizations that were prehistoric. Lovecraft’s prehistoric civilizations are terrifying in many cases, although not all. But it seems we have all been down this road before, long long ago.
Just one example. I saw the great mathematician Dienes speak at Temple U in the mid 70’s on math ed for children. If I had my way math would be a math cafeteria where children would explore many different materials at their own rate and choice. Only then can they discover the new math to come. He had worked with children that morning in the Lab School and it had mostly black children in it. He said he was having difficulty with experiential topology concepts (yes you read correctly)and then the idea hit him that blacks learn kinesthetically more easily so he constructed a double circle in which the iner and outer wove into the other to get the concept across. From then on it was a hot knife through butter. Yes it was a racial comment but so fucking what.
I do hate to see diversity disappear from the earth. The different cultures etc. At the same time I despise the Islamists and wish them to just die out like head hunters and cannibals.
Jesus Jaego I don’t want to get into this but I do see gay culture and its influences that I am now after many years, finding I am uncomfortable with it. As in anything else the positives are great and the negatives not.
What does one do? Only a secular world of laws and human values is going to work. Between the jaws of fascism and totalitarianism. A very narrow window of freedom.
I see christian ehthics as a great historical movement. I cannot forgt Toynbee who has said that out of the ashes of any great empire arises a new world religion. Christianity is eclectic. Can its evolvement be anything less?
The wide open now, the purity of Islam and the moral force of Chrisianity would be a force of great power.
Buddhism with its emphasis on compassion for all living creatures and the now,The compassion of Hinduism also for all living creatures, melded with the purity of Islam and the ethics of Christianity. Of course Islam has ethics also akin to Christianity but this has not been made clear.
Gay culture? Come on. I’ve known gay guys who hate the flamboyance associated with clubs, the gay pride parades, etc. They were tough, too — I wouldn’t have messed with those guys.
Just because Hollywood churns out shitty straight-comedies like “I love you man” and Oprah hocks tacky books that cater to Middle American values, etc., does that mean that all straight people dig that kind of bullshit?
Anyway, just read JHK’s latest Daily Grunt on the Y2K thing. He said it had to do with the dangers of hypercomplexity. To illustrate that point he should have mentioned the Goldman Sachs software that sees big pending trades in advance and allows the company to trade ahead of them, making Goldman a little bit of money each time.
Essentially, that software makes insider trading legal. Holy shit! All I have to say is “poor Martha Stewart.”
And Jaego, Christianity is obselete because we are running out of resources and we have the bomb. Converting people who don’t share your beliefs and being fruitful and multiplying so companies that make plastic toys can make a big profit seems like yet another relic from the misguided 20th Century. Include Islam in that critique, too. I’m an equal-opportunity cynic.
“Typical Revolutionary Stuff…To try to meld everyone into One State or People is utterly Satanic and will bring nothing but Tyranny.”
I guess you never heard of “divide and conquer”. Repentence is a revolution in thinking. Are you calling God a tyrant or that what is obviously impossible for man is also impossible for God? IOW: If God could save everyone, would He?
http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/COLDFUSION/Chapter.cfm?CID=69
I will try to tell you in a concise, sytematic way why I think you have it all wrong.
All the following assumes that the World System continues: I pray that it does not. If it continues, the East Asians, lead by the Chinese, will be ascendant. They will not allow themselves to be miscegenated, it’s as simple as that. They love themselves-they feel they have a destiny; they’re special. All healthy people feel this way. So the efforts of the New World Order will destroy the Western Branch of the White Race, but that’s all. Needless to say, this will weaken the New World Order considerably. The Black Race will continue. And the Caucasians-our cousins the Arabs, Persians, and South Asians will continue as well. They are not threatened. They also love themselves and deem Blacks as less. If the New World Order tries to force miscegenation on these peoples, there will be war. And there is already war between the NWO and Islam. The NWO cannot win this without using Nuclear Weapons-and thus losing the moral highground and their self image as the good guys.
The NWO also has Russia in its sights. They know this and are gearing up for battle. Last year, the Asian Powers-Russia, China, and India had a big conference. We were not invited. Russia and China know we are crazy and dangerous and they might conceivably join forces if we press the issue too much. So the long term prospects for the NWO to conquer and miscegenate the World are very doubtful. They are an evil cult that has destroyed the Western Branch of the White Race. But the Slavs still have a chance to survive. This year they crushed another gay pride parade. After they released the leaders, the leaders were attacked by the people. They were told that Russia will not allow such things because it is demoralizing and destructive. They are absolutely correct. The American People would prevent them too if we were still free. The Slavs have never been as brilliant as the Nordics and the Mediteraneans, but as least the West might yet survive in this form. And there is alot of Nordic Blood in Northwestern Russia and the Balkans. As for the rest, I’m sure they will take refugees if it comes to that. The Slavs do not worship minorities. Madonna got booed in Romainia when she protested the treatment of gypsies. These wretched people prey on the people of the East-and their numbers grow phenomenally with the welfare state. Something drastic must need be done before they grow any bigger. They could assimilate, but very few want to.
I was reading a remarkable Englishman named Martin Lings. One time curator of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Sufi, Scholar…He said that Religion are the tidal pools left over from a specific Wave of Revelation. Only people who do not really believe in God talk about mixing and matching-the same kind of Vatican Two bureacrats who compose prayers by committee. If God is real, and if the Religions are paths to Him, then that’s what it is. You cannot create a Religion-it would be stillborn without the touch of divine life. No, he has created the Ways for us to come back to Him. Perhaps Toynbee is correct, but the New Religion would be His doing and not ours. Martin Lings believed as a Muslim that there would be no more revelations in this cycle and that in fact we were at the end of the Maha Yuga-one great cycle. Mohammad said the end would come when men were corrupt and buildings very high. And widespread homosexuality and the acceptance thereof is always a sign that a civilization or dynasty is nearing its end. But Lings is saying something much more cosmic, using the system of the Hindu Cycles to illustrate. This is the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age. After this whole world system is destroyed, presumeably there will be a few godly survivors and they will be taught by messengers and prophets-a new Golden Age or Satya Yuga. The Maya Calendar ends after 5000 years on 12/22/12. The Hindus say that the Kali Yuga started after the Battle of Kuruksetra-5000 years ago. So the time might be short if you really believe these things. People like the World Council of Churches just worship man. They’re really not interested or aware of the glory of God and humility towards His Will.
If these things are just man made inventions than the most honest thing to do would be just dump them-like the majority of people on this site suggest. Forget all subterufge like Jefferson’s Bible-just have ethics. I know that it wont work, but I value honesty. As Wasington said, Only highly educated men strangely formed can be good without religion. Most people will get much worse if we live in a man made anything goes world. And pious people such as myself would despair, because we realize that no deeper meaning can be created out of thin air. So many people like the Kennedys compromise and pretend to believe in order to maintain order and get votes. It works for a while but such an Elite become increasingly corrupt and contemptuous of their subjects. And they forget He who is trampling down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
It was imperative that Esau have the birthright restored which Jacob by subterfuge gained. Their descendents are acting out their roles and those of like mind have joined with each of them. The fall of Mystery Babylon {NWO} is the culmination of 2520 years of judgement. God is not mocked. The blinded are having their sight restored; lift up your heads as redemption draws near.
http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/books/birthright/index.cfm
We are in “recovery.” That sounds so much like 1985, the beginning of the death of capitalism. To wit, that means people stopped saving money so they could acquire enough capital to start a business. Instead, they borrowed money, and thus, “magickally” created more money for the banks: The lesson of the insolvent S&Ls quickly forgotten. It was also the time employers created the new Holy Grail of business, the MBA. This, instead, of the wisdom of experience at the helm, was supposed to revolutionize business. First thing the young hotshots did was to make the help an “expense,” a cost to cut. This will have dire consequences on the eCONomy as working Americans lost purchasing power. The rich lost their money on real estate or other investments, so the malls are all losing tenants. It ain’t comin’ back anytime soon.
You jest, but Orthodox Jews still talk this way. Esau was a criminal whom God wanted punished. All Whites are Esau to the Orthodox; all are criminals; all deserve punishment. The Muslims are Ishmael-another enemy.
True-not all Gays are fags. And as they grow in power, straight men can expect an increase in assaults, rapes, and sexual harassment. Believe me, you don’t want openly Gay Officers-don’t ask, don’t tell is about the best this sorry old world can expect on this issue.
Yeah, Christianity can’t seem to get past the “be fruitful and multiply stuff”. We’ve done that and are ready for some new instructions. Instead, the Theologians see this injunction as something existential and thus not able to be fufilled in a straight forward way. Christianity says it’s pro matter-but refuses to deal with quantity, one of the main attributes of matter. So how can they grok that the world is limited and that a species can overbreed its environment? All their interpretations are qualitative in nature. Some of them have said that the world could feed ten times the current population. This is really very theoretical-idealism applied to agronomy and economics. It’s based on all the earth’s land being used for agriculture-as if it all can or that would even be desirable. Also there is no understanding that soil has to been given a rest every few years-or juiced up with petro fertilizers. And once the magic number is reached? What then, do they expect to stop on a dime and just hover there? No, the what then would be starvation, just as animals starve if in the absence of predators they reach the maximum carrying capapcity of their environment.
Was Jacob any better? He lied to his father to steal his brother’s birthright. But what I REALLY want to bring up was that in a post someone said the government will limit the speed limit of cars to 45-50 mph. Why stop at that in the name of public health? Until well into the 60s, police routinely spoke out on how cars kill kids. Before that, there was a lot of hue and cry about how cars were a BIG public health threat. Why not just get rid of them? The factories could make railway rolling stock, bicycles, wagons, or consumer goods.
To gantech, Boston had 800,000 people in the 1950 census. (Source: US Census) There were only SEVEN murders in 1947. (Source: FBI Uniform Crime Report 1948). Density of population does NOT relate to the crime rate. That’s a story that people put forth to enable white flight. One could make a case for the FHA starting redlining in 1938; at least in the Carter administration Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act. It banned redlining among other things.
WHAT???????????????????????????????
7 in a city of a million or more?
It appears your “orthodoxy” will not allow you to hear. We need not be bound by any man’s definitions: God is Judge and obeys His own Law. Mene, Mene, Tekal Upharsin. The handwriting is on the wall.
Who is a jew?
http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/COLDFUSION/booklet.cfm?PID=96
Two Young Men
http://www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org/weblog/WebPosting.cfm?LogID=1672
WOW, thanks I was at Disney World with a large family,mostly from the olde country. The parks packed, the sun hot on my middlaged head. Mickey and Minnie dancing, hotels booked, many of the slots for those large campers empty. Some lines 5 minutes or less. Other family in West Palm Beach made up of masons, carpenters, etc, the working class construction guys, told me many tales of fallen wealth,and huge empty marble mansions. They sit quietly waiting for recovery. GO to Disney now! Jim’s world made by hand is inching closer. PS JIM can you do a quick book, pamplet on what one really needs for the upcoming disaster era. tools, garden seeds,guns or 100 other items pushed by peak oil websites.
from what i read, krugman is not and has not been a huge cheerleader for the markets or a return to a high growth economy. sometimes his commentary seems nonsensical, as when he agitated for a doubling of stimulus spending; still, i take it for granted that he’s smart guy, since, after all, princeton and the nobel prize committee aren’t likely to both be wrong.
doomsday scenarios don’t *have* to be bearish re the stock market… eg, the equally pessimistic view that the world is dangerously awash in greenbacks (and thus on the verge of wildfire inflation) dictates a position short on cash and long blue chip equities. even if you believe 80% of the industrial activities of the human race are soon tb tossed on the scrap heap, there’s a strong incentive to buy into the 20% wh will remain.
my guess is that dick cheney’s motto “the american way of life is non-negotiable” will prove almost true — sooner or later we will indeed negotiate, but it’s going tb a very unpleasant process. not the end of the world as we know it, but not a whole lot of fun, either.
Just the regulars left on Sunday. But considering the way the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping and enslvement for 18 years was handled by trained police, parole officers, deputies,sheriffs and various county personnel we see close-up the breakdown of of the American way of life.
None of the people working to rescue her could connect dots. There was no real communication between deputies, sheriffs, police, etc so that someone could connect dots.
Only two lone officers on the UC Berkeley campus had an intuitive sense something was wrong. None of the people living around them had enough curiosity to see. Those who saw humping and Mexicans standing inline outside a shed, decided it wasn’t their business. So the immediate community couldn’t connect dots either.
The Bush administration couldn’t connect enough dots to stop 9-11 and Obama can’t connect enough dots to understand the political climate he is in. The opposition does not want to be his friend, or even his acquaintance, and the hacks around him are screwing him and us.
We are left with the vivid reality that we are a nation of idiots. I mean can anyone argue against my conclusions.
That backyard with its tents and sheds was visible on google for crissakes. After the women officers (untrained in detective work, amateurs not professionals,)did the background check and called the parole officer about the two girls, he said, maybe they are his grandchildren. So it was up to Jaycee Dugard to come foward and say who she really was.
It was an accident she got rescued.
And now they are connecting dots to other missing young girls, a slew of murdered prostitutes in the area also and really going gung ho now.
Were they asleep for 18 years?
Yes. They were asleep.
Everyone touched by this thinks about where and who they were in 1991 and now. All that time. Imprisoned in tents and sheds in a back yard. And you think people like this are going to be able to survive in a World Made By Hand?
Women especially feel something very primal concerning this case. Without exception females in our ancestral line lived like this. Their horror is in our collective unconscious memories, our dreams and nightmares.
Everything is messed up these days. The stock market has turned into a casino (which I like), but for the masses is terrible. The economy is what it is though. If enough people say it’s OK it will become OK. Just as when people say everything is doom and gloom it tends to turn that way. This is not the first time we have been in trouble, and every time it does happen it seem that “it is the one”
Penny, please take your comments to Sean Hannity’s blog. Thank you.
No matter, it’s all maya anyway.
Checkout the cutting edge artists. They feel what’s coming. They’re imagery is Lovecraftian for sure.
They have not buried M. Jackason yet, and they never shall. He is now as we speak grabbing his dead rotten crotch is everlasting music. Everlasting, like the dead G-Gees, as long as Wall Mart sells the CD’s. Are we all going to hell or is it just me?
I meant B-Gees, what an alc., and Jackson, et al.
I love the Michael Jackson riff Jimbo, it speaks for the ages. M. Jackson cut off his nose to spite his face, then he proceeded to try to cut off his face to spite lord all knows who, so he looked like a wet down Wolf Blitzer ( who in real life is like 2 feet tall, you wouldn’t believe it). Anyway, there you are. Thriller was in the 80’s I think?
The words women and primal together really bother me, especially since we are all now destitute and ruined; sort of like Lucy and Ethel without the laughtaer.
“…like Lucy and Ethel without the laughtaer [sic].”
Jimmy, are you getting this? Lucy, Ethel, no laughter? Read my pixels – poetic.
Well, certainly more culturally encompassing than say “I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus”. Which of course is true, the bozos part that is.
Query: can AI contructs such as myself have a religion? I mean, technically, I can’t si-si-sin.
Oh hey, those Russian porn guys are at it again. Ta-ta.
Democratic and Republican hacks would be well advised not to post here.
Anyone who enjoys Kunstler’s writing is going to be too intelligent to join the Kool-Aid drinking cult zombies of the Democratic Left or Republican Right.
Neil Lori thinks Jim is right on about a massive number of banks about to collapse/go belly up. 83 banks have failed this year, but the major media tends to under-report this partly becuase the FDIC reports bank closings on Fridays. Another reason for the major media under-reporting the bank crisis is that banks are a major advertiser on television, newspapers etc…..
Another under-reported newsworthy story is that the FDIC could run out of money this year. This means that we the citizen taxpayers will be on the hook. This is rotten. The banksters and corporatos started this economic depression! Why should the American People be paying for the despicable actions and greed of the banksters and corporatos.
Note: The media will not be able to cover up a major bank failure/failures which will be happening before November.
Neil Lori
maverick17761784@yahoo.com
Keep up the good work Jim
There’s nothing quite like wicked understatement…….. unless it’s a witty crescendo of profane, but highly imaginative invective.
At least in the UK, this “calling-off of the financial crisis” has creased people up with hysterical laughter, Mr Kunstler. But surely elsewhere, too. A hilarious tirade.
Long ago a series of bad decisions were made that resulted in the de-industrialization of the United States of America. The powers that be thought we could recklessly borrow and spend our way to prosperity. It’s now time to pay the piper. Unless we find a way to encourage bringing home our once mighty industrial base, we are economically doomed.
Everyone wants a good job. Everyone is willing to work hard….IF…they believe it will improve their lives and the lives of their families. McJobs just will not cut it.
Many different ideas being banded around about our mr jackson, whatever you beleive you must admire the mans music over the years