JHK’s Three-Act Play
“The powerful are panicking, and so they should. Their secrets are leaking.” —Miranda Devine
“It’s all just snake oil. We want to save the planet, and the life upon it, but we’re not willing to pay the price and bear the consequences. So we make up a narrative that feels good and run with it.” — Raul Ilargi Meijer
“2023 could be a pivotal year for the USA if the pervasive lying can be exposed, digested, and believed. All that exposure has to happen amidst continuing boondoggles toward the Great Reset agenda.” – Truman Verdun
“More borrowing only ever makes sense if you are expecting a larger economy in the future. All economic expansion is based on energy. Countries with energy can expand, those without cannot.” — Chris Martenson
“To be an enemy to America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” — Henry Kissinger
Clusterfuck Nation
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It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat. But it is an inescapable duty here to lay out the probabilities ahead. I’ve been doing this forecast thing for some years now, and, of course, I am often wrong, so take some solace in that and relax. Maybe the new year will be all unicorns, rainbows, talking gerbils, and candied violets.
2022 sure was a cold shower. The long emergency I talk so much about finally got up to cruising speed, with the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden” revving our country into economic, political, and cultural collapse — a hat-trick of calamity — and he did it more swiftly and directly than any emperor managed in late-day Rome, with policies and actions 180-degrees contra to America’s public interest — cheered on by a thinking class that had obviously lost its consensual mind.
Was the governing strategy simply to do the opposite of what the loathed and detested Mr. Trump would do? Could it be that simple or that automatic? The thinking class’s eyes have a zombified glaze these days. It’s obvious, you might agree, that “Joe Biden” is not in charge of anything, really. He’s an animatronic figure programmed to read a teleprompter and not much else. Half the time, he can’t even find his way off-stage after doing that one trick. The claque pulling his strings just may be the crew you see around him (you know, WYSIWYG): Susan Rice, Ron Klain, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and company. Ms. Rice has kept herself completely hidden backstage at the White House for two years. Nobody ever hears about her or sees her. Weird, a little bit, for the Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Or else, are there puppeteers deeper in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the “systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of? The US leadership dynamic is truly mystifying and has been for two whole years. Will mysteries be revealed in 2023? Personally, I think so. Things are lining up in that direction, though who knows whether the damage can even be reversed at this point. And now onto the shape of things to come….
Economy
All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin. They’ve tanked whatever’s left of the US economy with an array of surefire idiotic maneuvers. By spending trillions of dollars that don’t exist to buy votes, they’ve inflated away our money’s purchasing power — an Econ 101 level mistake. The “Green New Deal” is a swindle, an out-front, in-your-face nefarious operation to subvert Western Civ by the WEF, and its stooges — laid out explicitly in its house publications.
There is no way we can run our society as currently outfitted on any combination of alt.energies. All the Greenies can really accomplish with this crusade is to destroy the complex systems we rely on faster than would happen in the normal course of things, foreclosing any chance of an orderly retreat to a plausibly downscaled arrangement for daily life. We are exiting the current system anyway, like it or not — the longstanding thesis of The Long Emergency.
This gets to the heart of the conundrum we face. Ill-intentioned as the WEF and its allies may be, the world is heading toward a Great Re-set. The catch is, it won’t be the WEF’s version of it, their schematic techno-nirvana with a tiny comfortable elite lording over the bug-eating hoi-polloi. They somehow miss the glaring point that the energy required to run their precious transhuman tech won’t be there. By the way, the WEF’s core idea of central control by a coordinated world government is at odds with the core reality of the times ahead, which is that life is about to get much more local and downscaled — the exact opposite of centralized. Everything organized at the giant scale is veering into failure: empires, global corporations, hypertrophic cities, giant universities, giant farms, you name it. Their business models are broken. The activities these things represent have to get smaller, finer, and more regional. Depending on what we’re able to salvage and re-purpose from the fabricated leftovers of Modernity, we’ll be lucky to land back in life lived at the level of the early 1800s. Or else, if we really mess up, we’ll plunge haplessly into a dark age in a resource-stripped world.
The “Green New Deal,” based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice, includes the deliberate undermining of what’s left of America’s oil industry by cancelling pipelines, drilling licenses on public lands, draining the strategic petroleum reserve, and other efforts to sabotage what’s left. America still has a lot of oil in the ground, yet much of it is hard to get at and uneconomical to produce at the scale required. It’s a money-loser, and losing money consistently doesn’t pencil out for any real business.
This hard reality is especially true of shale oil, which had a good run production-wise 2009 to 2022, though the producers could barely make a dime at it. The shale oil “miracle” was largely a byproduct of near-zero interest rates. Investors flocked to it after 2009 because they couldn’t get any yield from bonds. Shale oil was played-up as a sure thing. It took investors a decade, and over a hundred oil company bankruptcies, to catch on — and now shale oil can’t attract enough new investment to keep up the giant operations at scale. The main shale oil regions, the Permian Basin in Texas and the Bakken fields of North Dakota, have entered permanent decline as they run out of “sweet spots” to drill and frack. Considering the new era of capital scarcity ahead, money for shale oil companies will be even harder to get and we’ll get less shale oil every year, while conventional oil continues its own remorseless decline. The catch here is that oil prices are just as likely to go down as up because the foundering economy creates substantial demand destruction — meaning that customers drop out of the market.
Natural gas involves similar dynamics. There seems to be a lot of it for now in the Marcellus formation spread over Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and into New York (where fracking has been prohibited for years). Natgas is very useful for electric generation, home heating, and some manufacturing, but not so much for transportation. Shale gas production is also based on “sweet spots” for drilling and there are fewer of them every year. The depletion curve for natgas is even more extreme than it is for oil: the flow stops all at once. The early shale gas plays in the southern US — Haynesville, Fayetteville, Barnett — have been in decline for years. As with shale oil, producing shale gas is expensive, with all the trucks ceaselessly delivering sand, water, and fracking chemicals to the drilling pads, and then transporting waste liquids off-site. Prediction: in 2023, we’ll hear the first rumblings about “nationalizing the oil industry,” which will be a giant step toward killing it altogether, given the all-around incompetence of government.
The strategy of changing out oil-based cars and trucks for electric vehicles (EVs) is a loser on several counts beyond the disruption and instability facing US oil production. One, it’s premised on the fantasy that we can continue living in a suburban sprawl arrangement by other means. Two, the electric grid is too inadequate and fragile to support the charging of so many millions of EVs in addition to everything else we ask it to do. Three, the middle class is being decimated, so there are fewer credit-worthy customers for cars priced out of their shrinking budgets anyway. Four, far less capital will be available for consumer loans. The car industry itself may not survive the re-possession orgy coming in 2023 for defaulted auto loans. That shortfall will infect banking, too. The economy is already hurting. The “Green New Deal” will cut its wobbly legs off.
Similarly, the new mandates against the use of nitrogenous fertilizers (made from natgas). European countries are already on-board with this WEF folly. The Netherlands, Europe’s leading food producer, is going so far as to forcibly shut down thousands of farms and limit fertilizer use on the remaining ones. Germany is likewise limiting fertilizers. Canada fell in line next. Prediction: in early 2023, “Joe Biden” will set in motion anti-fertilizer policies in the US. There will be plenty of squawking in the big farming states, rising to angry protests. The tractor convoys may invade Washington. The situation sets up a grim prospect for the US food supply: scarcity, high prices, and hunger ahead.
The Ukraine bread-basket is out of the picture in 2023, unless military action ends well before planting season. Thanks to “Joe B’s” stupid sanctions policy, a more vulnerable Europe can’t depend on Russia, another world-leading grain producer. By summer, the projected harvests all over Western Civ will be inadequate to feed the existing populations. Routine grain exports to the poor nations of the “global south” will stop and a lot of people will starve in those countries. By then, it will be too late to fix anything. The price of food will soar throughout Western Civ, aggravating other economic crises that will amount to metastasizing poverty. Populations will get very restless. Governments will fall (candidates: France, Germany, UK, Australia, the USA). In some places they will not recover in their prior form.
As a general proposition, Globalism is done. That got underway in earnest with the Covid shut-downs. Now, geopolitical friction gets worse and trade relations deteriorate further. There will still be trade between nations, but much reduced. Global supply chains are already wrecked, especially for specialized mechanical replacement parts and electronic components. It will be harder to fix cars, trucks, turbines, really any sort of machine, including computers and things run by them. A lot of commercial activity will just stop.
Europe has already blundered into buying its one-way ticket to Palookaville. Germany and the rest paid for that ticket by going along with feckless US policy to “weaken” Russia with sanctions (mission not accomplished). The coup de grace was the US wrecking the Nord Stream pipelines. So, Euroland has inadvertently decided to ditch its industrial base, which means they go medieval or worse. They have committed economic suicide. They’d better hope reincarnation is for-real. Anyway, they’re not coming back from this fiasco the way they went into it, that is, the way things were. When the shock of winter is over in early 2023, strife will be the new leitmotif in the Old World. People grow desperate in the six-weeks-want of springtime. Nations crack up.
America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity. In real life, prosperity requires producing things of value, not just trading increasingly abstract financial instruments purporting to represent money. I’ve discussed this enough in books, prior blogs, and previous forecasts. Suffice it to say we’ve run out the string on this stunt. All we’re left with now is the debt markers, documents that purport to represent wealth. The collateral is all the stuff we produced previously that is still standing: buildings, developed properties, public works. A lot of this stuff is deteriorating quickly, losing its value — for instance the tens of millions of suburban houses built with shitty, short-lived materials like strand-board and vinyl… all the cars….
Financialization led to the current inflation in our debt-based money system. More borrowing becomes more money going into existence, chasing a declining amount of goods as production falls off and supply lines choke. Services also suffer. People can’t afford to eat out, get acupuncture, visit hair-dressers. When the inflation is bad enough, say more than ten percent annually, it will cause enough economic damage to provoke a big contraction in activity, bringing on a deluge of loan defaults on mortgages, car payments, and corporate obligations. Loan defaults cause money to disappear from the system. This flips inflation into deflation. The bond-market is blowing up as this occurs, because bonds are debts and they’re not being serviced or paid-off. The imploding bond market infects the stock markets and they crash, too.
Before long, nobody has money, except people who invested in gold and silver. Prediction: the change-over from inflation to deflation comes in summer of 2023 and gathers momentum into the fall. The implosion leads to economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s because our social and family arrangements have disintegrated along with our towns and cities. Civil disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns, but this time without a disease to blame it on. It’s no longer safe to be a politician.
The Covid-19 Story Backfires Badly and Hell Breaks Loose
Against the backdrop of a developing economic depression, the public can no longer avoid seeing the calamity that the mRNA vaccines have instigated. Early death is in the news daily now and from exactly the adverse effects that have been derided as “conspiracy theory” by public health experts since 2021: myocarditis, blood clots, organ damage, neurological illness, unusually aggressive cancers, damaged immune systems. Meanwhile, America’s public health aristocracy — Dr. Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, Deborah Birx, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and many, many others will be compelled to testify under oath before newly re-constituted House committees and finally answer for all their dishonesty in the Covid-19 response saga. They lied about everything, especially the “vaccines.” It will go worse for them as public sentiment turns from submission to official bullshit to rage over a deadly fraud.
By then, the past efforts of this gang to mislead the public on Twitter and other social media will be well-documented. The exposed slime-trail of money and corruption between Pharma and federal bureaucrats will finally make an impression on the long-bamboozled nation. The mainstream media will be dragged into this morass and the public will begin to understand how the newspaper editors and TV news producers, too, were bought off by Pharma and controlled by the national security state to pimp for the Democratic Party and globalist interests outside the USA. This exposure could be the end of the great legacy news organs, The New York Times and the rest of the gang. Their executives will have to testify along with everyone else. They might not be prosecuted — in a gesture of respect for the First Amendment — but rather will suffer badly from their loss of credibility.
All of this will aggravate the animus against the government and the Democrat Party’s “Joe Biden” regime — which will be under assault from separate inquiries into the Hunter Biden laptop and its abundant evidence of bribery and treason, and hearings about the wide-open border, payments to Ukraine, and the gestapo-like behavior of the FBI.
Here’s a scenario for you: The Justice Department will be drowning in criminal referrals. The FBI will be in a state of paralysis, unable to carry out more insults against US citizens as its systematic crimes are revealed. When the DOJ dithers about bringing action, the public will be even more enraged. The current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, gets dragged into Congress to answer for his misconduct and the resulting humiliation will run him out of office. “Joe Biden” may be forced to resign, drowned in a sea of troubles and scandals revealed. A deal will be made to let Veep Kamala Harris off the hook in exchange for her resignation.
That will leave the Republican Speaker of the House, whoever it is, to become president. He will fire every political appointee in the executive branch and replace them with people who will follow the law. It will look like a promising return to decency and the rule of law. But the damage to America’s prestige will have been so gross by then that the federal government has lost legitimacy. The financial crisis, meanwhile, puts the government into something that smells like bankruptcy. The country is in a ferocious depression, the people have no money, but neither does the government. Real authority devolves to states and localities. The playing out of these dynamics also depends on what is happening outside the USA.
Europe in Macro
Don’t forget, Europe, the west end of the Eurasian landmass, used to be an important part of the world, with an aggregate GDP greater than even the USA’s or China’s. Europe is the birthplace of Western Civ, a division of the human project the past few thousand years that yielded tremendous advances in science, art, music, philosophy, and organized intelligence generally. Now it is on the rocks. Europe, in the aggregate, as represented, say, by the European Union, or NATO, made a grave error going along with the USA’s foolish Neocon project to make a heap of trouble in Ukraine in order to “weaken” Russia.
Russia was no longer a threat to the USA after 1991. Once the USSR was done as a political entity, and after Russia recovered from the daze of collapse, it wanted to be treated by the West as a normal European nation. Russia became a market economy, like all the others in Europe. It held elections like the others, had a legislature, a new body of property law, a private news media, regular banks, and all the other trappings of modern political normality. Russia even requested early-on to become a member of NATO. The USA and Europe refused NATO membership, but also refused to admit Russia into European normality. Instead, led by the USA, the West conducted an asset stripping operation which hampered Russia’s redevelopment.
Otherwise, the West mostly ignored Russia, and in spite of all that Russia got back on its feet, got some industries going, especially oil-and-gas, and enjoyed two decades of relative stability. Russia eventually began reaching out in the world and made trade agreements with other countries. It built those Nord Stream gas pipelines. It organized a regional “customs union” among its Eurasian neighbors intended to function rather like the Eurozone.
As that was all happening — pay attention — around 2010 then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat on a State Department’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that threatened to block the sale of a Canadian company, Uranium One, to Rosatom, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation, on the grounds that Uranium One’s assets included 20-percent of the USA’s uranium supply. Selling all that American uranium to Russia looked kind of bad, you’d think, and you’d be right. But then, suddenly, about $150-million poured into the Clinton Foundation — much of it from Uranium One’s owner, one Frank Giustra — plus Bill Clinton happened to get a half-million dollar speaking gig in Russia, and… whaddaya know, CFIUS ended up approving the sale. The public hardly heard a peep about it. (Where was the US news media?)
During that same period, Hillary Clinton also helped facilitate the transfer of American bio-medical, nuclear, and Info technology to the high-tech consortium called Skolkovo, Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Much of the tech at issue was dual-use, good for civilian and military applications. Again, tens of millions of dollars gushed into the Clinton Foundation from the corporate participants in the Skolkovo deal. Crickets from the news media again.
In 2011, relations between the US and Russia soured when President Putin accused the US of fomenting protests in Russia over its parliamentary elections. And from there, our State Department decided that Russia and the USA could not even pretend to be friendly.
Jump ahead to 2014: Neocons in the Obama administration figured it was time to cut Russia back down to size. That effort crystalized around the former Soviet province, Ukraine, and blossomed into the US-sponsored-and-organized Maidan Revolution, utilizing Ukraine’s sizeable Stepan Bandera legacy Nazi forces in the vanguard, to foment violence in Kiev’s main city square. The US shoved out elected Ukraine President Yanukovych — who angered America by pledging to join Russia’s Customs Union instead of the EU — and installed its own puppet Yatsenyuk, who was ultimately replaced by the candy tycoon, Poroshenko, replaced by the Ukrainian TV star, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ha Ha. Who’s laughing now? (Nobody.)
From 2014-on, Ukraine, with America’s backing, did everything possible to antagonize Russia, especially showering the eastern provinces of Ukraine, called the Donbas, with artillery, rockets, and bombs to harass the Russia-leaning population there. After eight years of that, and continued American insults (the Steele Dossier, 2016 election interference), and renewed threats to drag Ukraine into NATO, Mr. Putin had enough and launched his “Special Military Operation” to discipline Ukraine. Once that started, American Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated explicitly to the world that America’s general policy now was to “weaken Russia.”
That declaration was accompanied by America’s policy to isolate Russia economically with ever more sanctions. Didn’t work. Russia just turned eastward to the enormous Asian market to sell its oil and gas and utilized an alternate electronic trade-clearance system to replace America’s SWIFT system. Sanctions also gave Russia a reason to aggressively pursue an import-replacement economic strategy — manufacturing stuff that they had been buying from the West, for instance, German machine tools critical for industry.
Russia did sacrifice more than $50-billion in financial assets stranded in the US banking system — we just confiscated it — but, ultimately, that only harmed the US banking system’s reputation as a safe place to park money, and made foreign investors much more wary of stashing capital in American banks. Net effect: the value of the ruble increased and stabilized, and Russia found new ways to neutralize American economic bullying.
Europe was the big loser in all that. For a while, Europe could pretend to go along with the US / NATO project, pouring arms and money into Ukraine, and at the same time depend on Russian oil and gas imports. Eight months into the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the US blew up the Nord Stream One and Two pipelines, and that was the end of Europe’s supply of affordable natgas, to heat homes and power industry. In a sane world, that sabotage would have been considered an act of war against Germany by the USA. But it only revealed the secret, humiliating state of vassalage that Europe was in. Europe had already made itself ridiculous buying into the hysteria over climate change and attempting to tailor its energy use to so-called “renewables” in history’s biggest virtue-signaling exercise. Germany, the engine of the EU’s economy, made one dumb mistake after another. It invested heavily in wind and solar installations, which fell so short of adequacy they were a joke, and it closed down its nuke-powered electric generation plants so as to appear ecologically correct.
So now, Germany, and many other EU member states, teeter on the edge of leaving Modernity behind. They managed to scramble and fill their gas reserves sufficiently this fall to perhaps squeak through winter without freezing to death, but not without a lot of sacrifice, chopping down Europe’s forests, and wearing their coats indoors. Now, only a few days into Winter, it remains to be seen how that will work out. We’ll know more in March of the new year. France had been the exception in Europe, due to its large fleet of atomic energy plants. But many of them have now aged-out, some shut down altogether, and “green” politics stood in the way of replacing them, so France, too, will find itself increasingly subject to affordable energy shortages.
Prediction: Europe’s industry will falter and close down by painful increments. The EU will not withstand the economic stress of de-industrialization. It will shatter and leave Europe once again a small continent of many small fractious nations with longstanding grudges. Some of these countries may break-up into smaller entities in turn, as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR did in the 1990s. Keep in mind, the macro trend world-wide will be downscaling and localization as affordable energy recedes for everyone. Since the end of World War Two, Europe was the world’s tourist theme park. Now it could go back to being a slaughterhouse. The Euro currency will have to be phased out as sovereign bankruptcies make the EU financial system untenable, and animosities and hostilities arise. Each country will have to return to its traditional money. Gold and silver will play a larger role in that.
The USA poured over $100-billion into Ukraine in arms, goods, and cash in 2022. That largesse will not continue as America sinks into its Second Great Depression. In any case, much of that schwag was fobbed off with. The arms are spent, the launchers destroyed. A lot of weapons were trafficked around to other countries and non-state actors. Russia is going to prevail in Ukraine. The news emanating from American media about Ukraine’s military triumphs has been all propaganda. There was hardly ever any real doubt that Russia dominated the war zone strategically and tactically. Even its withdrawals from one city or another were tactically intelligent and worthwhile, sparing Russian lives. The Special Military Operation wasn’t a cakewalk because Russia wanted to avoid killing civilians and refrain from destroying infrastructure that would leave Ukraine a gutted, failed state. Over time, the USA proved itself to be negotiation-unworthy, and Ukraine’s president Zelensky refused to entertain rational terms for settling the crisis. So, now the gloves are off in Ukraine. As of December 29, Russia shut off the lights in Kiev and Lvov.
The open questions: how much punishment does Ukraine seek to suffer before it capitulates? Will Zelensky survive? (Even if he runs off to Miami, he may not survive.) What exactly will be left of Ukraine? In 2023 Russia will decide the disposition of things on-the-ground. Failed states make terrible neighbors. One would imagine that Russia’s main goal is to set up a rump Ukraine that can function, but cease to be an annoying pawn of its antagonists. Ukraine will no longer enjoy access to the Black Sea; it will be landlocked. The best case would be for Ukraine to revert to the agricultural backwater it was for centuries before the mighty disruptions of the modern era. Perhaps Russia will take it over altogether and govern it as it had ever since the 1700s — except for Ukraine’s brief interlude post-USSR as one of the world’s most corrupt and mal-administered sovereign states.
Bottom line: Ukraine is and always was within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, and will remain so. The USA has no business there and it will be best for all concerned when we bug out. Let’s hope that happens without America triggering a nuclear World War Three. (Yeah, “hope” is not a plan. Try prayer, then.) Mr. Putin’s challenge going into 2023 is to conclude the Ukraine hostilities without humiliating the USA to the degree that we do something really stupid.
Asia
The enormous region where most of the world’s people live is swirling with quickly changing dynamics. It’s hard to tell what kind of shape China is actually in at the close of 2022. The CCP capitulated on its extreme lockdown policy and now the country seems gripped by a new and severe outbreak of the Covid virus. It’s killing a lot of people, including quite a few higher-ups in the CCP. The world saw the beginning of a popular revolt in China through the fall of 2022 as demonstrations erupted. The political side remains opaque.
The economic side, less so. China’s wealth since year 2000 has derived from its immense factory capacity and cheap labor force. Globalism is wobbling, and with that the world’s supply line network. If trade relations with the USA continue to sour, both China and the USA will suffer. China will find itself at over-capacity, even for the giant Asian market. And they are competing with several other quickly-industrialized nations in the south, plus India, plus the old stalwarts South Korea and Japan.
The main problem for China, and indeed all the Pacific Rim nations on the Asian side: energy. China doesn’t have very much oil in the ground and is utterly dependent on imports. It has a lot of low-quality coal. It’s building coal and nuke plants like mad. Will that suffice? Electricity is great, but you need fossil fuels to run heavy industries. In the great shiftings of 2022, China made deals for getting more oil and gas from Russia. That might work for a while. But Russia’s energy resources are probably near peak production now. What happens on the way down from that peak? Maybe Russia will be less avid for sharing its fossil fuels with its neighbors. Maybe that will cause political friction. Maybe a desperate China will reach out and try to grab resources from Russia’s vast Siberian territories? Not next year, though….
The Neocon-led US foreign policy establishment is insane for sure, but the CCP is only not-crazy during times of great stability. Throw in some popular dissent and some economic distress, and the CCP could go cuckoo. Uncle Xi shows very Mao-like tendencies for creative despotism. The party must have a long game for Taiwan, but a distressed and crazed CCP, and an agitated Uncle Xi, could turn that into a short game out of desperation — and then what? We’d have two really crazed governments, the USA and China, ginning up the Eastern theater of World War Three. The upshot of predicament depends to some extent on how delicately Mr. Putin can organize America’s exit from Ukraine.
Prediction: For 2023 internal friction will preoccupy China as it attempts to square its operations with those pressing trends of our time: downscaling and relocalization. All this could easily lead to regional strife in China. For decades, the CCP has been the glue between its disparate peoples. It may prove to not be superglue.
Japan remains as enigmatic as ever. It has drifted economically for nearly forty years. Now it looks like it’s drifting into a sovereign bankruptcy as it loses control of its deeply-gamed bond markets. I’ll stick to my old prediction that Japan is en route to going medieval. Its pre-industrial culture was very charming and worked well for long periods of history. Industrial modernity demoralized them. Japan imports all its oil. Without it, you can’t even begin to run a modern war machine, so there won’t be a second reaching-out for resources as in the 20th century. The Japanese will not be alone in the new medievalism when this era completes itself.
The Deep State, an Appreciation
America is at a crossroads, a threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s happening across Western Civ. Is it some natural process of self-destruction? An auto-immune disorder of a giant cultural organism, with parts attacking the whole? The USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of Everyman, though they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is infected and ailing, and by what? It’s as if some cosmic spike protein came among us all and got into our hearts.
Most major religions feature some version of the idea of death-and-rebirth, and it’s a fact that we see ourselves embedded in cycles, especially seasons. Things turn and return, are born, develop, degenerate, pass away. This was the brilliant application of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory to the study of history, and by those terms we have entered a deep secular winter of the human project. One can appreciate how the onset of winter spooked our prehistoric ancestors. They developed their prayerful ceremonies for bringing back the sun, and warmth, and new growth, dancing around the fire in the skins of animals, often making blood sacrifices to the mysterious forces in charge of… everything. The modern way of reenacting all that seems to be industrial-strength warfare. Many of us are praying right now that we don’t have to go through that.
More likely, I think, we’ll forego the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life. For some years, I’ve been calling this process a long emergency, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. I believe in the natural process called emergence. Systems transform themselves organically from one state to another when acted upon by the circumstances of time and place. The outcome is usually a surprise, and not all surprises are bad. So, adios 2022 and hello little baby 2023. Lead us where you will and let’s go forward into it bravely. As Bob said so many years ago, it’s all right, Ma. It’s life and life only….
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New Paintings from the 2022 Season
Barrel Racers, Cambridge, NY
Just Out! The whole shootin’ match going back to 1987!
For autographed copies:
Battenkill Books, Cambridge, NY
Also at: Amazon, Barnes & Nobel
Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:
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Don’t know if I will live long enough to read this in it’s entirety but will try. Thanks for the memories.
I haven’t read it all yet, but the last remarks at the end of his first phase seems to sum it up. The character of the people under question will determine the future course of the nation. The character of the American people is vastly different than the one of the 1930’s. There must be a certain commitment to cooperate and help each other and it just isn’t here now. The center will not hold.
“Duty” used to be a thing.
Duty?
Towards the hordes of parasitic ‘New’ Americans who don’t speak my language or share my culture, and have been taught to hate me?
Towards the inbred cabal of banksters and their sycophants who are busy using financial shell games to necrophilize the carcass of my former country?
No thanks, I’ll pass.
The ones that will probably be cleaning your ass when you are old and feeble? Those parasites?
Zorro-100% concur,
“my butts been wiped, my butts been wiped” fearless leader
“Hard times make strong men
Strong men make good times
Good times make weak men
And weak men make hard times.”
Shotho, you’re right. Today’s American society is nothing like the society of the 1930s… we’re back to being weak men, and because of that, we know what’s coming.
Well, I hope that you do, and I believe that you will make it. It is another bull’s eye for Jim and that he says that it might not all pan out as he sees it, I think it pretty much will.
I do take issue with the idea that the powers who rule are printing out money to buy votes – hell, they don’t need to buy the damn things, they can create them out of the same thin air that the cash comes from. I believe, actually I KNOW that they are printing out as much as they can as fast as they can so they can filter as much of it as possible back into their own pockets so that they can own ten times the assets they will need once the shit REALLY hits the fan. I would not be surprised if Sleepy Joe isn’t bunkered down in the East End of St. Croix right now just in case the dawn of the New Year brings a red dawn of one kind or another.
And he and I differ on our opinion of how our Manchurian candidates are going to fare in their bid for King of the Hill. With friends like the Second Sick-O Austrian, Bill Gates, and George Soros behind them, China has my bet for a serious advancement towards their goal of Top Dog in the coming Year.
But Jim is always scoring center of mass hits, so once again I thank him for all of his hard work, his kindness and I wish him a long and healthy life.
America’s economy largely hinges on finance now that financialization replaced manufacturing as the basis for prosperity. Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity.
It’s amazing when you think about it. For at least 30 years, the economy has been fueled by the great casino lending dinero to the players so they can stay in the game. A few recipients come out rich as Croesus; others rub by; not a few use up their chips and slink over to the bingo room.
Business today monitors every hemidemisemiquaver of the Fed’s acts and language because they signal the price of borrowing. Particularly since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, our dark guardians have seen to it that the Loan Ranger pays minimally for taking on more debt. For a company to live beyond its financial means has never been cheaper.
No one actually denies that the world’s economy sails on a sea of debt. It’s not an occult secret hidden from prying eyes. Anyone with minimal financial knowledge can spot it if they want to. But our economic “leaders” and pundits rarely speak of it. Mustn’t let the plebs get wound up.
It seemed to many like the system worked fine and had no expiry date. The Covid catastrophe only whipped it more. Hey, kids! Get your stimmy bucks! Free money!
2022 was the year the shadow fell. Stimulus nowhere in sight and seems merely to have created inflation and postponed the reckoning. The only Lenders … a bagel manufacturer.
Bring on 2023. It will be different, if that’s any comfort.
so much shorter than a 1.7 trillion budget bill
Winning the War in Ukraine
Winning the War is a question of existential survival for both the Russian and US protagonists. For the Russians it is a matter of national survival in the face of the USA’s policy statements and actions whose stated aim is to destroy the Russian nation-state and replace it with a group of weak resource colonies susceptible to bribery, assignation, military intervention, and globalist wealth extraction. For the Global West (AKA the USA) it is the very survival of the “rules-based order” * that forms the basis for decades of dominance and wealth extraction all over the globe.
The Rules-Based Order—- Our Rules:
1- All international trade in energy and key goods must be based in US Dollars.
2- The USA shall have the exclusive right to create Dollars out of thin air. It does so by distributing Dollars into the accounts of the Banking Cartel (AKA the FED) which then disperses them into the world economy in the form of loans. (Which sometimes trickle down into consumer loans.) International debt holders then pay off their loans by sending food, oil, uranium, rare earth minerals, bananas, slave labor products like Apples, and other items that the USA no longer has.
3- If a country starts accumulating too many US Dollars because they have too much oil to sell, they must use it up by buying arms (AKA Weapons of Chaos) from US manufacturers or buy US bonds with it.
4- If they don’t like the Rules Based Order and step out of line the USA will hire mercenaries to bomb their wedding parties or jam a bayonet up their President’s ass.
Putin violated the First Rule by having the audacity to demand payment for his country’s oil in gold or the national currency. Therefore, he must be killed, and his every utterance loaded into a Saturn rocket and sent on a direct flight to the center of the Sun.
For those who still remember their first-grade math, Russia’s 10 to 1 advantage for the KIA results of the Ukrainian-US proxy war tells you how that will end. When Russia grinds the last Ukonazi soldier hiding behind the last 60 year old conscript into the frozen mud it will end. What then, USA? We will find out if our “leadership” is only clinically insane as is self-evident, or suicidal as well.
Agreed, thors. This is a fight for survival not just for Russia, but for the US to continue as the world’s hegemon.
Amen – I couldn’t agree more. Well put
I don’t know if any of us will live long enough to come any of his predictions come to fruition. And I strongly disagree with most of his predictions. 1st off, why does he fall into the trap of using the now debunked “fossil fuel” narrative? Oil is not a fossil fuel and it is regenerative – comes from decaying organic matter. 2nd, he makes an excellent point that there is nowhere near enough green energy to power the global elitists “dreams” of these mass cities where they can track everyone. However, those “dreams” are their selling points to the masses – the elite are so far removed from reality that they can’t even comprehend that most of us hate their “dream” cities. But I digress, because the FACT is the want at least 3/4’s of us dead, and the rest as transhuman slaves. They do not care if these dream cities actually work, because they don’t care if we don’t have electricity! The people remaining alive will live in squalor, just look at the inner cities – only it will be worse because they no longer have to at least convince a few idiots to vote for them!
As for China, don’t even get me started – the USA sent Russia flying into Xi’s hands, and who knows where that will take us! And, once again, Oil is NOT finite!! Russia will never stop selling them Oil. Period. Although it appears Russia no longer is interested in “world domination”, they certainly plan to maintain their own, something I’m sure Xi is fine with, at least for some time. And China’s financial system is even worse off than our own. It is so understated by Chinese friendly media how bad of shape China is in, with their ghost cities and banks. The people are starting to rise up there, and a desperate Xi is a dangerous Xi – can you say “Taiwan”, just for starters? War is a money maker for globalist, kills people, and is a great distraction from the protestations of the Chinese people at home. The CCP isn’t stupid; they know they need money, they don’t care, like all communists, how many of their own people starve or are killed in war, and they definitely need a distraction for the media to report on
Add to that the severely weakened U.S. military and you have to wonder what Xi is waiting for…
The only thing for certain is no one knows how this all ends. The criminal puppit Biden Regime, along with their elitist friends in congress on both sides of the isle need money, want most of us dead, and need their own distractions from all the covid, election fraud, and deeply corrupt non-elected (FBI, DOJ, CIA, NIS, CDC, DHS, etc…).
The only real question is whether the citizens of this country will pull their heads out of their own asses in time to see through the shit and rise up. The true power is in the citizens of this country, but there is so much apathy and so many “don’t want to get “envolved”. Most in this country don’t realize just how bad things are going to get exactly because they won’t stand up; FROGS, the water is starting to boil!
Great…Kunstler has attracted another nut job. Biden, criminal? Por Que?
he got you to show up also. lol
Bravo! You skewered the River Rat.
If oil derives from decaying organic matter, how in the world can it be regenerated? From what organic matter? Compost heaps?
NeverVaxxed, I’m sorry but you are going to be very disillusioned in the next few years when it becomes (literally) painfully obvious that the oil is running out. This is something I wrote right before the elections a couple of months ago. And if I can make one editorial note: Even if I’m wrong about peak oil – which I don’t believe I am – the policies put in place (and still planned to be implemented) by western governments absolutely insure the exact same outcome.
PEAK OIL – THE REAL PROBLEM
Peak oil is the overriding geopolitical issue of the day. Everything that is going on in the world today is, in my opinion, due to this one problem.
Before I get wound up on the peak oil problem, let me say that yes, there are a lot of ancillary things going on, too, what with the new world order, and all. I don’t discount any of this. I just believe that these things more accurately fall under the “let’s not let a good crisis go to waste” category.
OK, back to peak oil…
The world we live in today – and have for the past hundred years – is predicated on the premise of cheap, abundant oil. Without it we simply would not be where we are and have the things we have. Virtually everything we do and everything we have is touched by, and in most cases, made possible by this supply of oil. Even the food we eat, and especially the amount of food we produce, is directly correlated to cheap, abundant oil.
You can read about peak oil and hear the fearmongers and the doomsayers talk about the end of the world because of the consequences of peak oil. But in a way they’re right, although they are being a little disingenuous when they suggest that the oil is running out. When they say peak oil, they are talking about ‘conventional’ oil; the cheap stuff that we’ve been pulling out of the ground for the past hundred years or so. Yeah, the amount of that kind of oil is declining fast.
But what these people don’t mention is all the other oil that is available to us – at the right (high) price. The shale, the tar sands, the Arctic, etc. For instance, there are estimates of two trillion barrels of shale oil sitting under the Rockie Mountains. This is a staggering amount and honestly, something that has been known for over a hundred years. But try as they may, it has never been profitable to retrieve it. This is not cheap, abundant oil.
Now, with all that said (and to the doomsayer’s credit), without cheap, abundant oil the world as we know it WILL end. Everything WILL drastically change because, as I said, everything we have and everything we do is predicated upon cheap, abundant oil. And going forward, oil will not be cheap and will not be abundant (at least for many years, if ever again).
Most credible estimates show oil supply/demand constraints for the foreseeable future becoming increasingly more obvious and finally hitting us hard some time in the next five to fifteen years. (Personally, I place my bet on five.)
This is the overriding reason, in my opinion, for most of what is going on in the world today. Without cheap, abundant oil our society, as we know it, is gone forever.
And this, to a large extent, explains the seemingly bizarre policy changes by governments and corporations around the world the past few years – ostensibly related to global warming (excuse me, climate change) – away from fossil fuels and toward solar & wind energy and electric vehicles. And the reason I use the word bizarre is due to the fact that these alternative energy sources really aren’t viable alternative energy sources. If we had to convert to these sources today the overwhelming majority of us would literally be sitting in the dark waiting to freeze to death. And truthfully, due to the sheer size of the global fossil fuel industry, this really isn’t going to change much in the next five to fifteen years.
Perhaps more bizarre is the fact that even at $100+ oil, gas & oil exploration companies – the guys who go out and look for new gas & oil deposits – aren’t. They aren’t looking. If you listen to them, they don’t even have plans to start looking. Which begs the question, “What do they know that we don’t know?”
I believe the whole climate change thing is simply a ruse to keep the majority of people in the dark about the oil catastrophe that is about to hit us. Let’s face it, in order for governments around the world to implement the types of policies that will be required for a world without cheap, abundant oil – without letting the cat out of the bag and risk losing control of their populations – there must be some other (more palatable) catastrophe at hand for people to fear. Something the politicians can point to and say, “That’s the evil thing making your life miserable.” But not something so dire that we all fear for our lives. And so they give us climate change.
I don’t dispute that the climate is changing. It is constantly changing. That’s nothing new. But we aren’t causing the change. Just look at long (and short) term climate maps and you will find an astoundingly cyclical rythym to global temperatures through the decades and centuries which is caused by the sun, the moon, and a host of other things. And the irony of the man-made global warming scam is that, by most unbiased accounts, we are now at the beginning of a decades long cooling period.
The loss of cheap, abundant oil will put in peril a large portion of global food production. Thus, we will eventually not have enough food to feed everyone because we will not have enough oil to produce this food. We also won’t have enough oil to produce the tens of thousands of other oil-based products that are used seemingly inconsequentially every day by all of us. We certainly won’t have enough oil to simply burn it up in millions of automobiles every day. There will be massive job loss because without cheap, abundant oil, there will be little to produce and only relatively expensive methods of making what we can produce without the heretofore cheap, abundant oil.
There will be loss of life, probably on an unprecedentedly massive scale. Those same, unfortunate, starving people you hear about in far off African countries you probably couldn’t find on a map will be the first to go. And in these places, it will indeed be a massive die off – surely in the tens of millions, probably hundreds. After this, the next wave will be those countries that must import most of their energy and food consumption. Those with domestic energy and food production will fare better, but it still won’t be pretty. And if (or should I say when?) war breaks out on a large scale, all bets are off.
Eventually, we will get to the other side of this crisis. It will take years, though, probably decades. The world will be a far different place by then. Hopefully, it will be a far better place. Plan accordingly.
***
As an addendum, I am going to go out on a limb and make several specific predictions regarding the next nine months (through the first half of 2023).
First, President Biden will somehow be removed from office. He will either die in office, resign due to health issues, or will be removed under amendment twenty-five. He has simply become too much of a liability.
Second, the Democrats will make a miraculous showing in the mid-term elections keeping control of both houses and even gaining those two seats in the senate President Biden said was necessary to pass legislation to take our guns.
Third, congress will indeed quickly pass gun legislation banning all assault weapons (including large caliber ‘automatic’ handguns and all large capacity magazines). Included in this legislation will be a not-yet mandatory buy back program.
Fourth, in order to ensure the gun legislation is not overturned in the courts, congress will also pass legislation adding at least two more justices to the supreme court.
Fifth, Donald Trump will be indicted causing all hell to break loose from the MAGA crowd – who are already upset and protesting the gun legislation.
Sixth, (and this one would most likely not occur until the second half of 2023 into 2024) governors from several states will balk at any decisions handed down from a ‘packed’ supreme court – especially the gun legislation – threatening secession. As a result, some form of limited martial law will be imposed to quell these protests and renegade states.
Seventh, all hell breaks out…
“Europe is the birthplace of Western Civ”.
Really? It seems more complicated. I’ve been reading David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s 2021 book ‘The Dawn of Everything’.
The Tigris and Euphrates was the birthplace of civilization. Europe was the birthplace of the downfall of civilization.
“The Fertile Crescent”; Hebrew Scriptural origins the basis for Western law and concept of Liberty as described in many Biblical verses -particularly in the person and promise of Jesus Christ. See 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 Verse 17.
Our host mentions Chins, giving excuse to bring in this personal experience from September 1985 in our Tahoe home: Mr. Kong Chou Liu, veteran of the “Great March with Mao Tse Tung, visited us to discuss bringing some brand new Chinese built steam locomotives to America for use on tourist railroads, etc. The conversation drifted to economic development policies & his commentary as to how America needed a modernized China as counterweight to Russia. Included in my suggestions for Chinese policymakers: “certainly should include comprehensive railway mode development connecting all provinces”. Going into 2023 homeland China is nearing completion of many exceedingly challenging railway engineering projects, including through the Himalayan range, ensuring ability to maintain strategic manufacturing connectivity and, most importantly, assuring food distribution…
In Canada, Mexico & the lower 48, loss of over 100,000 miles of food distribution rail lines, including many once linking key agriculture districts with US urban populations, will soon be felt, with consequential lethal famine. Persons of means and corporate interests can assume responsibility and form consortia to rebuild these crucial branch line. Enhanced food distribution is best way to leverage disaster preparation funds, not hideouts and private security forces. The Bible does in fact show a type of America in Daniel Chapter 4: Nebuchadnezzar’s “Great Tree Sheltering Many. Moreover, the Tree is preserved from destruction by “Bands Of Iron”; see Verse 15!
“……America…… preserved from destruction…..”. 4014HAMPHEDGE.
All due respect, theTree referred to is Israel, but only as she will be a shelter and a provider to the Gentile nations surviving the Great Tribulation, and she herself preserved from destruction at the hands of those same Gentile nations. Israel is the only nation with a God, all other nations are Gentile including America. America’s power will be crushed and broken like all the others. Israel will be brought to the place of repentance as she is Jehovah’s unfaithful and thus whore-ish wife as well as Jehovah’s disobedient firstborn son……both in the Land today in unbelief, without the Messiah and way before the time. Her time to both bless and rule the Gentile nations is yet ahead but ONLY after she is brought forth in a day following repentance when they see him whom they have pierced. The 1948 nation of Israel is a construct of powerful Zionists. Israel will yet be forced from the land again, forced back out among the Gentile nations to be punished. It is from THAT dispersion that her Messiah will call her back to the land, rebuild the Temple and allow her to fulfill the purpose for which she was brought forth back in Exodus…..to bless and rule the Gentile nations from Jerusalem, Christ sitting on David’s earthly throne in a Theocratic Kingdom. The Church has another role entirely ruling over the earth from the Heavens as Consort Queen to Christ the King and ruling as co-heir from Christ’s Heavenly throne. (Christ has a dual rule). So, no the USA is entirely Gentile despite the many Christians within her borders. And despite there motto on her currency, she is not a Christian nation.
I wish I could share JHK’s enthusiasm but as long as the levers of power in the United States and here in Canada are in the hands of WEF puppets, I don’t think we’ll ever get to the truth, The parties of chaos, Democrat and Liberal, have done such a good job at dividing the polity through the legacy media that I fear when the truth does come out, the one-half of the population that’s still brainwashed will rise up and threaten to kill anyone who questions the official narrative put out by Washington and Ottawa.
Mesopotamia (Greek for between the rivers), Tigris & Euphrates, is the birthplace of civilization, yes.
However,
Hellas, aka Grecia in Latin, aka Greece, the Greek speaking people and city-states surrounding the Aegean Sea (which was the conduit for shipping goods, people, and ideas) are the birthplace of Western Civilization. The Romans adopted the Greek ideas and philosophy, and modified them. But Rome saw the value. The Roman Empire and Roman Catholic Church transmitted and imbued these concepts to (geographic) Western Europe.
That said, today Greece is nominally part of the West, EU and NATO, blah-blah, but not really “Western”.
The Greeks and Greek language were the vehicle for spreading Christianity. Hellenism also was intertwined in the Byzantine Empire.
When Rome broke with the other Christian churches in 1054, that’s the birth of the West which has evolved as we know it today.
If you use Latin letters and live in Western Europe, North America, or down under, you’re in the West.
If you don’t, you’re not..
As always, JHK’s column was superb, though not perfect, since I don’t see the GOP speaker of the House taking over and doing the right thing. Very optimistic of JHK! But perhaps I’m mistaken
The presumptive GOP Speaker can barely get a sentence out of his maw without a malaprop or a questionable gerund. And, as an Establishment guy, he’ll be more worried about “bipartisanship” than with doing what’s in the best interests of the country. In other words, a typical Republican, and not an outside other box leader.
it’s always great to hear from Socrates Detroit. Living across the big ditch in Windsor, I always considered myself a Detroiter at heart even if my allegiances were to the Maple Leafs and Raptors. is Cobo Joe’s and A C Lindell’s still around?
Yes. Really. Europe is the birthplace of Western Civilization. Even before the Greeks the Yamnaya of the European Steppes, inventors of the wheel and tamers of the horse we began. Their migrations brought their language and technology and culture to India, Persia, Scandinavia, Hispania, Rus and more. Their primary God was the father of Odin and Zeus/Jupiter.
Then, the Greeks and Romans developed Western Civilization. Byzantium carried on Rome until the Ottomans overran it. In Northern Europe the German warrior kings in Germania, Francia, and Brittania rekindled Roman technology, law, religion. They rediscovered the incredible and advanced scientific, mathematic, legal and philosophic though of Greece and more of Rome. They sailed forth into the unknown and charted the seven seas, mapped the world, developed all of the technologies the world so desperately wants and the legal and philosophical systems they want to burn only to enjoy the material scraps of once great people and nations.
They built cathedrals, advanced art wrote cantatas and fugues and symphonies. They built universities, hospitals, sub-oceanic and satellite communications networks. They built railroads and invented aviation and the machines that made it possible. They split the atom and unleashed the safest cleanest form of energy man has ever discovered. They built spacecraft and ten of their great men walked on the moon. The West towered over the world in every dimension of civilization.
Then came the 60s. The subversives of the Frankfurt School and other aliens who would capitalize on the hubris and demoralization of a corrupt, ignoble, weak and short sighted managerial class in The West took root. In exchange for forestalling a manageable financial bankruptcy they sabotaged their people and their children to be nice to be everyone else as a facade for cowardice and feathering their own nests.
These comments that question the greatness of The West illustrate the fall – the demoralization and apologetic deference of a self defeated people. They suffer extreme demoralization and contempt for themselves and their ancestors. So now within The West we have arrived at the great bifurcation. Those who will recommit to themselves – the people who built The West. They will preserve themselves and its spirit manifest in its culture. The will survive and one day re-emerge to shine their great light upon the world.
The other fork will consist of those who will abandon themselves and stay lost in self loathing, moral confusion and self righteous self immolation that utilizes quackery produced anti-Western books as a crutch of righteous indignation – a cope to escape the demoralization of their fallen civilizations and nations. They will be overwhelmed by the rabble of globalist immigration who will repay their false belief that the foreign hoardes will hold hands and join them in an endless chorus of Kumbaya for universal brotherhood. They will check out in medicine ceremonies, indulge in quack self help groups and honor the spirit ancestors of stone age hunter gatherers. They will thus spit on their ancestor’s graves. They will be overwhelmed by the foreign and angry rabble, and their lights will go out – for eternity.
That leads me to a major component of chaos that is missed entirely in JKH’s predictions. That is the massive wave of un-assimilated, alien, illegal and legal immigrants throughout Europe and America. They are currently supported and elevated above the indigenous and heritage populations of The West. They are taught and told to hate The West and the very populations who they were welcomed in to replace. Some groups carry a blood libel against the people and nations of The West. It is a libel that has been coddled and encouraged and facilitated by the degenerate and unfit ruling elites can’t see what will happen when their children are a tiny minority who taught the new majority to hate them and to feel right in dispossessing them.
Add that hot spice to the cauldron and list of utter failings of the corrupt and suicidal ruling regime that turned against itself and its people who are The West.
@themetalmystic Excellent and thoughtful post.
Right on! I don’t know who the other commenters were. People spit on and delegitimize The West. It betrays an ignorance, a pettiness and envy or all of the above.
Happy New Year ZorroSchorro
Downright brilliant if you ask me, Zorro. Sums it all up about as well as I’ve ever seen it done, by anybody. Bravo, ‘mystic.
@ themetalmystic:
Yup. The superiority of Western Civilization over all others is undeniable.
Good post, and good analysis of what we face. Unfortunately, a lot of people who ought to know this instead call anyone who brings this up things like “idiot,” “Trump worshipper,” “traitor,” and “maniac” while continuing to support the suicide of this society, including the deaths of their families and friends.
You are and proved to be an equal to Douglas Murray and Francis Fukuyama (and maybe Eberstadt) in your depiction/portrayal of the decline/end of Western Civ (as JHK refers to it). Very coherent and lucid pot.
And a Happy New Years to you too Jim! Have a question though- what about Iran and the ME- any predictions on that?
If you say Iran you should include China and Russia. They are now very much a part of the equation there and that’s even beyond BRICS.
Same with the rest of the Persian Gulf. All of those hostilities engendered and exacerbated by the CIA/Mossad are falling aside as Chinese and Russian diplomacy (the real deal, unlike Blinken & Co) work their pragmatic magic.
Anyone with two brain cells would know that the current joke that sits in DC would drive Russia into China and the Brics. Anyone would know that, the question is was it planned?
Russia and China are the key founding members of BRICS.
How could Brandon have driven Russia into something they founded?
It must all be Reagan’s fault, right, comrade?
Indeed, Uncle Bob, it was.
Reagan and Bush set out to destroy the USSR, thereby setting into motion today’s chain of events.
At the time Russia and China were not aligned.
It was Carter’s National Security Advisor Brzezinski who first started pushing for the dissolution of Russia., 20 years before he published “The Grand Chessboard”.”
the current joke is the executive branch and congress many of who have been there since reagan. its not a 2020 thingy.
Always enjoy your yearly predictions, and I believe you may have hit a bullseye this year. I hope not, but one way or the other this great unraveling will occur, whether or not I concur. Have a Happy New Year James !
Thanks again JHK, and a Happy New Year
Read previous forecasts from Mr kunstler. The terminal bad shit he ALWAYS predicts never hits the fan. I do believe he has a genetic disposition of depression. When the world ends when you end (no descendants) you can be as gloomy as hell…. Zero worries about children or grandchildren to balance your mindset with hope.
Some other bad shit is concocted to forestall or distract from that which he predicts, but the bad shit is still there waiting. It doesn’t go away.
the pandemic was huge in that its agenda 2030.
@ docmartin:
I think JHK is calling some things early.
Speaking of get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand, President Trump still hasn’t said anything about the overwhelming evidence coming out about the vaxx’s lack of safety and efficacy.
He’s getting terrible advice from terrible people, still.
You probably missed this, but Alex Jones told Del Bigtree of The Highwire that Trump made it very clear that he doesn’t want to talk to any “anti vaxxers” anymore. In fact, Trump’s language was quite strong. I forgot exactly, but I think he called anti vaxxers idiots. AJ was trying to get into communication with Trump about eliciting his help in stopping kids from being jabbed with the clot shots. He gave the above message as a reply to Jones through one of his aides. He refused to even talk or listen to him or anyone else on the matter.
That’s why and when Jones started putting his support behind DeSantis.
Trump is proud of ‘Operation Warp Speed’. He believes it is “his baby”. This is the achilles heel of trump. His narcissism and stubborn arrogance. It knows no bounds.
I did miss that.
All I knew is that he hadn’t acknowledged the facts yet, in the face of all the evidence coming out.
Which means he either doesn’t know, which is not a good look for someone running for president, or he does know and hopes it will just go away if he doesn’t say anything.
Here is some information about the studies that came out recently:
VERY VERY IMPORTANT THREAD. Explains the significance of the IgG4 paper in a technical but very understandable way.
https://twitter.com/AlexBerenson/status/1608542207811747846?s=20&t=5WBLynRi3KSB4cV5eVex3Q
Beryl you’re just going to have to accept the fact that Trump is not interested in the facts that you care about.
Like I said, he considers ‘Operation Warp Speed’ to be one of the crowning achievements of his presidency, and it frustrates him that he gets no credit for it. I’ve heard him say this more than once. Forget third party information. I’ve heard HIM say this.
He knows the left won’t give him credit. What really frustrates him is that most of his fans, like you, are anti vaxxers. He is not anti-vaxx. He has never been anti-vaxx. He never will be anti-vaxx. He thinks RFK, Jr is a nut.
Sorry to break the news. Trump will not be swayed by the facts of the jabs.
Maybe, just maybe, if a jab leads his beloved Ivanka to drop dead, and a doctor that he trusts says, “Sir, the COVID jab killed her. No doubt about it.”……then he might be ready to listen.
I’d say you nailed the state of his mind. Trump was a dim for most of his life and still has that “thought” process in which feelings trump facts. Thus he “feels” what he does about the jabs and contrary facts are irrelevant and, worse even than that, those facts undermine his “greatest achievement.” So he is where he is and he ain’t about to move.
I was in his class at Penn at a time when it actually was a great university. (That time is well in the past.) Somehow he went through his two years (he was a transfer) without being affected by or learning from his surroundings. That’s on him.
Mick – so do you actually think Ivanka took the jab? You’re smarter than that. Please tell me you mean hypothetically?
Trump is sane when it comes to foreign policy, especially Russia. DeSantis is insane on these things, backed by the “right wing” enemies of the United States, the Neo-Cons.
Neither one of them has the courage to disavow the Vax, but neither one of them was willing to force it on people – though Trump may have toyed with the idea.
On balance, Trump is still better, though the way he is acting is quite disheartening to say the least.
In any case, all of us who voted for him should update our inner files: He was never the man we had hoped he would be. He never had the slightest interest in closing the border for example.
I think he did have that intent, until he didn’t.
Does it even matter who the Democrats select as their next president? Maybe it will be Caligula’s horse which will at least provide some entertainment during press briefings. The US is pretty much dead, we’re just kind of doing the forensics at this point. I share JHK’s enthusiasm that we can build something new from the ashes.
Yes, I don’t like the DeSantis view on foreign policy. I’m concerned that he will be another neo-con.
Maybe DeSantis is a closet student of history, and shares Jefferson’s fears of large standing armies and central banks.
That would be huge! Unfortunately, it’s more likely DeSantis will come under the influence of neocons. Politicians need money. It’s very difficult for those who don’t sell out to stay in the game. Look at Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich.
TaxDonkey, I do NOT share JHK’s enthusiasm that we in the USA can rebuild from the ashes.
Not only are people too soft (I include myself, though I think younger people are not only softer, but mentally compromised by their utter dependence on smart phones), but diversity especially and also the culture wars have really divided society.
The key to America was economic prosperity for more people than elsewhere. Also, in 1924, the door closed to immigrants not from Western Europe (like me).
Those born between 1900 and 1955 came of age weathering a depression, a world war (that did not touch America itself), and 25 years of prosperity for most (except those who lost their lives, limbs, or brains in Korea or Vietnam). People were Americans. And they were proud of that or they totally accepted that, if they were “illegals” who snuck in, and eventually became US citizens, even with their horrible English. I know quite a few of those, who despite their halting English thought America and AMERICANS were great! Even during the difficult 1973-83 era.
That is all a memory. Not to mention our gender/sex issues.
When the USSR imploded, the Soviet republics and their residents got hammered. However, at least in Russia, with its majority Russian population, despite the dysfunctional system, the family and social structures they had enabled them to make it.
Never in history has there been a major power as diverse as the US. It worked, and I think it requires, prosperity. I’m not sure how it will work in reverse. If leverage is great on the way UP, it is hell on the way down.
The down started in Feb 2020. We are entering year three, with no end in sight—on a macro level. Of course, some will do well or better, but most will do worse. I’d plan accordingly.
Yes, the different races ignored each other (except for Blacks preying on Whites) during prosperity, but will fight in the bad times to come.
So?
So let’s win. Morality means winning. Only winners can be merciful after all – or generous. We’ve forgotten that all this is a luxury.
But first and foremost we win for ourselves. This is health. Anything else is sickness. As Tom Jefferson said, Survival is the first morality.
BoO this could be simple cognitive dissonance and the huge weight he gives to political imperatives. Trump knows he will appear weak with admission of such a serious error, and most anti-vaxxers will have to forgive him if their other choices in 2024 are as bad as 2016.
but the pain of cognitive dissonance in condemning his crowning achievement as a mass poisoning, well, who will take the blame of the media. much safer for his personality and his political standing to support the warp speed vaxx research program. remember he never supported mandates for any group. he always supported free choice.
he really can’t back away from his history on the vaxx.
it would be political suicide and tremendous grief and guilt.
Don’t think DeSantis is some extraordinary leader. He is doing the bare minimum of what I expect a sane Republican govonor to do.
He knows how to spell.
Alex Jones….only one of the worst humans alive.
When idiots like you are bad wrapping him we know he is over the target.
Right. When someone like Jones is your hero, you have no moral compass. You must be a pathetic little incel. Was Sandy Hook a hoax?
Ooh, someone who agrees with Crusher on Sandy Hook.
Why don’t you two get a room?
Moral compass we are talking about a country that rips 800k babies from the womb and we are worrying about what some talk show hosts says about a psychopath shooting up a school being real or some government black op?
Priorities all over the place and none of them matter one bit.
Been married for over thirty years so your incel comment is more a reflection of your lack of values than mine.
You continue to show just how clueless you really are.
False equivalency incel.
So benr, sandy hook a hoax?
@sewagesucker
Why should anyone answer any question you pose when you are so obviously here for nothing but trolling.
Go fsck yourself.
That’s wee-minded benr for you, riverrunner. No ability to answer a straight question, only vitriol and name-calling, like a cornered rat!
Happy New Year, wee benr. Looks like you’re about to have more of the same old, same old though. Frustrated failings about things you don’t even understand. Probably the dumbest poster on this board of pretty sad posters.
Answer the question benr. Yes or no? Tell the world who you are .
Fake Trae returns, after stomping his flip flops & leaving the blog in an embarrassing huff a few weeks back.
Good times.
Whether Sandy Hook was a hoax or not is not a yes or no answer.
Maybe ask, was it a psyops?
Oohhh, a ‘psyops’ says MaryQ. How clever. It is an easy question you moral abomination. Thank you for the reminder.
I have answered the question your just to dim to remember it and or understand it.
As far as the retread libturds return talk about pathetic.
Good grief the poor fool just can’t keep away!
It’s almost as if he likes us and the abuse.
Poor simple bastard.
So benr, sandy hook a hoax?
Definition of Straw Man argument, fyi.
This is correct…..and it up is why I continue to believe DeSantis is the best option for a GOP effort to dislodge the Corpse from the Oval Office. Trump has had his day. He did many good things. But he is out of ideas and only is running because he wants his legacy to end on a WIN and not a LOSS …. especially since the loss was fraudulent. I “get that” but it’s still a poor reason to run again. What is Trump’s agenda? Sounds like more if the same from his first term. Some of that is good, but the American people want to see some fresh ideas for crushing the Woke Mafia once and for all. I don’t think Trump has the balls to do what must be done…..but I think DeSantis does.
Why does anyone care what Trump says at this point?
I care if he’s going to be a candidate in 2024 and he hasn’t come around to acknowledging the facts.
These people who pushed this shot deserve prosecution and there is a slim chance we could have an American president who will lead the way. I don’t want him ruining that.
Beryl, it’s a question of what would matter most to him: his need to always be right so that his ego never takes a hit, or the need to sweep some of his enemies out of the way at the cost of making an admission of error. I question whether he would be able to say he was wrong. His ego and narcissism are his biggest flaws.
He could blame it on a number of other people, although he is ultimately responsible.
By not acknowledging he was wrong, he is covering for a whole slew of incompetents and bad actors.
Pence, for example.
Oh, you still believe that elections matter.
Me? No.
But if something happened to change that, I want to be prepared. It’s only prudent.
At local and state level, yes. At federal level, no.
Even local is getting bad, Hereward. Or always has been.
Federal – hell, they just place into office who they want.
Of course we believe elections matter, especially to those who have become adept at stealing them.
And what are those ‘facts’ you speak of? mRNA vaxxes have been extremely effective.
Right riverunner – it’s about booster time isn’t it? Maybe get two – just to be extra safe.
Extremely effective in killing people.
Global death rates are over 15% average.
Injection in the frontal lobe might be a good option for you, RR.
Uh huh Benr…and you attribute that to vaxxes? Source please and nothing ridiculous.
Hahahahahhaha!
Seriously, I suppose they have been effective, if the goal is to kill off a few million people.
Which they haven’t….
As the old saying goes sewagerunner why argue with a pig you will just confuse the pig and piss yourself off.
You are clearly a pig and worthless troll with zero to add to this site.
Do your own damn research you lazy sack of manure.
Translation from benr? I have no idea, yet again, what I’m talking about.
@ sewagesucker
Translation you’re an idiot who wouldn’t listen to anything unless it confirmed you bias so why bother.
Better to point at you and laugh as you are ALWAYS wrong.
runter finally supporting the trumpster, kinda brings a smile.
getting people to admit that the jab and the reaction to the covid scare was bad for the world and killed as many or more than the flu is on a par with realizing oswald didn’t act alone or that cheney allowed those jets to hit the world trade center.
To imagine that your government is evil is the height of treason, you can’t go there.
Well, well, well……How about this for “fighting inflation”?
Beginning Jan 1st:
$6.5 Billion Natural Gas Tax Which Will Increase Household Energy Bills
$12 Billion Crude Oil Tax Which Will Increase Household Costs
$1.2 Billion Coal Tax Which Will Increase Household Energy Bills
$225 Billion Corporate Income Tax Hike Which Will Be Passed on to Households
atr.org/list-of-tax-hikes-in-democrat-reconciliation-bill/
Corrected web link: atr.org/list-of-biden-tax-hikes-hitting-americans-on-jan-1/
No wonder they made such a show of hiring new agents.
The agents will be coming for the “overpayments” dished out during Covid. Wait for it.
If the taxes were carbon dividends that would be passed back to citizens as a UBI it would all be good.
But that is not going to happen. Rule by the rich can’t let such a thing happen. Only failed policies in line with unbridled capitalism will be tried by the two geriatric political parties that run the show here.
What could have been……………….
httpX://www.afcd.org/
One rapper said the black was the main element of existence since “when you close your eyes, that’s what you see.”
You close your eyes and dream of carbon – which is also black.
I see a reddish pink sometimes. When I was very small, I liked to rub my eyes to see all of the Klimpt-type colors.
Black is what the rapper sees. I see red, not black. We can just barely imagine their world, & they ours.
Her vote cancels out yours. They must be kept down in the next America. Blacks and women are natural allies. One is necessary for us. The other is not.
Do they even teach the parable of the ant & the grasshopper in grade school anymore? I suppose not, the comparison is too invidious, too much butthurt the result. We are the ants, they are the grasshoppers. Even so, we must overthrow our queens.
Jarek, do you just wear a white hood around your hood and house all day?
Hear, Hear !!!
“Routine exports to the poor nations of the “global south” will stop and a lot of people will starve in those countries. ”
– no, they won’t. The Britney Griner affair has already proven Black lives matter more than White lives, and our Woke high priests will enjoy starving local Deplorables as they ship all our food to “People of Color” living near the Equator.
People who deem themselves sophisticated are usually sophists, and the simplest fucks of all.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul is a lateral move at best. But what if Peter is your brother, one to whom you are indebted by many bonds of kinship, nationality, and custom? And Paul is just some stranger?
Xenophobia may be limited, but xenophilia is immoral madness. One doesn’t overcome limitations (Should they be overcome? Can they be? Should they be if they can be in all cases?) by ignoring them much less hating them.
Some big words Jarek…been studying your thesaurus?
You are a Lilliputian. A little man. You give me a pain in the gulliver.
Great article Jim, and very much on point with your predictions. There will be some doubters, but we are truly headed for life-altering events, hopefully to be survived. If you will indulge me, I have been thinking about our Southern border and the absolute non-enforcement of our laws. This is an invasion, not a surge of migrants, but illegals who care not a wit for our nation or its laws. But why would China Joe and the administration allow this breach of our sovereignty? There are only two possible explanations for this. First, in a case that must be investigated, the Biden clan is being paid by the Mexican cartels, who are making billions from the humans and drugs, so many millions to pols would be no problem, and the Bidens have proven that everything they do involves graft and grift. The second potential reason I see is that the civilian force talked about by Obama is contained withing the mostly military-aged illegals storming the country, who now number over 4 million. In addition to the Demoncrap storm troopers, antifa and blm, they can be enlisted to fight Americans, based on the government largess and promises of more. You might count the 87,000 new gun-trained IRS agents in that group as well. If anyone has a better explanation, I am all ears.
Jgalt: I think it’s simpler than that. They just want to create a permanent Dem majority by importing automatic Dem voters. The GOP doesn’t care either because the illegals will be force wages down.
We might survive if there were only 2 billion in the world. With 8 billion people we are doomed. Billions of people will not starve to death and go quietly into the night. The nuclear fuse is burning and the American government is fanning that spark so it won’t be going out. The madness of crowds rules, nobody has a clue what to do. When the starving starts, the flashbulb will go off.
You are right. But instead of going with the Globalist agenda that would have made us of us here serfs (you too), we could and should have gone with Fortress America. We have everything we need here. Sit tight with our borders sealed and watch the world die.
Thank God South Africa never got the bomb. Some say they did, but if they did, the white government recognized the danger in time & decommissioned their stock. The last thing this world needs is a “rainbow” bomb. We’re still at the mercy of the “Sampson option” though.
Excellent Tate.
Tip of the hat on the Samson Option.
Talk about leverage! Seymour Hersh wrote a book, a must read, “The Samson Option”
it will be a race between starvation and the next lab-made-plague.
they already had the dress rehearsal on Oct 23, 2022, in Brussels. the next plague will give them permission to install body tags such as the quantum dots, or Musk’s implants, or the nanobots now constructing signalling devices in many of the vaxxed. they must track us better, and be able to control the mass mood. depopulation and tracking are the basis of forced obedience.
httxx://www.globalresearch.ca/bill-gates-plans-new-catastrophic-contagion/5802719
I read about that just last night. I went straight to the source: centerforhealthsecurity.org, after reading (a not-too-well-written) article on the Tenpenny Report.
Not a lot of information on the site but what little info is provided (“Lessons”, “Participants”) is all you really need to know.
Looks like Africa’s gonna get hit hard. Children too. And spreaders of “misinformation”.
“Covid” isn’t going away, it’s coming back as “MERS-2”. Warnings at the World Cup. Musk was there – uh oh…
Two words: FUCK THAT.
Thanks for that, Jim. A somewhat long, but thought provoking read. Am looking forward to next year’s JHK Essays.
May you have a very Happy New Year!
Sounds like Jim still has hope…………hahahaha.
You have to have hope, or else life is not worth living.
Yes, most folks need hope, but…
If you can set hope aside, leaving yourself with nothing but life, then you will know what you are living for, and no one will be able to break you by crushing your hope.
…but yeah, for just about everyone else, try to envision a rationally positive outcome to current (and long-trending) events. Ok, “hope”.
Don’t conflate hope with magical thinking. The later causes inaction.
Don’t worry, I’m not doing that. I’m just thinking of plain old garden variety “Hope”. A weed I’ve eliminated from my garden – but I understand many cultivate it for the nice-smelling flowers. And that’s ok – I guess.
“We want to save the planet” but unfortunately for the bulk of the masses that will leave only [mostly only] the ruling global elite inhabiting the Earth.
And that has been the plan in action these some last 50 years or so, soon to culminate.
“Say goodnight, Gracie.”
~toktomi~
The dismal trajectory envisioned by Mr. Kunstler has quite a lot of global momentum and it is difficult to see what could set things back on the right course. But I’ll jump right in anyway. Regards energy, the only sane path is nuclear (hundreds of Micro Modular Reactors trucked/floated on site) while using natural gas as a bridge fuel. But that won’t happen until the elections are cleaned up. But that won’t happen until the courts are cleaned up. See where this is going?
Mr. Kunstler is correct about the Fourth Turning. Absolutely required reading for anyone trying to understand what the heck is happening.
I doubt if the will nor the resources exist in the West to embark on any more grandiose nuclear power projects. Nuke plants are being decommissioned, not built.
Even if the will exists for nuclear, it takes a lot of time to plan and build them. Fingers crossed for cold fusion, folks!
Cold fusion is still several decades in the future to being implemented at scale.
Cold fusion is fantasy…..even “hot” fusion is decades away.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are the way to go. We should have stuck with the research conducted at Oak Ridge in the ’60’s….we’d probably be using the reactors right now.
But NNnnnooooo! The MIC wanted reactors that would produce weapon-grade fissile material for their bombs.
Please don’t tell France, Germany, Japan, India and China. I think there’s more… Oh yeah, USA too! Most can see the handwriting on the wall as the Green Dream implodes.
It isn’t imploding. The planned collapse is accellerating.
When the dust settles, 15-min. cities, digital access checks for anything you need, and digital currency will be brought in. Because the system is reinventing itself.
Unless more people start saying no. The green dream is nothing more than a fig leaf to hide what is coming — as the intentional collapse accellerates.
@ Night Owl:
There can be no doubt that the collapse is intentional. When every Western policy is aimed at killing people, it’s hard to escape the feeling that “they” want to kill us.
Maybe the main real purpose of third-world immigration is to encourage us to kill each other.
Depriving people of food and energy, giving the clot shot to as many as possible, and stirring up ethnic and racial hatreds in an atmosphere of resource constraints is, if you think about it, a good way to kill of the maximum number of people in a country, while leaving the infrastructure mostly intact.
It is a multi-pronged assault that is desinged to tear down every pillar upon which places worth living in were constructed.
I don’t even begrudge the illegals. Many are decent and simply want what we have, but they are indeed being weaponized.
@Ant:
“Maybe the main real purpose of third-world immigration is to encourage us to kill each other.”
That’s the conclusion I have come to.
Encourage immigration by treating illegal aliens better than citizens. Import large numbers of people from alien cultures and settle them together so they can remain separate. “Melting pot”?
And when the shit finally does hit the fan? Citizens, especially – well, ok, almost exclusively – white, will be attacked by “law enforcement” for not being servile enough toward the invaders.
But a lot of us and them killing each other.
‘Accelerates’. One misspelling is possibly a typo, but twice in the same statement is clear evidence that you’re a pretty crappy “editor”.
@Yirgach
Population Dynamics 101
There is no fix for population overshoot.
And there is no fix for a growth-based [exponential growth, no less!] global economy that has lost the one-time constant growth energy supply.
No, kiddin’, kiddies, it is the end of the line for most of us.
Wanna have a say-so in the longevity of the ruling elite? Walk away. Right now.
Rather hang on as long as possible? Makes sense, I reckon. But have no illusions. We’re all gonna die, sooner rather than later.
I could be wrong but all the crazy, denial stories that I hear to the contrary are patently silly.
~toktomi~
Please, Ehrlich tried that excuse and failed miserably. Like any organism, humans adapt to change.They learn not to waste resources on mitigation. Has worked out just fine for the last couple hundred thousand years. In this age we all live longer and better. Why?
You need to understand how that happened.
@Yirgach
🙂
~toktomi~
I think you’re absolutely correct regarding The Fourth Turning. I read it (the first time) a couple weeks after it came out, and honestly believe it may be the most prophetic book of our Times. As a result, I have shared its insights with dozens of friends, and Truly believe that we are well into our “critical” phase. No one knows exactly how thing will resolve; but they’ll be significantly different than what we’ve experienced so far. Frankly, it’s nice to be in my late seventies!
THE LONG EMERGENCY
arrived in my mailbox two days ago. Can’t wait to read it after today’s blog.
STUDENT DEBT FORGIVENESS
isn’t all that bad for the tourist industry I found out recently. I have a conference to attend in Clearwater this February and wanted to extend the stay a few days at the $319 per night conference rate. No doing. The rate goes to $600 and up because “its spring break”.
Another great article – thanks, James. I don’t think you are very far off in any of your predictions for this year. We shall see.
I do see that more and more people are coming around to getting what a hoax covid19 was. Or at least understanding that emergency, untested mRNA vaccines were not a good idea. The MSM continues to cover up the carnage, but when enough families lose teenagers to myocarditis or enough high profile people die of SADS, it will be impossible to ignore it.
People are dying of artificial sweeteners, Mary.
The prediction today is that very bad weather is about to consume civilization. Interpret that sentence literally or symbolically as you wish.
Since people are not dying in large numbers any serious and real complication with mRNA vaccine will be successfully covered up. People can’t accept that fossil fuels now exit stage left so what kind of delusional and magical thinking makes people think the ‘truth will come out’.
It won’t, propaganda is effective. People are taken in by false flag. If the ‘hoax’ were exposed for what it is, people would be smart enough to mitigate the shitstorm ahead. The majority of people can’t accept that grandpa Joe does them wrong so turn up the volume knob on bat-shit. The lies won’t stop and they won’t stop working.
It is a sad disappointment to find out people are not as smart as I thought they were.
The death rate is up 20% in the United States among working age people. Can that be hidden, even from average, distracted people?
A 10% increase is considered “catastrophic”, but let’s face it, you have a very callous conscience except when it comes to minorities or officially mandated compassion objects.
I don’t want to know what an officially mandated compassion object is. It sounds scary.
George Floyd? Hello? Or you can choose another of the pantheon of melaninated loser heroes to worship.
Beryl, I believe I’ve heard that they are now dying of too much happiness. I don’t think any of us here are in danger of that.
And seltzer, I heard.
Those bubbles… hard on the heart. 😉
Guess I’ll have to switch back to Prosecco…
SADS has been around longer than covid. Is what is happening in China now w covid hoaxy or is it all stage managed?
Jabs do some of the same damage as covid but they also prime your body to be more easily being infected.
They are programming peoples bodies to do the opposite of what a normal vaccine is believed to do.
More BS.
Try and keep up sad little propagandist turd.
Look around the real data is coming out you just have to pull your sad head out echo chamber leftist nonsense sites you call news.
So provide the data big talker from a reputable source and quit spouting bullshit with no basis in reality.
It takes an immense amount of effort to avoid knowing about this stuff. I don’t know how riverrunner does it. The guy must be worn out.
@ant
No that fool is here to stir the pot and provide cover for some reason.
I suspect it is and has been on this site playing the same scams and games for years as a legion of names.
You suspect incorrectly benr..yet again.
More lies from rr and retread libturd.
Happy new year may your covid shots bring you exactly what you both richly deserve.
Classy benr, classy….amazing but I haven’t been sick in 3 years.
Oh you are sick mentally ill.
Stop gazing in the mirror, RR.
JHK: “….. Or else, are there puppeteers deeper in the shadows, say, “JB’s” former boss Barack Obama, Der Schwabenklaus and his WEF retinue, Bill Gates and other tech billionaires, the “systemically important” bankers, George Soros…? Or some coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of?”
I firmly believe that Barry Soetero, aka Obama, is the chief puppeteer in the Zombie Administration. Susan Rice is quiet and unseen because she is more powerful than most know. Mainly because of her alliance with BHO.
But the real power are the “coven of super-elite warlocks we’d never heard of”. Absolutely. These are the ones who tell BHO when to jump and how high. As well as the Clintons when they had the con. And the Bushes, And the……well you get the drift.
This coven is more wicked and desperate than ever, because they know their time is short. A lot of damage will be done though before they are taken out of the way.
Speaking of WEF, doesn’t the fact that Zelensky now says he intends to join that organization, which has a goal of loss of sovereignty for America, make Congress’ sending Zelensky any more money some kind of crime?
They are supposed to defend our sovereignty, aren’t they?
Speaking of Obama, He and Michele joined Netflix in 2018, as they transitioned from a movie service to a political propaganda outlet.
That Sevant of the People show featuring Zelensky as a teacher who becomes president started showing on Netflix in 2017.
Congress doesn’t give a rat’s ass about defending our sovereignty.
This Ukrainian Operation is a means to an end. That end is all that matters to them, and the “coven” they bow down to.
I can’t see Barry-O pulling anybody’s strings – except maybe Big Mike’s g-string.
Whoever had their collective hand up Barry’s outdoor, has their hand up the Big Guy’s.
I spit out my fizzy-water!
Can’t find a thing to argue with here, Jim, other than possibly the idea that the current band of idiots will be called to account this year. They seem to have effectively fire-walled themselves from prosecution, for the time being at least. I think we’ve still got a few more years of turmoil before we get up the gumption to go after these lowlifes, which will make it all the worse for them when we finally do. The pent-up rage is going to be truly epic!
I think we’ve likely got a major war in Euroland on tap as well, which will ease some of the population pressures over there in the 21st century’s inaugural major blood-letting. Seems to be almost therapeutic for that part of the world, and “the US” seems to be more than gleeful to stoke the conflagration. We can only hope it doesn’t get out of control and go nuclear, but I’d say the odds on that are 50/50 at best. We haven’t been building and maintaining those things all these years just to let them deteriorate on the shelves, and they’re our DC criminals’ last best hope to hold on to power, which is otherwise about to evaporate in the coming years.
But other than those very minor quibbles, very well done!
Concerning the swine who currently rule us, I don’t know how things will pan out. But I do have a powerful gut feeling that they won’t be around much longer. The kind of events and trends that we are facing tend to make short work of governments.
Agreed. Their actions have already undermined their legitimacy completely, thus their reach for “extra-judicial” means to keep the sheeple in line. But I continue to think it’s going to take some external assistance to flush out DC and their WMD’s. Their crimes are truly global in reach, so it’s only fitting that some of those external actors who have shared in the misery all these years get in on the action as well. If Americans alone could have taken them out by less forceful means it would surely have been done already. 2020 proved that that’s no longer possible. Absent the force of arms, the ruling junta in DC doesn’t intend to go anywhere.
I don’t see nuclear war in our future.
I think every country is in the hands of the puppet masters. They will break the governments and they will break the people, but they will not break the assets.
This is a country in which they look at perfectly good structures and announce “This is a teardown”.
And then they tear it down and build a monstrosity in its place.
Yeah, you don’t need nuclear war when you have destructive sociopaths in charge.
Great post as always. This post could easily have been made into a three-part series — easier to analyze and comment on.
“Failed states make terrible neighbors.”
Ah, the exact reason that Poland and Hungary will use to ‘reclaim’ territory at their respective borders with Ukraine — for the purposes of stability and peace!
I can see Poland cutting a deal with Russia.
Maybe after freezing this winter. Maybe after starving next summer.
Eventually all of Europe (that doesn’t include the UK) will let go of our hand and take Russia’s hand instead.
If I were Russia I would simply smirk at the Poles grabbing Galicia.
“You go, boys!” Go ahead and incorporate the worst people in Ukraine, whose grandfathers slaughtered 200,000 Poles with pitchforks and machetes. Except for the babies and children. They just bashed their heads in. But, you know, as the president of Poland said, let’s let bygones be bygones. We’re good buddies now.
Sure, dude.
Poles might find out for themselves why Russia launched the SMO.
Minor typo. It is Ugo Bardi who you can find at httpX://www.senecaeffect.com/.
The road to ruin is rapid so it is hard to say when the she drops. But it will
Alas, financialized prosperity is false prosperity, since it consists mainly of borrowing ever greater amounts of money to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity.
On my website I don’t have such a long fine analysis this morning. All I have is a short story. The story will piss the insecure right wing hangers on here, but I am always pissing them off. So I don’t care.
The Omnibus Bill is an attempt to keep up the mere appearance of prosperity.
* my typo: when the shoe drops
They are trying to prove that MMT (Mondern Monetary Theory) actually works. Before this is all over we will see Basic Income, Free Education and Free Health Care.
But the end result will be the same as Marxism – utter failure and great agony.
Yir,
They have bought into the paradigm, and it will be difficult to revert
to the old system.. Do you know the stated reason for taxes in the MMT?
Income redistribution.
BRH admits to ridiculous increases in property taxes.
Land redistribution.
By 2030, you will own nothing, and you will like it.
You won’t be able to pay for your taxes, utility bills, transportation costs, mortgage, or groceries, let alone have disposable income or (HAHAHA!!!) save anything for the future. It’s no wonder that many people have the attitude of “fuck it!” and just go out and squander whatever money they get: It’s not as if they can ever become truly wealthy, and they also know they’ll never get out of debt, so they may as well have some fun before the bastards in government and banking take everything away from them.
Bob,
From your lips….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm45h8DHiR8
Elysian,
Considering they have to copy your driver’s license, get your birth date, and verify your occupation to buy a goddamn box of .22LR bullets so you can blink on private property, I doubt that’s available here in the People’s Republic of Hochul.
You only mention Marxism to piss me off. I won’t take the bait.
I agree MMT is here to stay, and the dollar will buy forever less.
MMT is not the same as CBCD. MMT is debt-free money, issued to pay for real goods and services, not borrowed money used to prop up the stock market.
MMT is not what they have in mind.
I admire Jim’s optimism.
My only prediction: the man-haters and women-haters on this site will lay off and let the rest of us discuss and debate the things that matter.
Well, first we’ll have to define “What is a woman”, and “What is a man”.
Lol….
Don’t ask the new girl on the USSC, because she doesn’t know.
Who’s keeping you from discussing anything?
I was thinking of discussing my idea for 4th wave feminism with the other ladies here.
I guess that’s out, now.
It’s too bad. After constantly hearing what control we had over men’s behavior, my idea for the 4th wave is for us to get in touch with our power.
Why are we allowing men to be like they are, if, as I’m told. it is up to us?
I was going to get a consensus of what we would want to make men be like, going forward.
I already know what I don’t want them to be like.
Women have the power to destroy men who make the mistake of marrying them. They have used that power. And they use the threat of it to keep their man in line – more of a servant than a husband. Their real husband is the state in other words.
So unless you are willing to admit the above, don’t bother having any such discussion. It would just be an exercise in “false consciousness” as the Marxists put it. Much like talking about how we are living on stolen land and then not moving off of it.
The Truth? We are living on conquered land. Everything you have is a result of that conquest. Thus you owe the Conquerors a debt of gratitude you can never repay.
I don’t talk about stolen land. Who conquered it?
BTW my peeps were here before it was the USA.
Who conquered it?
Wow.
Her people were here before so she’s not part of the bad stuff – but she sure accepts the fruits of thereof.
Classic feminine here. Her vote cancels out yours.
Jarek:
Don’t jump to conclusions!
BTW, the idiocy of California’s reparations to black Americans for slavery looks really nutty when one considers that the whole Mississippi Delta belonged the Choctaw Indians.
They were pushed out to empty the land for cotton plantations. The Choctaw Indians definitely should get reparations.
Yeah we should just go back to Europe, but all of you should stay here as slaves and concubines of the NATIVE AMERICANS.
What a word salad of stupidity. Go attend your klan meeting.
@ Jarek:
Pshaw! You’re not married because trust fund babies generally don’t get married. The reason they don’t is because marriage and family would almost certainly require getting a job, work, and sacrifice. The main objective of the trust-fund baby is to, above all, never have to go to work–or accept any other responsibility, for that matter. The goal is to remain a child.
Grownups have the expectation that they will work and sacrifice in the service of others. It is only children who expect others to take care of them. Adults have graduated into the role of taking care of others. The husband–or wife–who has not accepted responsibility for others is merely seeking to remain a child. Responsibility for other means…duh…that at many levels you will be their servant.
But I suppose if you find it too degrading to provide for a wife and children (mainly due to the fact that YOU want to be the baby), it’s probably better if you stay single.
@ Jarek:
When you were a child, your parents busted their asses to take care of you, to serve you. When you are an adult, the roles are reversed: You are supposed to bust your ass in the service of others. Grow up.
So why are you & other men here whining that some women refuse to marry men? Shouldn’t you be cheering us on? After all, we’re saving you from all the bullshit you claim you have to put up with in a marriage.
You don’t know what you want, except for women to be miserable, since you hate us.
I’m convinced that Jarek is also a ridiculous little racist incel with no social skills probably holed up in his parent’s basement.
Mary: I never focus on women refusing to marry because the marriage strike is men refusing to marry – since that means marrying the state, not just some more or less unpleasant and useless woman.
That’s the real situation now.
RR: Congrats. You’ve become one of the girls.
Thank you for proving my point Jarek.
Lil’ J still hasn’t figured out yet that almost everyone here laughs at him.
I think he gets most angry when people start turning his annoying personal questions and probes back onto him.
Trying to remake men is not going to work, imo. They are what they are. And it happens that there are already good ones out there.
The worst things they do are already illegal. The merely annoying things they do should be discouraged or ignored, not made illegal, imo.
Or ridiculed. That is why we should point fingers and laugh at the men larping as women, those disgusting men prancing around in high heels and lipstick and announcing that they are more sexy than any actual women.
Our ruling overlords have made it illegal to laugh at them. That is wrong.
But I also think it’s wrong to fire a man for blushing in front of a woman. So, there’s that.
I would love to hear your idea for 4th wave feminism.
Looks like my prediction didn’t even make NY! (:
No-one, Mary. But it clogs up the comments section with pointless back-and-forth invective that serves no purpose.
I would say the same for football scores and World Cup nonsense.
There isn’t much to debate, TBH.
Multiple hoax narratives have led the West down the garden path, and now the planned destruction is being sped up as much as possible to ensure that the plan doesn’t fail.
The global plantation must be ushered in, and the many-stranded myth of a lack of resources, overpop., climate change, and out of control deadly diseases will continue to be propped up by the mafia and their paid shills until they break it all — before putting it back together as the New Normal.
And 75 percent will buy it, even here, some of the lies remain virtually unchallenged.
“;even here,”
You said the corporation you work for is part of all this?
That is correct. At the apex of it.
Ofc, the majority of large corporations are part of it. No one would vote for what is coming, so they are not asking us.
Maybe you can be of use by proving information to the rest of us. I can’t see any other justification to be working there. You could do something else after all.
I don’t really care if you see any justification.
@ Night Owl:
Jarek can’t see any justification in working.
Night Owl has, and does, invaluable information from our man inside.
It is wrong of you to demand more, belay that- our homelands are in great danger as it is, and I pray for our people there.
“I can’t see any other justification to be working there. ”
Well, he supports a family . . .
Well he could do something else as I said.
Jarek:
What is your job?
Where do you go to work every day?
Who is your emploiyer?
He volunteered this info. He didn’t have to do that. He shouldn’t have if he didn’t want to talk about it.
I’m not going to belabor it. Now let’s talk about you! Do you volunteer? You live on Martha’s Vineyard? Or Nantucket?
I volunteered it because I have nothing to hide.
As Islander asked, what is it you do, Jarek? Where did you last donate or protest?
Jarek…in the final analysis, Night Howler Monkey is just taking the money, while pretending to himself that he’s in the vanguard of resistance. The fact is, though, that (assuming his self-inflating autobiographical hints have any truth in them) he’s a wimp, a sell-out who won’t resist the fruition of his apocalyptic predictions and is materially aiding in their development.
I hear you if you mean their posts distract or dumb down somewhat.
More than that. If you have spent enough time around liars, you realize that in the end nearly everything they say or do is a lie, or has a lie running through it in some form.
They are lying and they know many of us know, but they choose to double and triple down on the lies.
Because it is all lies.
They have a goal, and the ends justify the means.
N.O. If you mean the stuff they are pumping out nowadays there in the Mainstream media, yes, of course. I was referring to the-battle-of-the-sexes commentariat on CFN tho.
🙂
This from he who said “Trump will be your President” in December 2020. Rich!
A few times over the past three weeks, the place where I usually get my gas was completely out of mid-grade and premium for a few days at a time.
That indicates to me that the refiners are having some difficulty in producing the two higher grades.
Probably won’t be long until all grades will be out intermittently. Then for longer durations. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see this happen by summer.
I had better keep my tank topped up.
One thing we can always count on here at CFN, besides the usual racism, misogyny, fever dreams, etc is gigantic leaps of ‘logic.’
This year’s forecast brings to mind a passage from prophetic poet Robinson Jeffers, written 85 years ago:
Why
do we invite the world’s rancors and agonies
Into our minds though walking in a wilderness? Why did he
want the news of the world? He could do nothing
To help nor hinder. Nor you nor I can . . . for the world. It
is certain the world cannot be stopped nor saved.
It has changes to accomplish and must creep through agonies
toward new discovery. It must, and it ought: the awful
necessity
Is also the sacrificial duty. Man’s world is a tragic music and is not
played for man’s happiness,
Its discords are not resolved but by other discords.
Actually, to know what the hell is gong on in the world – be it good or bad – is a mandatory obligation for any serious individual or Government official. But what is serious?
It is to know what is possibly coming down the pike and to to benefit from this foresight.
Misty pangs and worries of a creature out of The Scream are just that..
Somebody posted a Jeffers’ poem a few weeks ago on this site. A metaphorical piece about seine fishing. I’m not sure when he wrote that one, but it was a gem. I’ve always appreciated his verse. He was no “happy wanderer” like Whitman, but rather dark, moody and inward, and in this case quite prescient. Given what he had already seen in his lifetime, I could see why he, or anybody for that matter, could get world weary.
Like Jim, many of us in the USA wrongly guess the DJIA would collapse.
how wrong we were.
I wonder what will happen in 2023.
Hyperinflation?
TELL ME
Predicting the DJIA and Hyperinflation is very difficult to do. At least putting a time stamp on it.
I think the biggest concern of 2023 is the coming war between NATO and Russia.
Or, what Russia ends up doing as an act of desperation right before it falls again. This is concerning because Putin might be gone when this happens. Contrary to popular left-tard belief, he is one of the sane ones in Russia.
NATO = USA. The question is, when the Ukes start to falter, what is Biden going to do?
Trick answer: shit his pants. The trick part is that he will do that regardless.
Shit his pants, fall off his bike, eat ice cream, shamble off into the shrubs, utter embarrassing non-sequiturs, and accuse others of doing what he and his party of criminals have done and are doing. That’s what Biden will do.
And yet Uncle Boob, ol crusty Biden has been fairly effective in his first two years.
Jo Jo Magoo has been effective, alright.
Effective at causing high gas prices & soaring inflation, allowing immigrants to run roughshod over the country, killing and maiming people with vaccine mandates, destroying small businesses, putting insane trannies in high places, decimating the military… that’s just for starters.
Yes NATO is essentially USA. I assume that most people here know and agree with this.
with afghanistan as the most recent similarity, the few americans we admit to being in UKR will bug out.
biden will proclaim that all UKRs have refugee status, and there will be token airlifts to 3rd countries in prep for a fantasy destination in US.
meanwhile, the Deep state will have brought the next panic event into mass consciousness. could be new plague, fuel crises, financial flops, weather or EQ events. something to serve as distraction from leaving UKR to the poles and russians to sort it out.
we could look back at Iran, when the shah fell for other comparisons.
if nukes fly, and i think it is too early for nukes, they will be “terrorist” events, that we cannot prove were russian.
there will be a few nukes exchanged. the NWO order needs the nuke scare to bring in the overt global control. but this wont happen for a several years.
really, consider chernobyl and fukushima. both global nothing-burgers. strictly local effects.
No nukes, just the fear of nukes. Cheaper and more effective.
i hope so, Blackbird.
but they may make a demonstration to drive the fear into the hearts.
It makes no sense to fear nukes.
They keep using the same tactics of fear over and over.
Just don’t buy in.
The last time “the Left” gained power in Russia, they killed millions of real Russians. Putin knows that as does those behind him. It is his most sacred duty to prevent that from every happening again.
The Mob behind Zelensky is the same as the Mob here and the same as the opposition in Russia.
Anglin’s question: Why did they allow the Western internet that only facilitates the corruption of their youth? China was wiser and created their own.
Why did Putin ask to join NATO?
Why did Peter the Great build Saint Petersburg?
Answer those questions and know Russia’s sorrow.
Lindbergh wanted to rebuilt White ramparts from Galway to Vladivostock. A Seer if ever there was one.
Russia isn’t going to fall. You’re thinking of the USSA.
They’ll both fall, just not at the same time or under circumstances most people will see coming.
There is no evidence that Putin will fail in Ukraine. Quite the contrary. Whether you like him or not, he and his team (Lavrov, Medvedev and Surovikin) and streets ahead of anyone we have in the West. My concern is much more what the Biden neocons will do once the realise the jig is up. They are crazy and unstable enough to press the button.
The adults in charge back in 1972 knew that the US had hit peak oil, and they introduced changes to deal with it.
But they didn’t go far enough, imo. Mandating better gas mileage and lower speed limits? How about investing in public transportation and rebuilding the tracks ripped out by GM and Standard Oil?
They did pass a law forbidding exporting the remaining US oil, but even that was overthrown by Obama and the worthless Congress we have now.
Zoning laws should have forbidden suburban sprawl. Why build out more into precious farmland when you already know that the oil won’t be there forever?
The plan should have been spelled out distinctly – conserve the remaining oil and gas for future generations. Even people without children should be amenable to that.
But then the Evil Reagan was elected, with a slogan of “Screw future generations. We are going to use every drop of oil now, for ourselves”.
And oil usage more than doubled since 1980. Suburban sprawl reaches up to 100 miles from the cities, with nothing but energy-burning McMansion after McMansion for miles and miles.
And now here we are, the future generations. And we are screwed.
It’s difficult to feel sorry for people so reckless, especially when their only reaction to the predicament we are in is to whine about the lack of the cheap oil they feel entitled to.
Rational people assumed the human race in general would be as rational as they were. They did not understand the loudest and most vociferous people of influence were sociopaths that did not care about future generations or anyone else. Sociopaths adept at controlling other people. Rationality became a pastime and doom was baked in the cake.
So you admit radical human inequality? The best Communists do, viewing their lesser brethren as useful idiots.
Can anything really good come from such utter deception? The older systems frankly admit it and make it a cornerstone of their policies.
Deception as a cornerstone of policy.
Hmmmmmmmmmm ???
How does that work in the long run?
As Jim in Florida used to say, A dead tree can stand for a long time.
“And oil usage more than doubled since 1980. Suburban sprawl reaches up to 100 miles from the cities, with nothing but energy-burning McMansion after McMansion for miles and miles.”
And average vehicles got bigger and bigger, and then huge. So much so that often I feel like I’m in traffic with Humvees, Tanks and Greyhound busses trying not to get squashed.
Oh, they call that suburban sprawl the exurbs now. Atlanta had the “Perimeter” when I lived there in the 90s. Now they have the “Outer Perimeter”. I think plans are in the works for a perimeter around that one too.
Why have the HOV lanes failed? Are Americans loners and independent when it comes to driving?
Yes. Americans mostly drive as loners and independents. Not for much longer though.
The pundits here were talking about how mileage per gallon has tripled since the good old days. I didn’t catch what changed to make that possible. Do you know?
Smaller, lighter vehicles is one reason.
The ones the politicians never drive, in favor of the larger SUVs.
Technology. (To answer Jarek). Yes, even larger vehicles get better mileage today than 40 years ago. But, the technology is there to make it even higher, or better. Car manufacturers don’t likey, and neither do the oil companies.
My husband drives a hybrid which gets 40 mph.
I like to point out that our VW got 32 mph back in 1961.
Europe never went as nuts about oil wastage as the US did.
Computer controlled ignition, timing, and fuel delivery systems were the driving factor. These increased both power output and fuel efficiency. Unfortunately, fuel efficiency gains are almost always used to either drive more miles or buy vehicles with greater performance and/or weight, very often both (See the Dodge SRT Hellcat Durango). There’s a fancy scientific name for that principle, but it eludes me at the moment.
Jevon’s paradox.
Thanks Dys and others.
Technology, specifically advances in engines and transmissions, and using COMPUTERS to control them, and aerodynamics.
The internal combustion engine (ICE) has gotten as efficient as it will get.
In fact, the changes over the last 20 years illustrate the law of diminishing returns: each improvement costs more or entails greater risk to the customer (in the form of expensive repairs that will exceed whatever fuel savings accrued—and if you bought it used, the 0.5 to 2-3 mpg improvement saved money for the previous owner).
Here’s an great example—the automatic transmission. In the 1970s, 99% of them had 3 speeds. By 1990, the majority had four. This was a pretty inexpensive trick that should’ve been on cars since the 1960s. In the 90s and 2000s, we got 5 and 6 speeds. That’s a bigger cost increase for a smaller benefit. Now we have 8, 9, and 10 speed. Ditto. So to keep costs manageable, because of “progress”, automakers do things they didn’t do before, like use fewer bolts or plastic drain pans, to save money.
Well, when a stone cracks the plastic drain pan, you have a pricey problem, vs a dented steel or aluminum pan that might leak, but would be less costly to repair with far less risk of catastrophic damage.
Ditto engines. Fuel injection cost more, but considerable benefits. Computerizing the engine was a big benefit for modest cost.
However, much of these improvements have evaporated because vehicles got heavier because of consumers wanting SUVs (basically tall wagons) and all the power accessories and Gadgets and government mandates for crashworthy and air bags.
And the exurbs are far away and you drive more.
The sweet spot for cars and trucks is late 1990s to early 2010s.
The higher costs to build cars was camouflaged by Mexican cars and parts, Chinese parts, and to a smaller degree, Korean cars and parts.
That is fading.
Just as America is getting poorer, the cost of cars is on track to sky rocket
The cost of EVERYTHING will necessarily skyrocket, as the Hawaiian Who Thinks He’s God said. The incredible debasement of the US dollar over the last 20 or so years has guaranteed our return to serfdom. Happy f-ing New Year!
Brevity is not my strong suit.
In the car-dependent USA, more and more ICE offer the illusion of utility, but are actually less useful.
One example: Pick up trucks with smaller, HIGHER beds are less capable for commercial use.
Another: Transmissions today have no dipsticks, making service difficult or impossible. No worries, the fluid and trans is good for “life”. So the automakers have “saved” motorists from $300 fluid change every 100,000 miles, which would translate to a manageable $300 to $600 for the life of the vehicle for a gamble— will the trans fail at 120, 150, or 200k miles? When it does, the motorist has two choices: pay $3 to $8 THOUSAND to keep an car on the road (if it’s in decent shape) or junk it, and spend $x thousand for a new or used replacement.
GM started adding a module to regulate fuel flow, an FPPM (fuel pump pressure module) back in 2007. This improved mpg by 0.5, which might help the EPA rating.
In 2007, If that module cost $100, and another $100 in labor, that’s a $200 bill for something that didn’t exist, and hence could not fail before. At $2 per gallon, In 2007, 15mpg vs 15.5 mpg, 12,000 miles, you saved 25.8 gallons. $50 per year, that I won’t notice. But I will notice a repair bill, the hassle, and downtime.
Is that prudent management of an expensive, vital (in suburban and rural America) product?
No.
But it is typical of the delusion of something for nothing permeates society.
Personally, even as I recognize the reality of the long emergency, and the end of “happy” motoring, I wish I could buy a new, mildly updated version of a 1985-95 Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic or VW Golf, with a reliable fuel-injected 4 cylinder with a catalyst, with a manual transmission and air conditioning that has room for four, gets close to 35 mpg in typical driving. Or a 90-2000 Camry or Taurus. bigger with automatic.
I cannot get such a new car.
The closest thing is a new Camry. It’s quite impressive. It’s BIG, inside it’s like a slightly narrow big American car from the 1970s. It’s quicker than they were, and gets 28/39 mpg.
But it’s got a whole “suite” of electronic gimmicks I don’t want, and will be expensive to fix. A touch screen radio, which I hate. An 8-speed automatic, when 6 costs less and is all I will ever need (my “beater” does fine with 4). Direct Fuel injection—which means crud will build up on the intake valves over time—which costs more to build than “port” fuel injection, and is not as robust. It’s not worth the extra power or mpg to me. And the standard low profile tires mean a much higher risk of dented wheels on Michigan’s pothole roads.
Some or all these issues will pop up in 6-10 years, when the resources to address them will be lacking.
At the same time, the simpler, more fuel-efficient vehicles which will be needed will either be rusty or gone (like my beater) or in short supply (because relatively few were made after the mid 2010s).
The upper middle class will be driving old, “base” 4-cyl cars.
And that is just one more facet of the upcoming reduction in personal mobility (the electric cars being the more obvious one)
Used to be that Athens was separate from Metro Atlanta. You’ve gotta think that Toccoa will soon be part of Atlanta, the way things are going.
Oh, and Gooooooooo Dawgs! Sic ’em! To hell with the ohio state university!
Lemming-like. Listened too long and hard (to the exclusion of reality) to the Pied Piper. Just as we were subliminally and even overtly trained to do so. A trans-generational psyop of Psyops.
The tangled web woven by Rockefellerists has come home to roost—just as I think they knew it would.
Gates said “a 10% reduction,” thinking (along with marketing PR think tanks) that would be a palatable public number. The real number intended I think is much higher.
Municipalities always wanted growth, because they believed a lack of growth was what caused the urban decay in our older cities.
Malls and such expanded the tax base. Nobody thought to question why they had to keep collecting more and more taxes to keep the same level of service.
Reality shows that when communities experience a lot of growth, taxes will eventually go up.
What impelled them to ramp up oil production, and introduce new and stupid ways to waste it? Simply greed?
I still can’t wrap my mind around the explosion of everything-wrapped-in-plastic. That started in earnest in the 1980s IIRC. Why are they wasting so much FF on shit they don’t need to?
And it’s not just plastic. What about leaf-blowers and other un-needed wasters of FF?
Cheap and low energy devices. Oil is the source of everything organic.
Carbon is life
It is unbelievable that they could be that evil, for whatever reason.
And there was really no good reason at all to waste oil. It didn’t have to be like that.
Maybe some sort of self-destructive urge? A hatred of coming generations?
Après moi le déluge?
I have no idea. I just know that it happened and now we are going to experience the consequences of bad decisions made over 40 years ago.
The only answer some people seem to have is to use the last oil to ruin the land and water supply of future generations by fracking, to get a few last bits out.
Despicable.
Also notice, that after they put the emissions laws in place, and emissions went down, the size of gas-guzzling cars went back up and now they are bigger than ever.
Yep, I noticed. That started in the 80s, under the Evil Reagan.
Mary, that’s because trucks and SUVs can do things that sedans can’t, like lugging around families and the modern equivalent of siege engines — kids’ extracurricular activities shit. Since CAFE standards killed the station wagon, Americans were left with either buying outsized vehicles or trying to stuff kids, dogs, sports equipment, food, ballet clothes, and God knows what else into a Dodge Omni. And speaking from experience, Dodge Omnis weren’t exactly comfortable when occupied by only the driver.
When I was a kid we transported ourselves to school, parks and playing fields, either by bike or by car.
Sprawl leads to traffic leads to kids unable to be outside on foot or bike without being run over by a 4 ton vehicle.
Plus chances are that the designated place is too far to get to by foot anyway.
I take it you didn’t bother to teach your kids to stay out of the road, Paula. And as was discussed yesterday, suburbia exploded for a multitude of reasons, not just because Ronaldus Magnus wanted to piss off the Greens.
It’s a confluence of reasons as to suburban to exurban sprawl, and bigger vehicles.
One factor—people (including often myself) want OTHER to people to do the right (more difficult) thing.
Self-discipline is lacking—in how and what we eat, stuff we buy, what we drive…
From 1953-73, the golden summer of Americana in my mind, affluence took away self discipline and the adults, those who live through the depression and fought WW2 didn’t want their kids to suffer.
Now that the reversal of affluence is accelerating, we will see how that plays out.
Uncle Bob, there are cars like the Subaru Outback that are the same thing basically as station wagons were. I call bullshit.
Uncle Bob,
“Since CAFE standards killed the station wagon, ”
Bullshit.
Station wagons are still made. The Subaru Outback is basically the Legacy with AWD. Very good car. Mine is the 1996 manny tranny model. Even the Volvo station wagon is reasonable compared to the SUVs and vans that clog our roadways. Some brands, like BMW and SUV, seem to have bypassed station wagons completely and gone from sedans etc. straight to SUVs.
Many people buy SUVs because they are taxed like trucks. I.e., no tax.
Huge scam. Terrible vehicles that have a high center of gravity and cut off visibility for drivers of normal-size cars.
And many SUV drivers are just terrible drivers. Watch them try to park if they can’t just wheel into a mall parking lot. They have no business behind the wheel of these obscenely outsize vehicles.
And then you see them driving along on a gorgeous day with all the tinted windows closed, AC blasting, oblivious.
The American cocoon.
Get off your high horse and this “evil Reagan” horseshit. Carter was the worst president of the 20th century not named Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Maybe you preferred the grayness and regulation of every aspect of life found in the Soviet bloc, but most Americans didn’t, at least until The Hawaiian Who Thinks He’s God and his puppets came along. In any case, suburbia and urban sprawl really started in earnest after WW2, when people wanted to get out of the cities and have grass, not asphalt and concrete, around their homes. Eisenhower hated passenger rail with a passion, as did a lot of Americans when given the option of being able to drive anywhere at their convenience. Same with killing downtown’s first with malls, then with big box stores. Was all of this stupid, as you posit; or was it people expressing their freedom? Before you start hurling rocks, remember that people in a free society have no obligation to you or anyone else to act or think in a particular way. Especially those of us who dearly miss Reagan, but take every opportunity to tell Margaret Noonan that she’s an arrogant dunderhead (even if WSJ doesn’t like it).
Dearly miss Reagan….grow up big boy. He was awful. I’m sure you clutched pearls over Soviet union life.
I’m not clutching pearls, and I’m a union worker, you dirty goddamn communist.
Oooh….’communist’. Original Uncle Boob!
Reagan DESTROYED small town America and family farms.
FUCK that old POS.
Thank you Mary.
We can see the inability of Bob to have cognitive dissonance between his worship of Reagan and his dislike of what Reagan wroth.
You have to have cognition to have cognitive dissonance.
What Reagan wrought. It wasn’t good.
But hey! You can sit in traffic to drive to your destination, where you can step over homeless people in order to be served by an immigrant who barely speaks English.
Because……freedom!
what Reagan wroth. – Paula
===========
wrought
Acoustic terrorism. Compare the sound of a blower to the lovely sound of a rake.
And consider the morality: Raking and picking up your own leaves as opposed to blowing them someplace for someone else to worry about.
They should hand a leaf blower to ever immigrant coming across the southern border.
I think they do.
No, they should give each one a rake.
You, klanboy, is concerned with morality all of a sudden?
“… compare the sound of a leaf blower …
Raking a large area is impractical for most people who don’t have the time or inclination. On the other hand using the mulch function of a leaf blower (found on many models) produces inexpensive product that breaks down with time and adds nutrients to the soil. And many models are electric, which green people will appreciate.
Most people using leaf blowers are being paid to do it anyhow. To blow the leaves into someone else’s property. So, they might as well use a rake and remove the leaves.
I have sen three guys blowing eaves around an area that I could have raked in a half hour. When I was in Berlin in fall 200y the Tiergarten was raked by hand. The workers rode bicycles to work. I don’t know about now.
The whole Camp Ground—every yard and backyard, used to be raked by hand, by a team of about 20. The leaves were raked into piles and then vacuumed up by a truck, which took them to the landfill for composting. Again, I don’t know about now. But it is perfectly possible to rake large areas by hand. Guys just like noisy machines. It’s a macho performance—they think it might look sissy to rake. Whereas women ‘scapers are perfectly willing and able to rake.
!969 “The Graduate”
Mr. Maguire to Ben: “Ben, just one word…plastics…’nuff said.”
The future in a nutshell.
Bingo! LOL!
Blaming one person, Reagan, Clinton, Obama or Trump is naive, They are the results of two and a half years of being interviewed by a voting public that never, ever votes on issues. This last midterm cements this into place as the worst government ever being basically supported by the people.
These politicians are a microcosm of us! Scary, isn’t it.
Not to mention the mass media’s self-appointed role of steering Americans to vote for particular candidates, even when over 80% of polled voters say a different candidate is significantly better (e.g., John “who in fuck voted for this guy?” Fetterman).
The role of mass media can be summed up by this: I was in a doctor’s waiting room in 2000 when the receptionist and a woman patient started talking about Hillary the Harridan. Both women eviscerated Hillary as a know-it-all, arrogant, condescending carpetbagger who knows less than nothing about New York. On and on they went, enumerating why Hillary was awful. By the end of their conversation, they agreed that they’d vote for Hillary because a) she’s a woman and b) the news said she’s brilliant. Critical thought and personal observation are worth less than what a couple of TV-R majors in fancy clothes say in front of a camera. Sad, and disgusting.
Even at the local level politicians are 100% self serving. They protect and promote themselves and others similarly situated.
Well remember, White flight is a huge factor, one that people don’t like to talk about except to condemn Whites. We flee Black savagery – something the upper classes didn’t have to worry about. But they are beginning to learn, eh Paula!
As a Marxist, you should welcome this payback. I don’t expect you to ever care about your own people per se, of course.
A self-confessed hater of white women lectures me about “my people”?
As if.
Yeah, this is why I hate them (philosophically): attitudes like yours. False values. Ridiculous ideas.
Jarek is a clown….don’t engage.
“forbidden suburban sprawl”
You forget that suburbs were White refugee camps.
You may not remember the riots from forced “school desegregation”, but I do.
Not entirely from the sanctified ones’ innate tendency to go a-wilding, either. The neighborhoods where they walked to school amongst familiar adults who looked and sounded as they did were broken by Great Society largesse.
Parents who bought homes there so that their children might walk to school saw their carefully hoarded property value wiped out. In return, they were offered stalls in the feral Project corrals.
Both black and white lost the tight territories they had developed over generations, the sturdy three-legged stool of home-school-church. And now we have Philadelphia.
That might have been true for some, but I think that most people bought what was available and affordable, and the government encouraged builders to build out, on land that was cheap because it was only used for growing food.
I used to work in San Jose and I worked with people who lived as far away as Stockton.
Is that rational? Only to people who can’t remember anything different.
They wouldn’t have to actually pass laws against sprawl, they could just refuse to pay for the infrastructure involved.
The local governments tax the existing population to pay for the water lines, the sewer lines, the electrical lines, the gas lines, the roads, the new schools, etc., for the new subdivisions and then tell the population “You want this”.
And then doofuses say “We wanted this”.
Yeah, no.
And Filthydelphia runs the whole Commonwealth. Some relatives in PA are fine with this because they’re woke Democrats, while other relatives and friends are irate about the Krasnerfication of the entire Commonwealth. It’s really sad and frustrating to watch the greatest country on Earth become a people’s republic of gibbering idiots and drug addicts, but there’s not much anyone can do as long as people buy the Uniparty’s lies.
Regarding peak oil and the “fossil fuel” designatin, F. William Engdahl just dropped this in my in-box (excerpt):
“. . . Big Oil finds a new King
As a first step, the major American and British oil interests concluded that a plausible scientific argument was needed that would propagate the convenient (for them) myth that the world’s petroleum resources were finite and depleting rapidly. For this job, they chose an eccentric petroleum geophysicist from the University of Chicago who was working for Shell Oil in Texas, a man named Marion King Hubbert, or King, as he preferred to be known.
Hubbert was asked to deliver a paper to the annual meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in 1956, an event that would become one of the most fateful examples of scientific fabrication in the modern era.
Hubbert posited all of his 1956 conclusions on the unproven assumption that oil was a fossil fuel, a biological compound produced from dead dinosaur detritus, algae or other life forms originating some 500 million years back. Hubbert accepted the fossil theory without question, and made no evident attempts to scientifically validate such an essential and fundamental part of his argument. He merely asserted ‘fossil origins of oil’ as Gospel Truth and began to build a new ideology around it, a neo-Malthusian ideology of austerity in the face of looming oil scarcity.
For the giant British and American oil companies and the major banks backing them, the myth of scarcity was necessary if they were to be able to control the availability and price of petroleum as the lifeline of the world economy. The scarcity myth was to be a key element of Anglo-American geopolitical power for more than a century.
King Hubbert admitted in a frank interview in 1989 shortly before his death that the method he used to calculate total recoverable US oil reserves was anything but scientific. It might be compared with wetting one’s finger and holding it up to see how strong the wind is blowing. . . . ”
Hubbert does look like a bit of a charlatan.”
And yet Spindle Top has played out and the oil companies are now drilling miles under the ocean and destroying water supplies to frack.
Why would they do that if there was an unlimited supply of oil?
Your abiotic oil link didn’t say that oil was an unlimited resource. I admit that I didn’t read it all, but I read enough to grasp that even if the oil doesn’t come from organic matter, it still takes time to seep into the reservoirs where it gathers.
It is obvious that the US pumped out all the easy oil already.
You may think that oil companies are stupid enough to ignore easy sources of oil in order to drill in difficult places, but I disagree.
How about investing in public transportation and rebuilding the tracks ripped out by GM and Standard Oil?
There is a good reason that public transportation (buses, trolleys, commuter trains) is avoided by everyone who has an alternative. It is uncomfortable, unreliable, and useless getting to anyplace not on the route.
I hear the chorus singing: “But that’s because it’s never funded adequately! We should quit spending money on roads for cars and put the funds into more buses and bus routes!” (Never mind buses use the same roads as passenger cars. “Yes, but we can create bus-only lanes, like bike lanes but wider!” Shouldn’t cost more than a million and a half dollars a mile.)
What’s that? You say public transportation is dirty, crowded and slow because it’s poorly managed. Uh-huh. Like communism doesn’t work because realcommunism has never been tried.
For my sins, I’ve taken public transportation in New York, Boston, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, and the San Francisco Bay area, as well as various non-U.S. cities. They’re all a slice of misery. I’d rather be in my car in a traffic jam (at least I’d have some personal space and privacy) than in a communal packing crate on wheels.
And yet, the public protested the ripping out of the rails. There is a documentary showing the public protests when the bought-off politicians sold out the public to Big Oil and the auto companies.
It is called “Taken For A Ride” and used to be available on YouTube, but has been taken down now.
When my mom was a child in LA she could take the Red Line to the beach and back. Cars make children immobile, as well as the elderly and those too poor to afford the multiple expenses involved in car ownership and usage.
But YOU like your can on wheels and YOU prefer traffic jams to being on a trolley, so YOU think that everyone is the same as you.
God, I hope not! You seem very unpleasant.
Uh, pot to kettle….
Starting in the Populist Era, Americans were taught that railroads were octopi out to destroy all that was good and decent in America. The drumbeat increased with the Progressives, as rail lines were taxed to death, while public service commissions and the ICC prohibited the railroads from dumping unprofitable routes until the Staggers Act helped the freight roads. (Bear in mind, corporations are legally mandated to earn profits. Sad, but true.). Passenger service steadily declined as cars became more affordable, roads improved, air travel became popular, and the Interstate system was built. Politicians supported the movement away from rail to road and air travel mostly because that’s what the public wanted, not because of Reagan or Trump or Leverett Saltonstall, or the Rockefellers, or Marathon Oil. Now, suddenly, rail is wonderful. But outside of subways and some short corridors (Boston-New York-Filthydelphia-DC), it’s not profitable and is seen as an antiquated form of transportation. The elites’ solution is, of course, to cater to themselves with overpriced high-speed rail at taxpayer expense, while insulting people who question the wisdom of pouring tax money down a sewer for something very few people want and even fewer will use. But that’s all irrelevant because this is something “the right people” want, and what they want, they eventually get — and then they blame others when it turns out their idea was wrong.
The railroads built the rails on land handed to them by the government and the government supplied the cavalry to protect them from the Indians. Then the railroad corporations paid off the Supreme Court to proclaim corporations immortal and commenced to price gouging the farmers.
The government built the roads and the interstate, and allowed private corporations to buy up the existing light rail lines between and in cities and rip them out.
The government paid for the infrastructure needed to enable private corporations to build sprawling subdivisions and handed out GI Bill money for the public to buy them.
The government continues to subsidize cars and planes, while stifling any public system.
And then doofuses like you claim that it is your own choice.
You are like a toddler, thinking that if you can choose between the red shirt and the blue shirt, you are exercising control.
You choose between the Chevrolet and the Ford and think that you rule the world.
Paula D on a roll! I used to be a city planner and I completely agree with your thoughts here.
And then doofuses like you – Paula
===========
doofi
The reason the US has no coherent government policy regarding energy – or really anything – is that in this country, the government doesn’t tell business (Big Business) what to do. That would be “fascism”.
What we have instead is the mirror image: plutocracy. Big Business tells the government what to do.
Dear god…something sane from Paula D.
“That will leave the Republican Speaker of the House, whoever it is, to become president. He will fire every political appointee in the executive branch and replace them with people who will follow the law.”
I’m just curious how that’s possible. Never before, when the Republicans have controlled the Presidency and both houses have they ever used that power for good not evil. What could possibly change that now, when the corruption is at an all time maximum? Team red vs. team blue is an old distraction.
The nation of wishful thinking has no borders.
Yeah, we had a guy who tried to fight the Swamp and failed.
The East Coast and Midwest GOP are RINOs whose goals of a central Deep State outweigh any caring for the people.
The monarchial kingdoms of the late Middle Ages presage what we are seeing now. Most of them were removed with much violence.
He didn’t fight the swamp….that was just bs and red meat for the rubes. He is the swamp. The most corrupt ‘president’ in history.
Oh, for the love of Christ, will you kindly shut the fuck up with your fucking Democrat Party talking points? I realize you’ve never had an original thought in your life, given your political bent (emphasis on “bent”), but this bullfuckingshit you assholes throw out there about Trump’s alleged corruption (omg, he said an election was stolen — just as a bunch of Democrats have done, and some of his voters went nuts and attacked a federal building, also like some Lefties) while you ignore Obama’s connections to Tony Rezko and Bill “let me build you a bomb” Ayers; the Clinton corruption machine; the Biden corruption machine; even the McConnell-Chao-ChiComm corruption machine is nothing but hypocrisy of the highest order, and it shows that the most important thing isn’t corruption, but making sure nobody outside the Washington club ever does anything to change the status quo. “Oh, you’re a Trump worshipping lunatic and a conspiracy theorist.”. As I’ve said here and in comments elsewhere around the net, Trump is done, as is the populist Constitutionalist movement. As I’ve also said, I didn’t support him in 2016, but I did come around for his last two years because his performance, on balance, was good, whether the Left will admit it or not. I sure as fuck didn’t, and won’t, support Mr. Fister the senile pervert you people worship as if he were God Almighty, mainly because he does the bidding of the WEF and the extreme Left, no matter how much it harms Europe or especially America.
Yeah, you’re the perfect example of a TRUMPISTA – your thinking process has become deranged and you simply hold that any factual information about the Clown President ‘just isn’t true!’ See J6 Committee report and his recent tax statements. What a lying grifter he is, and you along with him.
Why do you hate ‘merica Uncle Boob? After two years, Trump was suddenly ‘good.’ My god, what parallel universe do you live in?
You make a lot of assumptions in this trainwreck of an aggro post here Boob. Does sedition and treason mean anything in your warped little mind? Ah, yes, the ‘party of law and order.’ That the one you belong to? What’s that? Oh, if Obama, Biden, (insert any dem here) had tried to pull off 1/6, would your reaction be the same….a shrug, and more lunatic ravings about how ‘I miss Reagan…boo hoo.’
It was under a Republican administration that the globalism push really got rolling.
I’m not sure which admin you are speaking of. NAFTA was passed and Glass-Steagall revoked under Clinton. These two action were huge accelerants toward our current disaster.
Mergers of giant corporations, which among other things, led to the homogenized MSM we now have, started under Reagan but dem admins have played along nicely.
Well, Clinton worked for the Bushes. They pretty much installed him where he was in order to destroy the Democrat party & create two corporate-controlled parties.
Evidence of this “installation” by the Bushes?
I think it was the Dem Party that decided on the “third way” strategy to win over Republican voters .
I disagree.
I think—I recall—the globalist push really got going under Clinton. A combo of foreign and domestic policy chnages that went very far toward moving us to where we currently find ourselves.
Remember Larry Summers and that senator married to a Chinese woman who pushed hard to elminate Glass-Steaall?
NAFTA?
Also, internal consolidation of telecoms so that our whole communications industry is controlled by six giants? Actually I think it is now four.
And other moves. Is there evidence that Clinton owes his political career to the Bushes? Although there was a personal relationship of some kind between Bubba and Bush Sr. Whom he had defeated. I think that relationship may have developed later.
As a Rhodes Scholar Clinton was already a darling of the CFC-Chatham House crowd. He wouldn’t have been chosen if they hadn’t had plans for him. Weakening the country’s industrial base was part of the Globalist plan. NAFTA. Gaining complete control of the media was an indispensable precondition to what has occurred here in the past three years.
“the globalist push really got going under Clinton”
Only at that time I don’t think we understood that this was a “globalist” agenda.
It had some other designation, like “third way.”
Agree.
Trump was not a Republican. His failure to realize this kept him from doing much of anything. His worst enemies, even now, are GOPers.
She’s talking about Reagan, not Trump.
The hapless Trump at CPAC: Why would I ever leave the Republican party?
Because not only are they scum (by and large), but because they also hate you.
R vs. D is a practice in futility.
True, but the Democrats are more open about their contempt for, and hatred of, Middle America, and are better able to use the machinery of government to grind their enemies to dust.
Oh Uncle Bob, you really need to get out of your programmed mindset.
Not really.
I think it is important to understand the history.
Anyone looking for a leader is lost.
No one is going to save us but ourselves.
He certainly lifted the veil on what’s been there all along.
A worthy summary much commensurate with my own, I’m self-satisfied to report. Satisfied, but far from smug.
Hear that train in the distance? It’s grown quite louder over these past 12…
Along with a lot of other old-timer Alaskans I’ve always kept extra supplies and vittles in stock; it’s astounding to most how quickly necessities, let alone conveniences disappear in a crisis/emergency/disaster. We remain on the far end of shipping logistics with the Gulf of Alaska the means of conveyance: 3 days of groceries on the shelves in Anchorage. I’d say 2 days realistically upon the SHTF and freaked-out denizens panic shop. The real deal will make the Covid butt-wipe crisis but a blip, but I must acerbically acknowledge how ‘Muricans responded to that plight—their heads irretrievably planted up their asses. The fact they worried about TP more than the food required to necessitate TP’s usage says a lot about our collective base consciousness. But I digress—
I’m taking your/my prognosticating very seriously. Am giving up my remote fishing village apartment for a 42’ motor sailer, yellow cedar-planked over oak, and will live out my remaining years as able on the waters that fed me and some millions of Americans over these past 55 or so years I pursued commercial fishing. I know where the finned and carapaced live so odds are good the panoply for my dinner plate will remain comestibly consummated for the years I may have left. Venison and moose, ducks and geese above the littoral too. I’ll send you some pictures of the boat, Jim. Maybe that fishing trip we talked of 12 or so years ago might yet remain on the bucket list, your chickens notwithstanding.
Finally, the maxims, tried and true: “Don’t worry about a thing, nothing’s going to be alright.”
And what life has taught me ultimately: “Wanna make God laugh? Tell Him your plans.”
Happy New Year, one and all.
Americans freaked out about toilet paper because Americans were told that Americans were freaking out about toilet paper.
We’re like that.
“Don’t worry about a thing, nothing’s going to be alright.”
I like that.
I think the toilet paper idiocy was a test to see how Americans would react in any large emergency.
I’m very happy that most went for the TP. I’d go for the food.
It sure did let the PTB know that they are dealing with irrational mental midgets for the most part, didn’t it?
I enjoyed reading this masterful assessment of the last 30 or so years and, I believe, prescient estimation of we’re going. I find some hope in it.
There WILL be retribution for those who have brought us to our present state. I know it’s been said before, but we hadn’t yet reached the boiling point. I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate the inertia of the great mass of sheep, but they are about to be awakened in ways they will not be able to ignore. Even the most slumbrous will respond to being cold, hungry, and without any likelihood of relief. I don’t want it to happen, God knows, but when it does many of the absurdities that we’ve been sidetracked by (the whole idiotic trans thing, for instance) will vanish like the chimeras they really are. Hungry people don’t care about your pronouns. The monstrous mutilation of children will end, as people find themselves less concerned with nebulous feelings and delusions about gender and more concerned with feeding and clothing themselves; a harsh but necessary awakening. They’ll make themselves useful to someone or they’ll be on their way to the next life.
It’s quite possible that many of the migrants, both legal and illegal, will begin to return to their places of origin in (mostly) warmer parts of the world. At the very least, their movements are likely to be in a southerly direction – which, personally, makes me happy. When order breaks down sufficiently, if they haven’t made themselves useful (which I consider unlikely) all those armed people down along the open southern borders (and elsewhere) are likely to send them packing to a place from which there is no return.
Once things have settled down, the localization JHK has talked of will come into effect. If you’ve made a wise choice in where you’ve settled, and have become part of a rural community where people have skills and neighborliness, where food is grown, you’ll be as well off as it’s possible to be. Those who have remained in cities or city suburbs will, I’m afraid, be culled, as will the woke – who are profoundly helpless. It will be horrible, but inevitable, because there is no way they can be fed or cared for.
The survivors are likely to be the smartest and most able, which bodes well for the future.
Do you remember in TLE that it will be horrendous because society in general has lost much of the skills that allow an agrarian society to run. That and the denial used to ignore the oncoming situations are going to crush the majority of the population. The cities are going to become huge cemeteries.
There WILL be retribution for those who have brought us to our present state.
Wishful thinking.
There is not a group that can be singled out for bringing on the present state. No group unless you say the entire country brought it on for going brain dead and letting natural consequences happen. Like children who believe in Santa.
Most of those who brought on the present state are dead buried or burned. The satanic cabal now encompasses those who know better and do nothing. These are not the same people as those who brought it on.
the localization JHK has talked of will come into effect.
No, we have no farms. We will have no fossil fuels to operate farming equipment with.
We die.
For every person in Union Grove there are ten thousand who died. In this world there will not be enough hands to bury them.
@K-Chien, Have you ever heard of horses? We certainly do have farms, quite a few small ones where I live – including dairy. We don’t have to have fossil fuels to operate a horse and plow. It would be nice if we didn’t have to revert to conditions of two centuries ago, but we certainly have farm land and the means to grow food. Where I live, quite a few people have surprising skills and knowledge. It would be ugly for a while but, as I said, the smartest and most well prepared would survive and the woke would cull themselves.
I remember Mr. Ed.
The USDA, National Agriculture Statistic Service (NASS) recently completed a census which counts only horses that are on working farms. This definition excludes boarding, training and riding facilities; as well as any other operation that fails to generate a minimum of $1,000 in sales of equine products, defined as “breeding fees, stud fees, semen or other”. NASS reports a total of 459,526 horse farms in the US, with an agricultural population of 2,847,289 horses.
So when the culling gets 99 out of 100 people we are all good then?
Thinking the smartest and most well prepared will survive assumes an orderly transition. Some kind of cosmic justice. It won’t work out that way. Obviously some unfit will go fast. After that the Fates have their say. They like to confound. The world is not about to suddenly become fair as civilization collapses around us. People will be pulling shit.
In about 700 AD there were corn farmers in Arizona that experienced a drought. A farmhouse from the end of their civilization was excavated, and the results revealed a murder scene from the last days of their civilization. The elements buried the crime scene for over a thousand years. The land became barren. America has seen collapse before.
No, that was Turtle Island. We’re the real Americans, not them. Until you know who your people are, how can you be right about anything?
If the people who walked over on the land bridge from Asia are not real Americans, who are?
America refers to a nation – ours. They didn’t have the word or any concept of a modern nation.
They were just living here. We needed to move them and we did.
Accepting them as the real Americans was a tremendous defeat for the real native White Americans. Freedom begins between the ears. So does slavery.
“…the smartest and most well prepared would survive…”
Only long enough to get killed doing something that needed to be done, that no one else thought of, and wouldn’t have done anyway had they thought of it.
He drowns as his boat floats away, carrying a mother and children he had barely met.
Why so negative, China-man? The dead will fertilize the soil where they fall – assuming they aren’t make into official fertilizer as at Waterloo.
You people who undermined our sense of being a people which led to the opening of the borders all share a special blame and place in hell – both leftists, their liberal enablers, and the “conservatives” who funded them and made money off the cheap labor.
Happy New Year everyone.
I read JHK forecast with a sense of trepidation. I was rewarded well.
However, I, along with a few others, believe the forecast to be optimistic. JHK keeps referring to “the people” figuring thinks out and making corrective activity happen..
IMHO, this font of intelligence in this country does not exist. The two sources of economic democratic growth are not intelligent, period. One, our newest folks from south of the border, raised in Socialistic countries, they are products of economic failure. Their levels of education are less than what the USA needs for economic growth. They will continue to come and load down the welfare system. All to provide a lot of illegal votes for the Dems. Two, our illustrious education system that doesn’t. The intelligence levels of kids graduating from high school and college declines every year. The Education Department ordered nation wide testing years ago, and the results are so bad that the testing has been discontinued since Covid. The papers supporting these graduates say they are qualified to take over the country’s economic structure.
Hahahahahahahaha.
Two vexing questions.
Are we living in a time where intelligent people are silenced so that stupid people won’t be offended?
Why are we running out of money for Social Security and Medicare and not for welfare, illegals and free college?
One summary.
There is a coin shortage. America is officially out of common sense.
No.
We are living in a time where the system has decided it is reinventing itself. It decided decades ago.
There is nothing more to it.
The form in which it seeks to reinvent itself is not a form that any of us would vote for or be in favor of. So they are not asking us.
They have and continue to install those who will carry out the plan. And they invert reality through the media organs they own.
They will continue to distract you until the planned collapse has been completed. To participate in the new world, you will have to give up nearly everything.
Unless we say no. The plan is actually very simple to recognize and the perpetrators to identify when one ignores the various distractions.
Unless we say no?
Who exactly is we?
I have not witnessed enough folks smart enough to realize their world is collapsing due to their gimme state.
The people. And I agree.
Trying to stay positive, ofc, but many will sleepwalk right into the trap.
Is working for them compatible with saying no?
I don’t work on any of the associated projects, and I donate and have done my share of protesting.
That old Ayn Rand line comes to mind that to help anyone else, you must first help yourself to some degree.
A man who cannot put food on the table is going to spend all of his time trying to find a way to do that first.
Tell me where you can work that isn’t giving $$ to the .001%.
I would be interested in working for them.
This is the conundrum. Especially depending on one’s field.
They’ve gotten nearly everyone onboard over the past few decades. Even my previous public-sector employers.
Will it change? I hope so.
It takes a heart of fire to stay grey so deep behind enemy lines.
The starving hermit in the woods won’t be able to tell us which direction to prepare for, or which elites may be preparing to rebel, but our man inside can.
To betray such courage ruins the betrayer. End such complaint, I beseech you.
Unless one works for themself, one can’t help but fund the 0.01% to some extent.
Next best thing, try to save a lot and then work for yourself.
S-D, I agree. I’ve been trying to work for myself, but they’ve made it VERY tough.
And of course, as a small (1-person, so far) business, the $$ is unsteady.
As Whitney Webb states in some of her interviews: We must say no.
To which I would add:
While and when we can.
Just reading an extraordinary book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert.
There is much in the story that is relevant to today. The main message, which he makes again and again:
The First Industrial Revolutoin, built on the manufacture of cotton, joined the most advanced technology, in Lancashire, with slavery in the American South.
what made the Industrial Revolution possible was the VIOLENT EXPROPRIATION OF LAND AND COERCED LABOR.
I can see a precedent here, where high-tech notions of trans-humanism require reducing actual humans to slaves and organ farms. But now the lure is accumulation not of capital but of raw power over the earth.
We are seeing expropriation of land in the Netherlands. We see it in another form in the buy-up of farmland by Gates.
Coercion of labor can occur and has occurred in many forms. Replacement of human labor with robots and AIs is also a way of coercing labor.
At this point, as Webb states in an interview with Dr. Mercola that was up at his site today, the aim of the “olis” is not to accrue more money—-they have so much already, having more is meaningless. It is gaining the power to put into place fanatical “utopian” visions of how human society should work. But utopias always turn into dystopias.
One obvious way to say no is to refuse to join the smartphone surveillance /compliance/data provision grid.
So, safe to say that you’re fully trepidated as well as fully vexed now, eh JAZ? Beats being fully vaxxed anyway!
By the way, don’t believe that “no money for Social Security and Medicare” hooey. There’s obviously more than enough for Ukraine and perpetual wars of DC’s own doing, so that dog won’t hunt.
JAZ is one of ours now, betray him not.
LOL! I’m still fighting for his mortal soul, for now at least.
JHK has written an outstanding summary of the state of the world! I can’t even imagine knowing so much.
Agree, but I do find a lot of your posts equally outstanding. Cheers & Happy New Year, Anthea!
@ MaryQueen:
Thank you!
Anthea, When TSHIF there will be a lot of dirty folks needing soap. Have you any experience making soap from wood ash? My project was not very successful, actually it was a disaster. More like shitty/smelly liquid soap.
Sounds like these bars would make a good Krampus stocking stuffers.
Negative value is still value.
@ stelmosfire:
No, I’ve never tried making lye from wood ash. When you make soap to sell, you kind of have your hands full making it the easy way.
It would be hard to make a successful liquid soap using lye made from wood ash, because you wouldn’t know the strength of the lye. That is not too big of a problem when you’re making NaOH bar soap, but it’s absolutely critical with liquid soap. Liquid soap cannot have more than a 3% superfat (the amount of fat left over from what is consumed by the lye). If you have more than 3% superfat in a liquid soap, it will separate.
Try making liquid soap with store-bought KOH. Stick to the recipe, and it’s a breeze. But you’d have to buy the KOH online, as I know of no regular stores that carry it. Brambleberry is a good reliable supplier of soapmaking stuff–and probably has a simple liquid soap recipe you could use.
Thing is I wasn’t trying to make liquid soap! I’ll give Brambleberrys a look. My daughter wants to get into making her own soap. I was trying to be primitive about it since I’m a caveman at heart. Next time I’ll try some Griz tallow. Thanks, Anthea.
@ stelmosfire:
Brambleberry is a really good starting place. Also, join some of the soapmaking groups on Facebook. Have a look at SoapCalc.net, which does all the calculations for you. You just input which fats/oils you want to use, and it tells you how much lye and water to use and allows you to make decisions about water and superfat percentages. I like a very high superfat. I set the superfat at 8% in SoapCalc, but I sub apple cider vinegar for water, which makes the superfat even higher.
Before we had online lye calculators, soapmakers had to calculate how much lye to use with a pencil and paper, after determining the SAP value of each of the fats/oils used. I have done this, and it’s a PITA.
But you can start off with a Brambleberry recipe. (Their recipe blog is Soap Queen.) I think most people start with a recipe they found online. SoapCalc allows you to “turn pro,” so to speak, and create a recipe for your specific needs.
Here is my recipe–though you probably wouldn’t want to start with a recipe with ten different fats/oils/butters.
14 ounces Beef Tallow
7 ounces Coconut Oil
2 ounces Cocoa Butter
2 ounces Mango Butter
2 ounces Shea Butter
~
7 ounces Sunflower Oil
3 ounces Canola Oil
3 ounces Castor Oil
0.8 ounces Flaxseed Oil
3 Ounces lavender essential oil or other fragrance
~
8 ounces Apple cider vinegar
1 ounce sugar
5.4 ounces lye
3 ounces sodium lactate
This is what happens to you when you start dicking around with SoapCalc. You get OCD about creating the PERFECT recipe.
The sugar is in there because it improves lather. The sodium lactate is to improve hardness and because it’s a humectant. Subbing ACV for water is said to make a milder more gentle soap. Personally, I like to include about 15% butters. This makes a luxury soap. You can even feel it in the raw soap batter; it’s like buttercream frosting, texture-wise. The liquid oils are selected for their high linoleic/linolenic content–which I think should be as high as you dare go. But this stuff is all fine-tuning. I didn’t start out like this. It just kind of mushroomed on me.
Even a very simple homemade soap is so much better than store-bought detergent bars that it will blow you away.
If your daughter gets obsessed–a common problem for soapmakers–have her set up at a local farmers’ market. She’s pretty sure to sell enough to support the addiction.
For colorants, check out Mad Micas. They are great. Brambleberry has some nice fragrances. One of their best is Bali Breeze, which is a fruity floral. Their Sea Salt is also very good–always a top seller for me.
Sorry to go on and on…..
Another really fun thing to do is to make “designer dupe” perfumes, which is easy-peasy.
Wellington sells about a hundred “designer dupe” fragrance oils, which when diluted make perfumes. (I especially like the Jo Malone ones, but they also have a dupe of Armani Code, which the men like.) They sell sample-size bottles so you can check out whether you like them before committing to a big bottle. Some of the non-designer-dupe fragrance oils also make good perfumes. Bali Breeze made a popular perfume.
The way you make a bottle of perfume is to fill a one-ounce spray bottle up to the shoulder with cyclomethicone. Then, using a pipette, squirt 3ml of fragrance oil (or essential oil) into the bottle. Screw on the spray cap and shake. You can sell the shit out of these. People love them. I buy my cyclomethicone from Lotioncrafter.
People also love bath bombs, and Brambleberry has a “how to” on those. They take a little practice.
I make some other products, but I sense it’s time for me to shut up.
Anthea,
Thank you for sharing all of this soap info! I will print this out and check out Brambleberry.
The only thing I’ve read about soap making related to starting with pig fat and using cinnamon for color and scent. They weren’t trying to be fancy, just get clean, as they were in dire circumstances.
Thanks again!
@ mrs_saj:
Lard makes a good, mild soap. The only reason that people don’t commonly make a pure lard soap is because the lather is a little lackluster. You can fix the lather issue by going with about 80% lard and 20% coconut oil. Coconut oil soap produces lots of bubbly lather, but a pure coconut oil soap is too harsh for many people. This is why soap is usually made with several oils. You’re trying to get the best of all possible worlds: gentleness, conditioning, lather, emollience, hardness, etc.
Lard is nice for a liquid soap–which you have to make with KOH lye instead of the regular NaOH lye. One of my main annoyances with liquid soap is that it usually comes out too runny. Lard makes a liquid soap that is just right: not too thick and not too thin.
This info is AMAZING, Anthea. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us!!
Lordy, my oldest sister and brother were raised using lye soap. Who knew the simplest things were so hard?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr_XQjBEgzk
Grandma’s Lye Soap
D’oh! I mean to say “KOH bar soap,” rather than “NaOH bar soap.” The sentence doesn’t really make sense as written.
Trade secrets, Wow! That’s quite a recipe. I think I’ll start on something a little easier . Maybe perfecting cold fusion. Thanks for all the hints!
One reason I don’t mind sharing my recipe is because I’m pretty sure no one will copy it anyway.
Another reason is that–unlike many soapmakers–I don’t think I’m Madame Curie because I can make soap.
@JohnAZ,
“IMHO, this font of intelligence in this country does not exist. “
We’ve spent the last ten years or compiling an endless list of purported victims and “marginalized communities”, who demand ever more reparations and freebies, and make ever more absurd claims. In fact, the real victims who have been genuinely marginalized are the intelligent, capable, principled, and sane.
It’s their voices that have been silenced, their skills and knowledge base that have been denigrated. But when things fall apart, those are the ONLY people who can begin to put them together again. They’ve spent recent years hunkering down and trying to survive, but they’ll come into their own. They’re the font of intelligence that truly does exist.
*or so
@ Rowdypiglet:
The great mystery to me is why the world’s elites, who enjoy unimaginable wealth, would wish to exterminate most of humanity. Is there some desire of theirs that cannot otherwise be gratified–even with all the money in the world and the freedom to go wherever they wish? If they are offended by the crush of humanity in Calcutta, why go there? The earth boasts endless pristine beaches, forests, mountains, and spring-fed streams. Even many of the world’s great cities were charming, if you liked that kind of thing, before the elites’ agendas destroyed so many of them.
It wasn’t that long ago that it was probably delightful to repair to your Upper East Side townhouse in NYC in the spring or fall fashion season, for a month of shopping, dining, attending parties and cultural events, and visiting museums and art galleries. You could get your hair and nails done on Madison Avenue and take the Mercedes convertible out of the garage to drive out to Jones Beach, or visit your friends in the Hamptons. The rest of the time, you could rusticate yourself at your place in Majorca or Tuscany, or go skiing in Switzerland or Aspen.
I’m not seeing how the rest of us are spoiling it for them or standing in the way of their complete happiness to so great an extent that we need to be mostly killed off.
Unless, that is, unless your chief and ultimate pleasure in life is the murder, torture, and ruin of others. After all, if you are truly an “elite” and far above other humans, how are you to feel the good of it if you don’t occasionally bare your claws and go on a murderous rampage? Kind of like the way the Spartans made war on their slaves once a year and killed a lot of them.
There is also a human tendency that I have often observed for inferior people to conceive a burning hatred for capable and intelligent people. The reason for the burning hatred is that capable and intelligent people make them look bad. And I suspect that the “elites” are, in reality, a bunch of inbred morons, and they know it.
I suspect that this is also Jarek’s problem: He’s a loser who’s never accomplished anything, or even attempted to, who detests everyone else here because we have lived lives of worth and accomplishment. (He also fancies himself rather “elite.”) And so his awareness of his own inferiority drives him to include a gratuitous insult in most of his posts. He’s actually a familiar type–probably to most of us: the aunt or sibling or co-worker who can’t bear the sight or presence of intelligent and capable people, and who always makes a point of attacking and ridiculing them, simply because such people make them sensible of their own inferiority.
You devoured your husband much as the Female Mantis devours its mate – starting with the head.
There is so much to hate. Not hating what deserves to be hated is complicity with evil. Yours is pseudo-Christianity at its worst. Like seeing life through dirty rose colored glasses.
@ Jarek:
Sounds like you’ve been watching the Nature Channel on TV.
People who never do anything with their lives are very often the victims of toxic parenting, which is to say that they were discouraged by criticism and made fearful of failure. This is often a control mechanism. Keeps the kiddies from leaving the nest.
It’s actually a form of abuse. When you come from such a family, it behooves you to break the cycle of abuse. Some of your comments suggest that you have been subjected to severe psychological abuse. That shit comes from somewhere–or perhaps I should say from someone. The “inner dialog” is often a tape of your parents’ voices–one or both.
@ Jarek:
Your manner of interacting with people is strikingly unhealthy. Perhaps this is how you function in real-world interactions, in which case it is unsurprising that you appear to have no real-world interactions, due to being shunned. Or–which is probably more likely–you have long been aware that people react to you unfavorably and so have isolated yourself. You could only get away with such behaviors vis-a-vis people who are unable to defend themselves, which would in most cases be children. So, if your family members have children, you are probably not allowed to be around them–though, as I have said, this behavior is almost certainly a family pathology, so you may have family members who believe such behaviors are normal.
You are the quintessential evil old woman. A busybody always watching, snooping and involving herself in other’s business – so helpful! – with a view towards their destruction.
And always smiling – like when you accepted a ride from a man and demonized him in your mind all the way home.
Yes, the world is a largely a white washed grave full of rotting impurity within.. You love these clean surfaces because it allows you to get away with your misdeeds.
Jarek thinks that “old woman” is an insult.
LMAO.
The thing so many men don’t get about women is that we’re mostly OK with ourselves. Seems to me their projection onto women that we are lonely or worried about aging is their own problem.
If I were embarrassed to be old, I wouldn’t preface so many comments with stating my age. I’m happy to be the age I am, and lucky for the privilege to become old. As my dad always said, “consider the alternative.”
I find it an interesting American (or perhaps western) phenomenon that people fear or deny getting old. I see it in a lot of the more pervy men on this site. They think talking like a dirty old man about anal sex and orgies & the like in some weird desperation to seem, what, young? “I have a creepy libido!!! I am YOUNG!” LOL.
In any case, they are laughable.
Thanks for the most convincing comment yet that proves you are a narcissist at the very least and a psychopath at most.
You have described Jarek to a “T”. Well said, Anthea.
He has no worth really in the world, so he hates all of us who do.
Especially women and black people, for reasons I don’t care to know.
I like Clusterfuck Nation but there’s always evidence of “Children of Alcoholic Families” thinking (it’s so automatic for all of us). Specifically, WhoTF does JHK think, from the other side of the criminal Duopoly, is going to ” replace them with people who will follow the law”? Anyone recall the Bush/Cheney debacle? WhenTF did that entity ever “follow the law”? In Iraq? Afghanistan? 911? I’m not saying DAD isn’t a drunk… I’m just not in denial that MOM is, too.
Indeed. And think of how many 9/11-level lies they have put out there in the past 5-6 years.
The shots alone are a crime against humanity that, given the scale, supercedes anything we have seen in human history.
This is the takedown of the West and the start of a New Normal. All planned. They are going for it all.
In Ed Dowd recent interviews, he is talking about some stunning numbers. In the USA, 2,500 excess deaths per day in addition to 5,000 more disabled PER DAY!!. If these numbers are remotely true, this is a catastrophe of historic proportions. I’m sure the numbers for the rest of western civ are similar. We can only hope that the ‘died suddenly’ numbers will decline along with the declining number of people getting boosted.
In Germany, they just announced that the “Übersterblichkeit” (excess mortality) was about 20% for this past year. Which is, ofc, absolutely unprecedented.
I mentioned recently that we live near a hospital. Every day we have 10-15 ambulances rushing by. This number was about 3-4 a week a few years ago.
The latter is anecdotal, ofc, but fits with the reported numbers.
All the new causes for dies suddenly are amusing.
I hear its due to hot an cold weather, artificial sweeteners, climate change, stress, …
Don’t forget gardening, warm showers, and sleeping positions.
It’s so ridiculous that it could be pulled straight from theonion.com.
But that is the point. Flood the town square with sewage.
And so many soccer players having health problems. Not sure if you remember the former Holland and Arsenal player, Marc Overmars, but he has just has a stroke. A very sudden and unexpected stroke.
I remember Overmars.
Night Owl,
I live near a hospital. I’ve had one particular friend who has visited since we bought the house 10 years ago. She lives on 2 acres out in the country on a numbered state road. You know the type of quiet country road. This year she asked why there were so many more ambulances. I hadn’t even noticed.
Yes, it’s hard to hide death statistics. But what of the other end: sterility, miscarriage, birth defects, and SIDS?
Neurological, almost always associated with protein misfolding, inherently has a really long latency period. I suspect we haven’t even seen the biggest wave of mRNA-prompted neurodegenerative disease yet.
Indeed, we have a surfeit of spiteful mutants now.
But when Children of Men comes, the twisted young who survive, having no future to live for, will be sex toys and rage zombies of the State, their hearts filled with vengeance.
Not against their masters and makers, no, who provide them with costumes and a role.
At least that mythical England tried to save itself. The best part of the movie was the endless lines of Muslims behind barbed wire awaiting deportation.
The Black Christ Child was grotesque of course.
Easier to hide.
Five years from now, miscarriages and birth defects up – but will we be in a position to notice, or care?
Twenty years out – I don’t think there is any concern among the Masters of the Universe about their program of genocide becoming obvious.
Today I read of a 32-year-old young man, member of “the tribe” (Wampanoag, that is), who died unexpectedly.
That’s all that was written, aside from the expressions of shock.
No speculation as to the cause of death. But people must be starting to wonder . . .
Generally speaking, when someone dies ‘unexpectedly’ they committed suicide. Very common among males.
total horseshit.
Ah yes, Ed Dowd, the world renowned public health specialist and epidemiologist. C’mon man, the dude picks stocks.
I saw an interview of Dowd recently. Someone on this blog recommended him to me. The numbers sound crazy, but when you spread it across a country of this size, it’s hard for the average joe to notice, unless he (or she) is personally involved in the business of death.
Good point. I went to the gym yesterday. Tons of people working out and nobody died suddenly.
Night Owl
Right on.
However, the Deep State is so arrogant now, especially after the election, that do not even bother to lie any more. Just do what they want and to hell with what people think.
Again, the people are so stupid they do not even realize what is happening, nor care.
Are you that much better? With your: Government bad, Corporations good. They’re the same thing, just the left and right sides of the Pyramid, from a frontal or one dimension view.
Why do you so often reach for the straw man? I have yet to see such a black and white argument from JohnAZ.
John is pretty balanced, even if he did fall for the Corona hoax 🙂
One’s in a mood. Don’t sh*t at the family table, ok?
JHK has it right. The problem is the financial invasion of everything. Corporations are just a part of it. Money is just made with already money, and all this does is add to the debt, both the Deep State’s and individual.
Corporations are influenced by the government, look at the USA that sent all their manufacturing, especially the “dirty” part to China. This corporation movement was to get cheap wages, but also to get polluting industry “over there”. The rust belt remaining elected Trump who promptly forgot about those folks that elected him.
I do not pay much attention to corporate America compared to the government. Not near the influence. Both are woke by the way, so they have basically the same agenda.
John has always railed against Government. He doesn’t know the Beast has two hands. Talks about Capitalism as if it was still mom and pop main street. Doesn’t get that Capitalism has mutated to something else entirely.
I have no idea who you guys are talking about. You’re just not seeing what’s there.
The gremlins are small and sweet when little. The wise keep them that way.
“The problem is the financial invasion of everything.”
Why is it so difficult for people to equate “coerced labor” with usury?
Is your money working for you?
It’s not that your money is working for you: it is your money coercing poorer people to work for you. This is why it is prohibited.
Gremlins indeed.
Your fevered imagination is a crime against humanity. Stop with ‘the shots’ bullshit.
I think that there is an innate desire for justice, not just in humans, but in all animals. Try to pet just one dog when another is there. It’s only fair that they both be petted, in their opinion. Did you ever see the experiment where they reward one monkey with a grape and the other one with celery? Yeah, that didn’t fly. And humans have the same sense of fairness and need for justice.
That is why it is so difficult for us to understand that the levers of power are completely owned by a small class of greedy and psychopathic people. This is not an accident.
The system is set up to reward such people and to discourage the honest and decent from participating.
Yes, a couple raised a chimp as their child. It became too much for them (they’re at least seven times stronger than we are) and the put him in a zoo. Knowing the tribal nature of chimps, they kept him in his own cage, but in view of the other chimps, so they could gradually get used to him.
On his birthday, they came to give their chimp son some birthday cake. The other chimps lost it. He was the low man on the totem pole and he was getting cake? Somehow they got out and tore the couple’s face off.
Extreme resentment leading to mayhem. This is Marxism. That the other chimp had a unique circumstance (a human family) didn’t matter to the untermensch chimps as it doesn’t matter to the agitated proletariat.
Paula’s “justice”!
My comment was in response to rudyspeak’s comment, about the likelihood that there will be justice, when both parties are equally corrupt.
But your Super Power is to turn any comment into one of your obsession, so that you can attack and insult.
Worst Super Power Ever.
@ Paula D:
Jarek’s problem is that he’s overmatched by just about everyone here and is sensible of his inferiority. He displays his lack of self-esteem in the customary way, which is to attack and insult everyone who is injuring his vanity by displaying intelligence, knowledge, experience, and competency.
Marxism is ignorance and evil
Paula is a Marxist
Therefore Paula is
I’ll leave it to you to fill in the blank. It’s called a syllogism. Look it up.
Oh come on. If JarJar wasn’t seeing the world through his cracked lens, we wouldn’t have got the chimp story. Tore their faces off. That’s some serious hunger for justice.
What’s his name? Twilight Zone, Burgess Meredith, librarian, broken glasses…
I don’t believe that chimps “somehow” broke out of their zoo cages in order to tear people’s faces off.
Like the old joke “Up to now, everything was fine.”?
Sounds like someone fed Jarek a tall tale and he fell for it.
Actually, that story happened.
I know because I worked in the animal nonprofit world, and it was a cautionary tale. But the pet chimp did not go to a zoo, he went to a sanctuary.
I still don’t know how the other chimpanzees got out, but they tore off the man’s face, ripped off his genitals and some other gruesome stuff. The chimps were shot by the sanctuary owner.
A really horrid story all around.
But still has nothing to do with what Paula was talking about.
Very cringeworthy attempt at a strawman.
Jarek IS a strawman.
Good boy, Wokey. You’re a good chimp.
“That is why it is so difficult for us to understand that the levers of power are completely owned by a small class of greedy and psychopathic people.”
In a true monarchy, “levers of power” are inacessible to the public. And the keys to the control room are owned by only one family. You’ll never have situations with feeble minded psychopaths in the room fiddling around with the controls to see what happens and attempting to get personal gain coming their way. Situations like this are similar to rules preventing children from flying commercial passenger jets.
“an innate desire for justice, not just in humans, but in all animals.”
Such a nice observation! Thanks.
Please remember dogs are pack animals, with innate hierarchy.
The lead dog is always greeted first, petted first, fed first, otherwise they get confused, undeservedly so.
@ Alzaebo:
I have little experience with dogs, but you see the same thing with goats. They are all about social dominance. The alpha female seems to spend most of her time reminding the others who’s boss. And all the others devote a lot of their energies to enforcing their place in the social hierarchy. So there’s a lot of head-butting.
Humans do much the same thing, except that it’s much more subtle. It’s also carefully concealed by good manners, assuming you are among people who have good manners. But if you’re among less civilized people, it can be as blatant as it is among goats–where you have to leave the PTA meeting by the side door, carrying an empty beer bottle that you are prepared to break.
I have a goat named Daffy who is the dominant goat.
When I take them out to pasture he insists on being in front of the rest. If he stops, they all stop.
This pisses me off and I entreat the others to Break free! You don’t have to live like this! Just walk past him and you will be out where you can roam freely!
It never works. Just like with humans.
But humans do have an innate sense of justice. Even Jarek does, in his own twisted way. That is why he gets so incensed at affirmative action. It offends his sense of fairness.
He would never admit that though.
Paula D,
I am picturing you trying to reason with your goats and it makes me smile. I talk to my dog all the time. I swear she understands me and does the opposite of what I say.
Goats are impervious to reason, scolding, and slaps on the nose.
The goats here are not mine but my daughter’s, and she has always had to get rid of the bucks at some point, as they get uncontrollable and/or destructive. Some go to freezer camp and some get sold. She sold the last one, as he was a pure LaMancha. The trouble with him was that the neighbor’s does went into heat, and he suddenly became an escape artist. He managed to escape three or four times during one work day, and my daughter and her husband had to go drag him home. My son-in-law was ready to shoot him. They finally locked him in a shed until they found a buyer.
Don’t tell the men here, but I usually have my male goats castrated.
Usually it makes them better, but not always.
I first read “The Long Emergency” back in 2005. It’s been interesting to follow CFN over the years and see how things have played out. Jimbo has a gift of being able to throw a lot at the wall in his yearly predictions…some sticks, some doesn’t. At least he’s up front about it, stating right in his first paragraph that he’s often wrong, so take some solice in that and relax. Every year brings increased complexity, supposedly to make our lives simpler, and look where we are today. “Get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand”. I like that, and so I will. Happy 2023, y’all…should be a doozie.
Amazingly coherent and cogent this morning lil’ t! Good for you!
Jim wants rapid change giving TLE validation. Stretch out the years and he has been pretty much right on.
Boy howdy. I didn’t see his claims about peak oil panning out like they are, but they are, meaning he was way ahead of the pack.
Able to see a probability that I couldn’t, and I’m grateful he laid it out plainly enough for me today.
In 2008, when I read TLE for the first time, it scared the hell out of me. I put it down three times before finishing it, being a naive suburbanite at the time. Tried to spread the word To F&F, laughed at.
Not any more.
Still a exurbanite, but out of debt and ready.
Thanks for this essay. I’ve been reading the blog for many years and this is maybe in the top ten hall of fame. Spot on analysis of the energy situation. No use sugar coating that. We got maybe another year or two (if even that) with the current energy paradigm. After that, I don’t see how we can even pretend any longer with business as usual. I personally appreciate the optimism that we can build another way of life as these psychopaths facilitate the collapse. There are too many current articles out right now that simply point out how fucked we are under the thumb of these omnipotent central planners and there’s nothing that can be done about it. How is that helpful?
Despite JHKs discomfort with certain authoritarian aspects of the parasite class’s agenda, he seems completely on board with 15 minute cities wherein the slaves will own nothing and be happy. A few months ago he fawned over King Charles efforts in this regard. JHK also just can’t bring himself to admit that AGW is a scam to control the plebs. Furthermore, he can’t let go of the discredited “Peak Oil” narrative. Show me the EVIDENCE that oil is not abiotic. There is none. That is simply a convenient myth. Enjoy zee bugs and free Netflix in your livable cities. I personally am not having any of it. TPTB can kill me, but I will take a few out in the process rather than comply.
Uh, I would ask you to produce evidence of one barrel of oil that is abiotic. Where is the source of carbon to form the hydrocarbon chains, and what Gaia process forms the carbon bonds. Why are all the oil sources only in certain areas where Mesozoic sea life abounded and the sea bottom muck that forms oil when cooked.
Counter argument.
Say oil is abiotic. How fast does it regenerate? Fast enough or are we running it out. Sorta like Lake Mead.
Hydrocarbons can be formed within the earth’s mantle from iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and water under conditions of high pressure and temperature. Small hydrocarbon chains then polymerize into longer chain molecules (ethane, propane, butane). Russian scientists have used this theory to find and utilize abiotic oil and natural gas since the Cold War. More recently, the process has been recreated in a modern day laboratory: Anton Kolesnikov, et al. “Methane-derived hydrocarbons produced under upper-mantle conditions.” Nature Geoscience; July 2009: 556-570.
Of course, the same “experts” that proclaim the COVID JAB “safe and effective” call this a conspiracy theory.
And those experts are paid by the people who want you diseased and living in a geo-fenced 15-minute city. Side note: Also the same folks who believe the earth is “overpopulated.”
Food for thought. 🙂
That’s the ticket- “Fast enough or are we running it out. Sorta like Lake Mead.”
Too many animals at the waterhole when the drought starts is the problem, not where does the water come from.
Natgas is essential for fertilizer- not that we’re running low on its supply, but on engineer infrastructure chains capable of delivering it.
John,
Are you a geologist?
Are you a chemist?
Or are you merely comfortable because, like the covid karens, you are backed up by a majority in expressing a view that is not native to you.
How do you know, actually, that the origin of oil is biogenic?
How? A lot of very sensible people think it is obviously bollocks.
Did you read the article I linked a couple of weeks ago?
Can’t find same article quickly but here is something else:
httpX://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/on-energy/2011/09/14/abiotic-oil-a-theory-worth-exploring
Don’t forget that “Everyone” thought the sun revolved around the earth. They were so sure they were right, they would kill to prove it. Kind of like testing witches . . .
What do you actually know about it, yourself? I bet: nothing.
What difference does it make if oil is abiotic?
It is limited in quantity no matter where it comes from.
Throwing a toddler tantrum because daddy told you there is no more oil candy won’t do you any good.
There is what you want and then there is reality. Sucks to be you if you can’t grow up and recognize reality.
Actually, it probably sucks to be you anyway.
Since industry will soon be over, so will your Marxism. Every dark cloud has a silver lining…..
It makes a big difference, as it means that oil regenerates. The theory has already been proven in a lab. The question is how much exists and how quickly does it regenerate.
Beyond that man-made fuels are also a possibility for combustion engines, an an avenue that makes far more sense than EV tech., which is arguably more environmentally destructive than the petrochemical industry.
EVs are a transitionto 15-minute cities and no personal transporation. They fit perfectly with the plan for the global plantation. There will be plenty of fuel to power the personal conveyances of your masters, however.
Well, it obviously doesn’t “regenerate” fast enough to provide the amount of oil needed to fuel our current system, or we would just go back and pump Spindletop.
Your magical thinking of endless plenty isn’t based on observed reality.
How would you know how fast it regenerates? The research is ongoing.
And the kicker: Above, you did not even know what abiotic oil production was.
Now you are an expert telling others about magical thinking.
You are very smart.
Interesting: knowledge of the actual origin of “fossil fuels” is held hostage to immediate human needs. Whatever happened to pure science?
Anyhow, as I said in an earlier thread, a true understanding of the origin of oil would surely help in knowing where to look to locate more!
On this subject of peak oil and fossil fuels, the CFN commentariat seems to be fairly ignorant while being sure of being right and scolding. Bad combo!!
Here is one of my posts from a few weeks ago:
Back to abiotic theory of oil.
Just watched this video of Fletcher Prouty discussing the invention of the term “fossil fuel.”
httpXX://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSff0pwc1Xc
Read also the comments there. For instance:
“3 years I drilled for oil all over and not once did any geologist ever call it a fossil fuel. It’s a mineral and there is so much of it. We did core samples in southern Saskatchewan in Canada and had tens of meters of oil soaked cores. I’m talking sweet light crude. Think of that to drill 4000 meters straight down and for 100’s of meters it’s nothing but oil. That’s a lot. But nothing was said they boxed it up and we cemented the well moved the rig off they cut the casing and buried it. Makes you wonder why…cause there is more oil than you can possibly imagine under our feet.”
“My father was a pioneer in offshore oil exploration in the 50s and late in life he told me that there is so much oil in the ground that we could never get it all out, even if we were trying to run out on purpose. There is more oil currently known of and untapped than mankind has used up in all of history.”
“My dad was told many years ago by an engineer who worked for GE–when GE actually made appliances–that virtually everything they manufactured could be made to last, virtually, forever. “The problem,” he said, “is that we’d all be out of a job.” BIG BUSINESS can be as corrupt at BIG GOVERNMENT–sometimes even more so.”
” My Grandpa use to drill back in the 70’s. He said BC is riddled with Natural Gas. They would drill, log it, and cap. I was taking to him about the price of fuel. He said it’s all a big plan. Canada should have pipelines running from east to west, and never have to buy a single drop of oil from over seas. They don’t want that though. They want you to buy oil from over seas, and it comes from Saudi Arabia. The kicker is cause of the laws that the liberals put in place, no tankers on the west coast. So that tanker now has to sail in the other direction… the long way around ”
Here is another gem (in the context of the “cap” on the price of Russian oil):
“When I was in college studying Industrial Engineering, maybe it was an economics class, I’m not sure, but the professor proceeded to teach us all of the algorithms that people came up with to determine pricing of products. Maybe a lot of PHD theses, I don’t know their origin. When he got done going through all of the algorithms, he then told us, “You can forget all of that because pricing of products is really quite simple. You charge what you can get.” ”
Ha ha.
Plenty to mull over.
If you think about it for an instant, the term “fossil fuel” is ridiculous. A fossil is stone. Not oil. A layer of plant material that is compressed in some way would not turn into a fossil. It only turns into a fossil if minerals dissolved in water are deposited in the plant so as to preserve the appearance of the plant.
Here is a definition of fossil from an Australian museum:
httpXX://australian.museum/learn/australia-over-time/fossils/how-do-fossils-form/
“The term fossil literally means ‘dug up’, which comes from the Latin word fossilis. A fossil refers to any remains or traces of past life that are preserved in the rock record. Fossils include the organisms remains, such as plant or animal tissues, shells, teeth or bones and even bacteria (!), but can also include traces of life such as foot prints or worm burrows. Fossils tell us about the history of life on Earth, which we refer to as the fossil record.”
The page goes on to explain the five ways a living thing can become a fossil.
None of this has anything to do with oil, except the fact that oil is extracted from the ground.
I am starting to wonder whether the oil qua fossil fuel thing is a huge psy=op and mind-fuck. Coal is obviously closer to the concept. Still, it doesn’t seem to be formed by any of the five processes described by the Australian Museum.
If fossil fuels really came from fossils, wouldn’t we be looking to paleontologists to explain and find more oil?
It seems far more likely that oil is a mineral with traces of organic matter mixed into it.
There is also a paper to download by Prouty, Oil: A Renewable and Abiotic Fuel. .
Reply
Islander December 8, 2022 at 7:52 pm #
Here is a graf from the Prouty paper:
“Since oil is lighter than water, everywhere on Earth, there is no way that petroleum could be an organic, fossil fuel that is created on or near the surface, and penetrate Earth ahead of water. Oil must originate far below and gradually work its way up into well-depth areas accessible to surface drilling. It comes from far below. Therefore, petroleum is not a “Fossil” fuel with a surface or near surface origin.”
Here is my comment with the interestingn long article:
““It doesn’t matter where oil comes from, it matters how renewable it is
Actually, to a scientist of course it matters where it comes from. You seem to be conflating a scientific issue with a political one. A “pure science” approach to solving the mystery might yield better research than one that prejudges the economic ramifications of the answer.
Here is an article that sets out the main arguments for each hypothesis as to the origin of oil:
httpXX://web.archive.org/web/20110706112841/http://trilogymedia.com.au/Thomas_Gold/usgs.html
“Interesting: knowledge of the actual origin of “fossil fuels” is held hostage to immediate human needs. Whatever happened to pure science?”
The term itself is suggestive of the absurdity of the central idea behind it.
‘Abiotic oil’. Is there no amount of bullshit you WON’T accept and prosetylise?
Yeah, you would think that if oil was renewable, all the pumps would be going in the oil regions, Permian basin for example, sucking up all that renewed oil supply. You would think that fracking would never have started if renewable oil existed. Why are we drilling a mile deep in the ocean if renewable oil was available. Why are we freezing our asses off in the Arctic if the oil is available here.
If abiotic exists, it is trivial and will not make much difference.
Finally, I just read up on the abiotic theories. I will not judge other than to say, like climate control, the proponents are looking at data and fitting it to their theories.
Assuming the abiotic process works, and that is an enormous stretch considering all the things that must happen to make one drop of oil, how fast does it generate. Remember Peak oil is the availability of affordable oil by definition. The problem will exist. Like Lake Mead with water, as the usage rate far exceeds its availability. In other words, who cares.
This is the same type of argument as “If there were a conspiracy behind Dallas/9-11/Covid/ et Cetera, someone would have talked about it.”
Shows only the limitations of the speaker’s thinking.
A long time ago I used to hear stories told by a fellow who was a salesman for Caterpillar heavy equipment company. He was selling Caterpillar machines in Europe back when construction started for building North Sea oil drilling platforms. He was visiting the sites where they were putting together the giant steel structures for offshore oil drilling platforms. Caterpillar was manufacturing specialized forklifts and other machines just for use in offshore drilling platform construction. At this time he was telling us about past work experiences, we were all sitting around on a deck in Ohio drinking wine.
Someone brought into the conversation about how so long ago right next door in Pennsylvania, they were using crude wooden drilling platforms coming from lumber milled in local sawmills. Nothing high tech going on there at all. No need for any complicated steel machinery. The oil under their feet was under so much pressure that the lucky drillers could hit a gusher with oil spraying in the air and covering up the faces of the guys out there in their overalls. And they were laughing and dancing like crazy, going nuts like a bunch of wild Indians drinking fire water. Just like prospectors do when they hit a mother lode gold vein. That black stinky stuff flying in the air was black liquid gold. And we’ve long since blown all that Pa crude out our tailpipes and turbines. We used it for lubricating engines. But it’s mostly gone, and it’s not much point now contending about how the oil got down there in the ground in the first place. It’s not coming back, at least not in our lifetimes. We’ll look back at all this and realize our forebears pigged everything up, wasted a good portion of it in senseless warfare, leaving us only enough in year 2050 to run garden tillers and mopeds.
Those wells got sucked dry a long time ago in Western Pa. Gushers don’t occur in any of today’s movies. The public knows damn well the age of gushers is long gone. Go to a drilling site now and you’ll either be out in the ocean or you’ll be on land in a very noisy place with multiple giant hydraulic pumps running with locomotive sized turbodiesel engines driving the fracking pumps. And those pumps run 24 hours a day, smashing rock down in the wells to get the oil flowing. There will be many techicians employed in this high tech process, going around with clipboards and inspecting guages and pipes and valves etc. Sometimes a giant diesel engine will break down and be pulled out for a rebuild or service. Cranes will be there loading or unloading stuff from oversized 18 wheelers. Giant machines that had come in by rail and then trucked to the well site. Let’s face it, the easy oil is gone.
Well Woodchuck, you are right. But they don’t want to face reality.
The abiotic oil people go straight from “It’s not a fossil fuel” to “There is an unlimited supply of it. The reason they are no longer drilling that sweet oil in Texas and Pennsylvania and California is simply a conspiracy meant to keep prices high.
They could go back and drill in the easy places, but they prefer to go to the ocean near Alaska, just for shits and giggles”.
And if you don’t believe that they call you the conspiracy theorist.
Why should we give you evidence when you don’t have brains to understand it?
“Fawned over” is rude and untruthful. He merely pointed out that King Charles has a long history of supporting the small and local that began with his promotion of E. F. Schumacher’s book “Small is Beautiful” many years ago. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that he might not be on board with the WEF, and he has certainly never shown any affection for “15 minute cities”; quite the contrary. He has been a consistent friend of the countryside and of villages his entire adult life.
What’s wrong with 15 minute cities?
I used to live in San Francisco and what I liked about it was that everything I wanted and needed was in walking or trolley distance.
No car needed, and I liked that a lot.
As I understand it, the 15 minutes refers to the time it will take to access any amenity you could want or need.
People prefer driving, traffic, parking, car crashes and smog to having everything nearby?
I don’t understand that.
I think it’s the surveillance and CBDC control that comes along with it.
Its the diversity that comes with it.
The tribal ones will show no mercy to whites, who are the most welcoming and inclusive of all. We are the only ones who treat other tribes as we treat our own.
So stupid are we that we abandon our children to face hostile packs, that we might win imaginary accolades from liars who hated us from the beginning.
Alzeabo…great, another Klan member. CFN keeps attracting the worst.
If RR is against you, you know you’re on the right side.
No doubt he attends lodge with great men, perhaps even Schwab himself once or twice.
“No car needed, and I liked that a lot.”
I am in complete agreement, having spent time living with a girl friend in the West Village of lower Manhattan 40 years ago riding the subway or walking everywhere.
I have now lived in rural Utah for over 30 years and I could not survive without my pick-up truck to haul supplies to my small ranch. To each his or her own. I just don’t want Klaus Schwab or anyone else dictating my lifestyle or what I put into my own body.
I know, it’s for the collective good that my carbon footprint is zero, so I should just grow up and lose the individualism BS….
Do you think Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are going to set an example by limiting their carbon footprint and living in a 15-minute zone?
Hooray, Green Alba! I was about to ask if anyone had seen my girl.
I abase myself. I must beg pardon.
Your servant dares dream too much, when his queen is away. Such effrontery is intolerable.
I meant only to say, our Highness, our Glorious Sovereign, the Queen of all our hearts…
I think you need a nice, calming cup of tea, Alzaebo. 🙂
I have missed GA also.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, GA.
I hope it has been a good one for you.
Thank you, Mary, I had a very nice Christmas and hope you did too. We don’t really do anything at New Year and this year my husband is working NY’s eve and NY’s Day so we’ll be bothering even less than usual.
Slugoon, as a Sassenach, could wish you a Happy New Year now, but tradition forbids me as, north of the border, we wait until ‘after the bells’. Bad luck or something, otherwise. 🙂
I can wish you a Happy Hogmanay, for tomorrow – that’s allowed!
My relatives lived in rural Utah. Many years ago, I would visit the town of about 100 people they lived in.
There was a general store there, a tiny store that stocked the basics. It also had a gas pump outside and it doubled as the town post office.
That is because cars were few and people walked to that store when they needed food or their mail.
But as cars became more ubiquitous the store went out of business, because people drove 30 miles to a bigger store with 30 varieties of cereal, instead of 3.
Also, I hear that the town of 100 has now sprawled into thousands of people living there and driving over the mountain into Provo, where the US government operates a giant spy center.
When I was a kid driving over that mountain was an all day affair, since the narrow dirt road was rutted.
But the taxpayers paid for a multi-lane freeway going over the mountain and now people “choose” to live in the former tiny town, where people knew everyone there and I used to get stopped when I walked around, by people wanting to know whose child I was.
Forgive me if I scoff at the “free choice” people insisting that the reason they live this way is because they want to, and not because their environment was shaped by their overlords to push them into their “choices”.
Thanks, GA. I love that you have a New Year’s Day superstition!
I don’t have a car at all, but I don’t like the idea of living my life by permission of some AI bot that tells me how many times a year I can go to the zone 25 minutes’ walk away where my daughter lives. For instance. And which will eventually stop me seeing her at all if I don’t get jabbed again. The 15-minute infrastructure is part of the electronic surveillance and control system.
Just because the trials are currently about limiting car journeys doesn’t mean that eventually you won’t be imprisoned in your zone even as a pedestrian, especially if they find out that people are meeting people in other zones to er … conspire (talk about the ‘government’).
Thank you. Once again, you lay out what I wanted to say, but was too lazy to.
It’s not about having a nice walkable neighborhood, it’s about what goes along with it.
It doesn’t have to be that way though.
When I lived in SF no one stopped us from leaving the city, or driving.
It’s just that everything was so convenient, and driving was such a pain in the butt. Not just from the traffic or the hills, which made driving a stick shift a real pain, but from trying to find a parking space. There were a couple of hundred thousand more cars than there were parking spaces, so driving anywhere meant a whole lot of time looking for a parking space.
I read about a 90 year old woman who had been born in SF and never left it in her entire life. She just never had a need to leave.
I agree that Big Brother telling us that we can’t leave the neighborhood is an entirely different thing from arranging neighborhoods to be pleasant and walkable.
But you can have one without the other.
That might be an interesting test case. If you read about an elderly buy riding his bike outside his 15-minute infrastructure circle it may be me!
We will stand up for you when the Zoning Police come for you, oleCasey. Although by that time it might be armed robot dogs snapping at your bicycle clips.
Easy, Paula.
The Big Box store, including malls, destroyed the walk up retail market with economy of scales. Many warnings were put out when Walmart started taking over, but in the environment of stupidity and greed, it fell on deaf ears.
When I lived in LA, I was in a neighborhood that was considered by the people who rate these things a 97% walkability rating. It was pretty great, and quite unusual for LA.
Everything I needed was within 1/2 mile or so, including hiking up in Griffith Park.
Paula,
You could leave your assigned “zone” if you wanted to, right?
In fact, you didn’t have an assigned “zone.” That is the difference.
As for Prince Charles, yes, he has always been a friend to the English countryside.
But he is also a significant frontman and spokesperson and keynote speaker for the WEF. How those two things parse is a question, but both things are true.
httpX://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj5cB_TtGAA
Yes, I just responded to that upthread.
I agree that limiting people from leaving is outrageous.
I just don’t see anything wrong with having pleasant neighborhoods.
Another problem is that in cities currently, the crime rates are soaring.
So that doesn’t make me want to live in a city, no matter how walkable it is.
That is true. The population has gone full-on feral.
I don’t know how to fix that, so best to avoid it.
Rowdypiglet
“It’s not unreasonable to speculate that he might not be on board with the WEF […]”
It was Charles Windsor who announced his pet project, the Great Reset, at Davos. He’s a radical malthusian and up to his eyes in WEFery.
Royalty may be grasping at straws to maintain their position of authority.
I remember that Europe at Times was run by one monarchial family, so globalism is old hat for them.
Charles better be very careful with his global instincts, I know there is a big contingent in GB who wonder if they even need the Family any more. The folks hated the EU enough to vote it out, the king better not hurt too many folks with WEF stupidity.
Yes. I think maybe Charles sshoujld cool it on the WEFfuckery.
The Brits are nearing the end of their tether already.
I used to think of him as a harmless eccentric who talked to plants. No more. I can’t even bring myself to refer to him as anything other than Charles Windsor. To even write his full title would give him a legitimacy and authority I don’t have any inclination to give him. And you’d have to hold a gun to my head to get me to sing That Anthem.
Not to mention that he enveigled a 19-year-old into marriage with him while he was aleady engaged in an affair he had no intention of ending with someone else’s wife. A right royal scumbag of the first water.
Loving the countryside as he does, this is how he treated his tenants living in the Duchy of Cornwall. .
theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/09/prince-charles-vetted-laws-that-stop-his-tenants-buying-their-homes
Add to that the fact that the Windsors are a bunch of vaxx pushers. I wonder why.
His father wanted to be reincarnated as a pandemic to kill millions or something, didn’t he?
Yes, he said he’d like to be reincarnated as a lethal virus to reduce human numbers. I read he actually said it in the Foreword to a children’s book!!!
Aspen, JHK has long been a champion of walkable, human scaled neighborhoods, where most of a person’s every day needs could be met with in a 15-20 min walk. “Geography of Nowhere” was published in 1993 and a 20th anniversary version released in 2013. There is also “Home From Nowhere” and “City in Mind.” “The Kunstlercast” was put together by Duncan Crary; it’s a transcript of many of the podcasts he and JHK did in the sights, walkable neighborhoods was one of many topics discussed. (I still miss the old Kunstercast form. :-()
In the 1990s and aughts New Urbanism was kicking off as city planners started looking at what they could do to restore the walkable neighborhoods left behind by suburbia. At the time I had high hopes for a resurgence of such neighborhoods. But alas and damn, New Urbanism has too often become synonymous with gentrification that prices out working people of more modest means. Remodels with high end finishes and higher rents; and tear downs and rebuilds of truly ugly modern buildings. Oddly, they all look eerily the same. I swear there is one architect firm doing all of them.
The commercial part of these developments offer the basic necessities of life such as of Starbucks, maybe a local coffee joint or two, restaurants, bars, hot yoga, regular yoga, day spas, hair salons and trendy barbers; maybe a Whole Foods and CVS. Sometimes a less expensive but still “cool” grocery like Trader Joe’s. If there is a hardware store, it will be stocking stuff to appeal to the Anthropologie shoppers. If you are looking for items needed to fix a leaky faucet, out of luck.
But if you look around, especially in old inner ring suburbs and small cities, you can still see some bones of the walkable neighborhoods that once existed. Where I live there are still old buildings that were once grocery stores, barbers and hair salons, drug stores, etc. All of these are within two miles of downtown; many have been repurposed into offices and other uses. But the infrastructure still exists here for a small walkable city.
Unfortunately it’s now surrounded by miles of suburbs and exurbs, with developers chomping at the bit to pave over and build on every empty scrap of ground they can find. I don’t get it. Do these people really believe happy motoring will continue forever and ever? Or are they laundering money?
I lived in SF so long ago that there was a hardware store on Castro Street that sold everything you might want from a hardware store.
And there was a lumber store on the next block from my house.
I delivered imported cheese all over the Bay area in the 90s. Even then, my civnat soul shriveled at the sight of once-lovely, handcrafted bungalows turned into ghetto slums by the “underserved.” Trash, tires, jacked cars, shabby bums, all of it.
How else to keep the money flowing by forcing the whites to flee, and flee, and flee yet again? Unable to build up society’s savings capital, as they are forced over and over to buy the same things- homes- and all that goes with it.
People think political campaigns against “the privileged people” are displays of mindless virtue signaling.
They are not. They are the coldest form of calculated piracy.
Exactly, capitalism requires growth. In the USA, that has been the transposition of ethnic groups moving away from ethnic groups.
JHK has repeated many times that TLE will be the reaction to no growth or negative growth economies. It is coming.
A body that keeps growing is known to be sick – sick unto death. But somehow economies have to keep growing? Any system that is dependent on that is a failed one.
The irony was that urban renewal projects usually destroyed existing thriving and walkable neighborhoods. The main example of this that I’m aware of was the urban renewal of downtown Kansas City, Kansas, which was in the 50s or 60s. The city took a thriving little shopping district full of a wide variety of small businesses–which it forced out–and created a wasteland of empty store-fronts and bizarrely arranged roadways that were an obstacle course to drive through. (Yes, people formerly drove to the downtown area to shop.)
The only reason I know what happened to KCK’s downtown is because one of my relatives owned a store there. Even in the 80s he was still bitter about how the city shut him down and kicked him out, and destroyed a thriving little business.
Yes, in the documentary Taken For A Ride they showed how the freeway system destroyed thriving cities.
I actually lived right by Hwy 101 when I lived in SF. That is, I lived where it suddenly stopped, right by Market Street. (Then they tore that part down after the 1989 earthquake).
I never knew why it stopped so abruptly until I watched Taken For A Ride.
Apparently the mayor at the time, (maybe Alioto?) listened to the irate citizens of San Francisco, and put a stop to the feds knocking out the heart of the city to put in a multi-lane highway.
That gave SF a few more decades of livability than cities like LA or Detroit.
Now, of course, it sucks, even without a freeway.
Also, there are a few American cities who still have their old pre-auto cores, like SF, NYC and Chicago
It is no accident that those are tourist destinations. Or were, before they descended into crime and destitution.
No one ever goes to the suburbs of those cities as a tourist.
They have no charm or attraction.
Also New Orleans.
In Kansas City, Missouri, the downtown and the corridor between downtown and Crown Center has been massively gentrified. The whole area was virtually a ghost town for decades. There were very few retail store left downtown. About all that was left were government buildings. Now the downtown is the Power and Light District, which is largely night life for young people, and expensive condos from the River Market all the way to Crown Center. The River Market was around for decades before gentrification.
My theory is that the area was deliberately allowed or encouraged to decline until some investors with deep pockets were able to buy it up for pennies.
Have you seen Catherine Austin Fitts talk about the 2020 riots?
She noted that the areas burned were the areas that were ripe for gentrification.
Poor people lived in those areas, with Dollar Generals and nail salons and taquerias and car repair places and pawn shops.
The rioters burned them all down, the people had no insurance to rebuild, and the land sold for pennies on the dollar.
The standard mafia way of business, with antifa and BLM doing the dirty deed.
In Minneapolis, where the riots started, the taxpayer paid for stadium bought up a lot of the former poor areas and turned it into a parking lot.
Weirdly enough, while I was typing this, a old-time song came on the radio that I didn’t recognize at first.
The words were something about how Paris and Rome were no longer as good as they had been. I told my husband “He should see them now! They are pigpens, especially Paris”.
And then the rest of the song was “I left my heart in San Francisco”. Which city is probably worse than Paris now, if that’s even possible.
The destruction of the beautiful cities that our ancestors built is really a shame.
I thought Fitts’s main speculation about the riots was that they took place on main thoroughfares that were slated for the installation of 5G infrastructure. So the buildings were prepped for demolition by rioters and eminent domain takings for 5G.
“It’s hard to contemplate 2023 without spiraling into nausea, tachycardia, and cold sweat.”
‘The Indispensable Nation!’ is like an unfortunate soul who has been given a ‘Terminal’ prognosis. This is a deeply sick and troubled place. And there are no Doctors in the House that can be trusted to do anything other than make America and the World sicker.
“The US leadership dynamic is truly mystifying…”
That’s what Deep State does. Deep State Gotta Deep State. Run the World from the shadows and hide like rats below the street manholes to stay out of sight. With an apology here to actual street rats.
“All you can really say is that the folks running things have hijacked every module of our nation’s interests and tilted them down into decadence and ruin.”
And yet people say that nothing ever gets done. Really? Damn good job here going on of effing everything up for Their fun and profit.
“… the world is heading toward a Great Re-set.”
Every single day the World re-sets. Quantum physics proves as much. The question is always does it reset into Their Demonic Version of the World or does it set itself into the Vision of the Remnant Sane.
“The ‘Green New Deal’ based on a combination of wishful thinking and self-destructive malice…”
It’s more like the Lean Bad Deal being forced upon a tortured and angry and beaten-down collection of Earthbound Souls whose main sin seems to be that we just want the Predator Class to leave us the hell alone. Which They won’t, of course. Deep State Gotta Deep State.
“… It leads to economic conditions worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s… Civil disorder ignites. The government attempts lockdowns…”
If We the People submit to these ‘lockdowns’… the problem is with We the People. If We are that effing stupid to Follow The Leaders right into the bowels of Slavery Hell, then We get what We deserve for being so utterly stupid. And We will be as stupid as They already think we are.
“The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself.”
Yes it is. But one must never lose sight of the Deeper State… the sick puppeteers that pull the strings of the Deep State bureaucracy. They are self-deluded False gods who think the World was created only for Them and that We the People are just filthy bugs messing up the place.
“Most major religions feature some version of the idea of death-and-rebirth…”
Nothing ever stays the same. The question is always… what is the trend line? Is it changing in a positive or negative direction.
And the thing to always remember is that the person who always has the biggest influence over your life is not Klaus Effing Shrub or anyone else but… YOU. You are always the greatest influence over your own life. And You decide your own trend line.
May the Great Spirit lead and sustain us all in the grand tug-of-war over the future of Our Planet in the New Year and always.
And the thing to always remember is that the person who always has the biggest influence over your life is not Klaus Effing Shrub or anyone else but… YOU!
But finding other people to blame things on is a hell of a lot easier.
Indeed. Clot-shot mandate and digital currency/ID advocates such as yourself are always the first to do as you are told.
There is a word for these sorts of people. I am sure it will come to me …
You know more about me than I do myself. That or you can’t except that plastic cards are digital money because that is all I ever claimed.
The word that should come to mind is paranoid because that be you.
The working phrase is “central bank digital currency.”
Credit cards are not digital currency. Central banks do not create the credit that you use when you use your credit card. You have to pay your bill from some bank account that you have in which you have deposited funds from a source that is not the central bank.
No it isn’t, you claimed that we already have digital money in the form of credit cards, so CBDCs are no big deal.
Credit cards are tied to dollars, euros, etc. Dollars, euros, etc. are not CBDCs.
You are an idiot.
What is Central Bank Digital Currency? Beyond the fact that it’s a fancy sounding name… this Bankster conjured abomination is simple: IT IS OUR WEEKLY ALLOWANCE FROM DADDY (GOV).
Daddy will give us our Allowance as long as we behave! and keep our mouth shut! If we don’t do that… DaddyGov takes away our allowance and we get nothing. Not even supper. We get sent our rooms to ponder our transgression. And then DaddyGov decides how we will be further punished.
‘Oh Daddy… I’m SO SO SORRY!…PLEASE give me my Allowance again. I’ll BEHAVE!’
accept
I will add that despite the obvious lack of verifiable evidence industrial CO2 production is a significant contributor to climate, Homo sapiens is obviously polluting and overpopulating the earth. Problem is Bill Gates, Larry Fink, King Charles, Jeff Bezos, etc. could care less about the environment or social justice. ESG is just their smoke screen to distract the masses while they gain total control over all of us and what is left of this beautiful, finite earth ship.
This comment is contradictory to your other comment. Are you the same person?
Nah, the hoi polloi are positioning themselves for survival.
Jim you’ve left out one of the biggest drivers for the acceleration in the desperation of the leadership of the west, the Belt and Road. In 2018 27 of 28 EU countries were exploring B&R deals with China. Italy, Greece, and Poland were looking at huge infrastructure and trade investments. With abundant energy supplies in Russia, propelling the new trade routes, the US stood to lose all influence in Europe. Obama’s pivot to the East in the teens was a failure. The US could not break China’s grip on its neighbors.
What was the reaction of the US? Plug in all new compromised leaders of the EU countries. Back the Green Parties that championed dismantling the energy infrastructure in favor of unproven green technology. Then break globalism with the COVID outbreak and push Ukraine into a war with Russia.
Hmm so the US destroys Europe to save the reserve currency. Then US businesses can play vulture capitalism picking over the corpse. Meanwhile as you clearly state the Shale revolution is ending and by 2025 there will be little excess nat gas to sell.
These decrepit leaders of the west are dangerously running out of workable ideas. They just want to keep their ill gotten gains, Republicans included.
One comment.
Our elected leaders are politicians, lifetime failures, stupid and amoral.
Extrapolating from where we are, the West, the WEF, has shot itself in the foot by cutting off Russia. The EU freezes, Russia sniffs and looks East.
Have you been watching the love fest between Putin and Xi this last week. Joint naval exercises in the China Sea? Xi pats Putin on the back now that Ukraine is stabilizing, Putin to pat Xi on the back for Taiwan stabilizing.
This is simple, neither group fear the US any more and Europe is starting to realize it.
You are Biden, who has personally messed with the world to favor his Mob, and the world has now told him to eff off. What to do?
My cousin’s son, Theo, died suddenly today. He was 18 years old.
Theo went to California in the fall on a baseball scholarship. He had to return to Canada after developing clots in his throwing arm. Theo was a catcher.
Obviously, our family is devastated.
RIP Theo.
My condolences to you and your family.
Do they realize the cause? Or are they going with “sudden and unexpected” and “baffled”?
They are indeed baffled while I bite my tongue.
That is what I did when my niece’s friend delivered a stillborn baby girl.
Very sorry to hear that, OG. Mind boggling at age 18. Condolences to your family.
Thank you, GA.
I’m so sorry for your families’ loss.
My condolences to your family and to you Duane. It is so unimaginably criminal what is occurring right now with these injections.
That’s terrible. So sorry for your family’s loss.
play deadly games etc
I have heard similar from 2 families. clots but not deadly.
So sorry., Saskwatch.
The bastards hide behind the curtain of no knowledge. How much money is spent by Pharma med hiding what they have done?
OMG, I am so sorry to hear this.
Absolutely terrible.
Will your cousin have an autopsy done?
I hope so.
My cousin’s son, Theo, died suddenly today. – SaskWatch
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I hate hearing about people who die “before their time.”
Your news also makes me nervous since I have a 9 y/o grandson named Theo. I know, it’s just a coincidence but nevertheless……….
So very sorry, SaskWatch. What these colleges are requiring of their students is nothing short of criminal. Keep telling Theo’s story.
How awful. My condolences to you and your family SaskWatch. May Theo’s memory be eternal.
This is really hilarious, if you want to have a laugh. Tulsi eviscerates George Santos for his lies, and then Jimmy does the same on Biden.
https://youtu.be/NsVgTbP5pPs
The hilarious thing about Nitrogen is that every human being is a Nitrogen factory! Our urine is a fantastic source of N! I have grown 100+% of all my vegetables for 14 years and guess what I fertilize with? And there isn’t even a yuck factor. You dilute ~10x. Most of us guzzle significant amounts of coffee — another excellent source of N. Another source of N is blood! Yeah hat’s where our future N has got to be coming from. Governments never pass on the opportunity to take our blood!
And the atmosphere is 80% nitrogen, to boot.
We just need those nitrogen fixing plants to help us along.
That’s why George Washington Carver advocated alternating soybeans and corn, and also growing peanuts.
There are plenty of ways to grow food that don’t involve $1,000,000 tractors running over miles of farmland to grow “commodities” to export or feed to animals in feedlots.
Cue the tantrums of those who want things to stay just like they are, dammit!!
They’re entitled to cheap meat made from tortured animals fed on feed that takes 9 calories to grow 1 calorie, dammit!
Soy is not good for you. Corn not great either unless combined with well-rounded meals that contain proteins.
You are not going to feed the world on peanuts and soy. Human dietary needs are complex, and feeding lots of people requires machinery.
You could be right about that, NO. Many people have pointed out that the earth’s population before fossil fuels was about one billion.
That means that the 7 billion people added since fossil fuels were tapped cannot be fed without them.
Most people do not make the leap that you do, however, that since we need fossil fuels to feed 8 billion people, it follows that the fossil fuels are therefore available.
That is Magical Thinking again.
I just gassed up the 540i for EUR 105. Nothing much has changed since I learned to drive except the continent I live on.
This fact is what scared the hell out of me reading TLE the first time.
Soy is good for you if it’s not GMO. Edamame is really good for you, so is fermented soy.
That is true, Mary. Though soy as a staple still needs to be balanced out with other sources of vitamins and minerals.
There is also research that shows that excessive quantities of soy causes hormonal imbalances.
It’s great to eat if you are a woman with hot flashes, actually.
I had a little bag roasted soy beans for lunch a few years ago, at work. My hands swelled up after a few hours and I went to ER instead of going home. They had to cut my wedding ring off and give me a shot of something. I was told I was allegic to them. No more for me.
Wow that sucks! I love soy sauce and edamame.
Not that I eat it a lot, but I like it and it’s great low-fat protein.
A billion Chinese can’t be wrong!