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Clusterfuck Nation
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The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.
This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.
The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.
The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.
All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.
The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.
Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.
There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity and showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.
As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.
This unearned immunity might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family amount to an extreme right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as Reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.
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2023 already seems like the year when everything comes apart. Even the MSM is edging closer to the real truth about the death shots, and the Ukraine thang is dead in the water. The question is, what is the next little wheeze that the culture of death and distraction dream up to distract us?
I agree. And there is going to be a big push to get the digital chains on.
I just read that Sunak in the UK is secretly planning to force the digital ID this year.
The clot-shot narrative is crumbling, so we are going to see a hard push to force what they need to get us where they want us.
There is an online government consultation that ends on 1 March (and which only opened in early January). Practically nobody knows about it. I only found out about it yesterday. The White Rose site has someone going through the questions.
The questions are presented in a confusing manner so a lot of people won’t know how best to answer them.
gov.uk/government/consultations/draft-legislation-to-help-more-people-prove-their-identity-online/consultation-on-draft-legislation-to-support-identity-verification
If there isn’t much opposition, it will become law by the end of the year.
The walls are closing in. Once it’s here, I won’t even be able to log into my laptop without it. And all the rest that you know about.
Ah, yes, a government “consultation”. More like an “insultation”, GA! However, I’m optimistic about all this. Sure, the same sheep he went for the jabs will go for this too (“So convenient!”), but again like with the jabs, there will 20-30% who will say “No!” In fact, it might even be a good thing that it is happening: it will push us to create alternative societies.
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There’s this hypothetical graph with two measures over time…
One measure is a large-scale centralized State government’s ability to distract, deceive, divide, distort and control (etc.), and the other measure is the general population’s ability to see through that…
It’s possible that the first measure looks like, from left to right, a ramp going down and the second measure looks like, from left to right, a ramp going up…
At some point the two measures converge/cross each other as they continue their trajectories down and up, respectively.
Perhaps where they cross is some pivotal moment in history that we have yet to witness/experience.
jezzica- fuck you. go away. how come you can post a link when it takes ours several hours to get approved.
Kunstler writes about 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. And you are writing about what’s happening online at the moment. And so I think about what I was doing online in 1988 or so. There was no commercial internet at the time, and my online activity was happening via a 2400 baud modem plugged into an early and primitive desktop computer compared to today’s machines. It was a big moment when I got a Compuserve account that broadened my online horizons. I had started out with different accounts on local bulletin board systems based in various people’s homes. Some of these bulletin board systems, or BBS’s were networked with and linked to other systems so you could get access to wider networks of linked machines. Back in the day, internet was only available for educational and government entities, In the beginning there was no internet available for the average person, and if you were running from a DOS platform, you had to do a lot of studying starting out just to learn how to tell your computer what you wanted it to do with typed commands.
If we want privacy online and freedom from government control, the only way might be to go back to the old BBS system that was scattered about everywhere and based in people’s basements and bedrooms with no central authority in control of any of it. My two cents on the matter……
I didn’t get online until ’95, but there were still networks of BBS around. A 56k modem was state of the art back then. Thanks for the blast from the past.
Obama is always pushing that internet ID requirement.
They want to know exactly who you are and what you think, so that they can proceed accordingly.
Slugoon, if you are around, you might want to complete this consultation and pass it on to any sane friends you have. 🙂
It’s absolutely shocking that hardly anyone knows about it. You’re too young to remember, but when they were privatising Gas and Electricity and selling shares to the public, there were endless ads using the ‘Tell Sid’ meme. Now that they are preparing legislation to take away our freedoms they don’t want Sid to know.
A “hack” of the entire financial system kicks it off, maybe.
The cyberattack that heir SchwabbenKlausser (siege heil) has promised us may include a massive financial hack designed to put us all in smart cities – pronounced k?ns?n?tre???n kæmps – until who made the mortgage payments and who didn’t can be sorted out.
Ahem,
“Imaaagine ze fwightening szenariö ov a compwehensiv gloewbal cyber ahtahck!”
Cyber Polygon.
If the federal government were to collapse, every state should have a plan to become a sovereign nation.
I think it has been stated that the BRIC’s intent to default on all debts held in dollars, euros, and other Western currencies, and also to nationalize foreign-owned assets.
In a case where a state becomes a sovereign nation, mortgages would be both debts held in dollars and foreign-owned assets. So you tell the banks–at least the ones that are foreign-owned, which is all the big banks–to get out of your state (new nation) and pound sand.
Since you would not want the majority of residences and most other real estate in your state to be nationalized and thus government-owned, the sensible thing to do would be to force the “foreign” banks to sell the notes to community banks for maybe ten cents on the dollar. E.g., if before you owed $200,000 to Bank of America, you would now owe $20,000 to (using community bank examples in my area) Concordia Bank or the Bank of Napoleon. (I would favor writing down the loans even more.)
It would be a REALLY big help of state governments would build gold and silver reserves, so as to position themselves so that people could use silver and gold for the currency.
States would doubtless need to nationalize all federally-owned land/assets, as well as land and other assets owned by, say, the Chinese.
The ownership angle might be the biggest problem seceding states would face–an ever bigger problem than all the people who get their income from the federal government, and their feral urban populations.
Gus,
A financial system hack would be horrible, but denying you electrical service would be terminal.
I don need no stinkin electric.
I know a guy in Japan whose only way of getting free from a smart meter that was killing him was to rip it off the wall and learn to live without electricity. He did okay. It’s going to be cold turkey for the rest of us some day not terribly distant. Best to be meditating upon that now.
Just pull the smart meter off and bypass it. I would think you could even put the meter back in place and have some current go thru it if you needed to. If “they” really did use the meters to cut people off en masse at that point there would probably be little downside to doing the above.
Good grief. Jim, you’re preaching to the choir in this blog. How I admire your books and how I laugh reading this tripe. Good grief, man, get a hold of yourself. Is it ennui? Is it anger that universities don’t give you honorariums anymore to rant? Your basic insight about the coming long emergency is a good one, and your treatise on the geography of nowhere makes great good sense. And no, I don’t think JB is the cat’s nuts, either, but the idea that Kevin McCarthy and the loonies who control him are going to use investigations for anything but selfish political tomfoolery is an optimistic viewpoint, to put it as mildly as I can. I don’t envy your economic to crank out this stuff twice a week, and I enjoy reading it, but come on, man. Get a grip. Yes, the invasion of Ukraine and NATO intervention could lead to nuclear apocalypse. That thought doesn’t make me sleep well at night, but your tone seems to suggest that you’d welcome it because it would blow us up and require local remedies. So I’ll keep reading in hopes that you can calm down enough to give your followers something that doesn’t reinforce their conspiracy theories because that’s what they need, Jim, a father figure and not a Mr. Pillow type guy.
“So I’ll keep reading”
U R funny.
So what is a “Mr. [sic] Pillow type guy,” exactly?
Oh, come on, you don’t know who the pillow guy is? Where do you live? Certainly not in thff e US.
I’ve heard of My Pillow. I don’t think I’ve heard of Mr. Pillow. So, no, I don’t know what the guy is talking about.
Neither does he Anthea, so that makes two of you.
666? Is this a new troll/sockpuppet? So you are complaining about Mr. Kunstler’s “tone”. And then you claim to know what we need – a father figure?
At the end you leave us with a cryptic comment about a “Mr. Pillow type guy”.
Hey dude. Go back to watching tv, mind your own business, and STFU. Maybe you need a mother figure……
666 was probably raised in a commune where there are no mother or father figures, only a vague grouping of heterogenous people. Maybe he was raised by two mothers, who raised him in a satanic cult, and that really messed with his head. That turned him gay and now he has AIDS, hence his AIDS666 handle. Solved it!
…Sooo AID666 had two mommies?
.
It’s a typical troll moniker.
It sees JHK’s exhortations to get small, get local, to decentralize power and let ordinary people govern themselves as a threat the boundless grift machine.
The crimes of the past 6 years require justice. I don’t care who delivers that justice, but we must have it. Who knows what that’ll bring, or playout?
JHK’s compare and contrast between the coming US collapse and the previous Soviet collapse was thought provoking. But ‘thoughts’ are another anathema to those who are protecting the power elite.
Someone above said the states should have a plan. I’d wager some already have plans. It would be a heck of a lot better in Mosby, Montana in the days of collapse, than it would be to be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yes, plans would be nice.
I’d also wager very, very few people are ready for when the trucks stop bringing the staples of life to the supermarket. So the clarion call to be ready must be heeded by the young and the strong. Will they?
As for me, I’m old. I’ve lived in the sweet spot of American prosperity. Our progenitors worked hard to give us this, and a proper thank you would be to pass it on, but I think that’s not going to be possible. So I’m also an ingrate, I suppose, but the people steering this ship of state just don’t have the same stuff our forefathers had.
The Mr Pillow reference is to Mike Lindell, who made his fortune selling “my pillow” on TV commercials, and is a big Trump supporter.
Apparently, 666 is not bothered much by the lies, bullshit, and propaganda the ruling class/deep state continually feed us.
Maybe 666 embraces all the bizarre “woke” dogmas, like naked, adult men in locker rooms with little girls. True Ohio case.
Maybe 666 embraces Hunter Biden’s latest legal efforts seeking criminal prosecution for those horrible people who “weaponized” the contents of one laptop computer, which may or may not be his (that part was a little fuzzy).
Maybe 666 is an idiot troll whose opinion on any topic is worthless garbage.
Probably referring to Mike Lindell, a much loved/hated right wing entrepreneur and Trump supporter.
Too many back-handed compliments too bother highlighting. I’ve a roughly opposite perspective. I deeply appreciate these original, concise, poignant editorials. Much thanks Jim…
Copy That.
“Yes, the invasion of Ukraine and NATO intervention could lead to nuclear apocalypse. That thought doesn’t make me sleep well at night, but your tone seems to suggest that you’d welcome it because it would blow us up and require local remedies.”
Perhaps you haven’t considered, 666, if everything is blown up there won’t be too many “local remedies” b/c the people will be dead, the soil and water poisoned, and no electricity to charge all those new electric cars and stoves.
Your 666 gives you away. The rest of us look forward to Mondays and Fridays……Kunstler is a light that is always on. What makes you think any of us need a “father figure”? Many of us were working against this satanic control system long before we had heard of JHK. His books and this blog confirm our theories.
Sir, (or Siress), respectfully, get a real job.
You can do better than that…how much are they paying you?
Maybe Kevin McCarthy will tear up or burn Bot Bidens speech Tuesday night. Or piss on Kamala Harris DURING the speech. Wouldnt THAT make a statement?
The Repubs, as usual will do nothing, hold hearings, waste time, waste money and give crumbs to the Right. Nada, nothing, zilch, bupkas.
Hunter will write a book, the NY Times will declare him officially innocent of even ‘thinking’ about breaking the law, Daddy Joe will return to running his China funded stink tank and bingo, all is well again at Waffle House, USA.
Last warning Sonny – get out of my head, or I will be charging you rent.
The next wheeze is going to be more like a collapsed lung when the CBCD (Central Bank Digital Currency) is foisted upon us. Look up Catherine Austin Fitts on You Tube, she does a bang up job of shining a light on THAT financial cockroach.
Get ready to be chipped or dipped.
For us American schmucks it’s always Groundhog Day on 9/10 or November 21. We never know what they’re going to hit us with come morn.
If the PTB think they can break up Russia into smaller states to manage and take advantage of, why doesn’t someone try accomplishing this same objective in the gool ol’ US of A already? Time to get rid of the liberal West coast and let them slide on into Gomorrah. Let the central breadbasket of the US do their own thing and prosper while the rest of the North American continent writhes in pain and starves.
They’re letting us stew in our own juices for tenderness first.
I’m not very digestible, Dis.
Yeah, us old cusses get kind of stringy and tough with old age. The young plump ones are much more desirable.
“why doesn’t someone try accomplishing this same objective in the gool ol’ US of A already?”
It’s a work already in progress…
The popular theory is five regions, all nuclear powers…kinda like Ukraine was when the USSR dissolved…
There are big problems with getting rid of the West coast, (or the East coast for that matter). They’d have to settle their share of our $32 trillion + national debt, to say nothing of their share of the additional unfunded liabilities attached to SS and Medicare, etc.. I don’t think they could ever come up with the money, which would place all that debt on the smaller remaining populace. At the same time, they’d be free from any additional debt, but what would happen to the West coast people receiving or about to receive all those promised payments they helped fund during their working years? The only benefit I can imagine would be that the resulting societal meltdown might finally be enough for Congress and president to start to fix our financial mess.
Odious debt. That’s going to be repudiated.
Yup. (I assume by “getting rid of the West Coast,” you mean secession.) That’s what the BRICs are planning on doing; just defaulting on the debts.
As for SS and Medicare/Medicaid, it would cease to exist, as would welfare and food stamps. Also state and local pensions would be defaulted on.
In California this would be a “We’re all gonna die!” scenario.” In other states it would be an “A lot us are going to die,” scenario.
The BRICS are the ones who hold the debt. They can’t default. The borrower is the one who defaults when they can’t pay their debt.
It is the US that will default.
The South tried that and lost. But that doesn’t mean they were wrong, right?
What do you think the Chicoms have been up to for the past 30 years?
The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.
Young twenty something to garden center manager: “Hi there! The wife and I are “going green” and starting our first garden this year, and we’d like to put in a few rows of frozen pizzas and chicken nuggets to diversify our harvest and tide us over the winter. You wouldn’t happen to have seeds for those and any growing tip books or advice to offer, would you?”
Manager: “Yes sir, but as you can probably guess, those are both high demand items and we’re all out of stock right now. I can take your order for delivery when they come in, but because they are in high demand and prices are rapidly escalating, we do require 100% pre-payment up front. Will that be check, cash, debit card, or your first born?”
Manager: “Oh, by the way sir, do you want to grow those pre-packaged in the box, or au natural? Sorry, but as you can imagine, the pre-packaged varieties sell for an even higher premium and the wait times are considerably longer, but they’re virtually pest-free during the growing cycle.”
Lol.
Just reach for those frozen pressed cricket burgers from the kitchens of KlausSchwab Foods. Delicious, nutritious, and microwavable. They’ve got our future planned.
We need to grow pizzas with plastic in them, to last longer on the vine, the shelf, the fridge, etc. Twinkies of the soul…..
I’m adding a wind break of sausage tree seedlings in the spring to provide some much needed shade and protection for my egg vines. They take 3-5 years to start bearing full sausages, so you have to plan ahead. They’re also a natural pest deterrent for the eggs, so it’s truly a win-win solution.
The key to growing frozen foods is to time them to bear fruit just as winter comes on. That way you can leave them on the vine or in the ground until the first spring thaw and save on refrigeration costs.
Dis, that’s brilliant.
“3-d printers are on sale. You may consider investing in one, and in pellets of flavored, vitamin-ed material, and print your dinner in minutes”
“You tell your car AI to have your phone app send the desired menu and for the printer app to have it ready by 8 – IT WILL SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE, AND IT’S GREEN AND ENERGY EFFICIENT”
I’ve heard they have artificial, lab grown meat. Can that work with a 3D printer? Do I have to feed a dead raccoon into one end?
Western Civ is due for a really big lesson in natural selection. When the financial system collapses due to overwhelming dishonesty and subsequent inability to “mark to market”, those who survive will be those who plant gardens and useful skills.
Plant a vegetable garden this spring. If your HOA takes you to task, tell them it’s a victory garden and that they are aiding evil Mr. Putin. Or better yet, take them to court, I bet that growing a garden is protected by your right to free expression.
I see more and more younger people planting container gardens.
The thing with a lot of urban gardens is that if you have a lot of these things called “trees”, and not that big of a yard, you don’t have a space to plant in that gets enough hours of sunlight to grow much of anything.
People don’t notice things like the shadow of their own house as much until they try growing food.
True that. Shade patterns and rain drainage are both major considerations that most people only learn the hard way.
Possibly those with real interest get one more growing season for learning. It’s possible but not guaranteed.
Not George, I take your point.
But it takes more than a season to learn. You never really learn, never 100%. If anything, you learn to observe.
And you have work very, very hard with your body, not just your mind.
But yes, the right knowledge has a way to find a way to the right recipients.
Beginning gardeners need to read several very good books on the subject. They don’t know how much they don’t know.
One woman who had been gardening for several years once told me how frustrated she was with planting the seedlings she had started indoors. Most of them died. I asked her, “How are you hardening the off?” She wasn’t. She didn’t know you had to harden them off.
My market gardener friend–who has probably been gardening for 40 years–has been on Facebook sharing her frustration with starting lisianthus from seed. She casually mentioned that she planted year-old pelleted seed. Now, year-old seed (or several-years-old seed) is often just fine–if it’s not pelleted. Pelleted seed, at least for lisianthus, is no longer viable after a year. I’ve been on Facebook griping about my peppers not germinating, and my market-gardener friend told me that they are notoriously slow.
I think a good book for an overview of gardening is John Jeavons’ “How to Grow More Vegetables,” preferably the oldest edition you can find, because later editions get overwhelming. Plus you need to mostly disregard some of his more troublesome methods, like double-digging, unless you are really, really into very small-space, very labor-intensive gardening. This method would actually be great for a beginner, because it solves your main gardening problem, which is crappy soil. But you need to be physically able to do it.
Jeavons also describes methods for starting seeds that assume you can’t just pick up a few Jiffy-7 seed trays at Walmart, but would rather build wooden boxes lined with oak leaves and filled with the compost you made, mixed with perlite and vermiculite. And he figures you’d rather mix the wood ashes you saved from cleaning out your wood stove with some blood meal and bone meal, instead of just buying a bag of organic fertilizer.
But apart from making some things a lot harder than they need to be, his books are excellent. They tell you how to do literally everything.
The J.L. Hudson catalog also has good basic directions for starting seeds. Almost everything in his catalog is listed by its scientific name, which will encourage you to learn your binomial nomenclature.
Beginning gardeners also may not know that they need to grow open-pollinated varieties, if they want to save the seeds. And the longer you garden, the more loyal you are to particular varieties.
The knowledge base involved in gardening is just staggering.
One way to get around the HOA rules is to combine the vegetables with flowers. I can warmly recommend Pamela Crawford’s Easy Container Combos: Vegetables & Flowers.
What is… HOA?
Home Owners Association
I live in a “Village”. Some years ago a local res. put the idea of chickens (at the time not allowed) to a vote. 51% okayed 49% No.
So what the apparatchiks on the Board did was require a minimum of 5 acres. Of the 4000 residents in the Village, 6 parcels were 5 acres or larger and two of those parcels belonged to Board members.
If you had the 5 acres, you could have 5 birds at a fee of $5 per bird. The penalty for undeclared illegal Cacklers was $150 per bird, per day.
I told the board that I considered the birds as part of my Garden and the Fee was a “Garden Tax”, they didn’t agree.
Sorry. I have to sympathize with those people who don’t appreciate being awoken every day at dawn by crowing roosters. Are the females completely quiet? It would be a species rarity.
Of course, if the shit totally hits the fan, and we have to go medieval and plow up every suburban lawn to grow food – I’ll change my opinion.
No Roosters allowed by edict. But, you’re correct re; hens squawk too.
It’s been my experience that the hens sound-off after they lay an egg. I don’t know if they do it because they’re proud or because it hurt like hell, lol.
I think it’s pride. Have you ever heard Kamala get off a good zinger insult at conservatives? Same joyous cackling.
I forgot to mention, I once heard that the difference btw Civilization and Chaos was something like 5 missed meals and 72 Hours.
Chickens also provide a lot of Comedy, to keep ’em in the yard, I trimmed their wing feathers on one side. Flap, Flap, Flap.. Crash.
72 hours = 3 days = 9 meals
20 minutes without TikTok
Well you don’t need roosters to get fresh eggs and a barking dog is much louder than a chicken whose clucking is closer to a purring cat.
Yes but, in order to grow replacement birds you need the rooster. I’ve never been very adept at artificial insemination. The cloaca are still a mystery to me. (as are sooo many other things..).
Keeping roosters and breeding baby chicks can be a specialty job for someone who lives far from others.
By then we won’t have electricity and when it gets dark everyone will be so exhausted from actually working all day that we will all crash.
Thank God for the roosters awakening everyone at first light! Gotta get going to bake that bread and get chores started!
Yep, things are never so bad that they can’t get a whole lot worse.
Jeez, if you’re annoyed by the sound of chickens then…..what can I say? You must not be around any to make such a comment. They’re not noisy at all sans roosters. A dog is a heck of a lot noisier.
There are many other noises in cities and small towns that are quite a bit more disturbing than a rooster crowing. There are police and ambulance sirens, noisy cars, garbage trucks, road graders, guys revving their engines or burning rubber to impress girls, etc.
At my last house, I could often hear neighbors’ conversations three blocks away. (Sound carried well in certain conditions.)
Here, we have frequent gunfire (target practice), dogs barking, and coyotes howling.
I can’t imagine why a rooster would bother anyone.
Of course, I’ve also always believed that most people’s pet peeves, dislike of certain foods, and even their allergies, are just stuff they like to talk about because they think these things make them interesting and unique individuals–and that these little peculiarities are stuff they invented so they can claim to have a personality.
Like your well cherished hatred of the man who drove you home the “wrong” way. No doubt one of many such hatreds, eh?
@ Jarek:
You know you’re a bore, right? (That’s in addition to being a pathological liar.)
bb,
Kafkian
Nice idea but an HOA has more legal clout than the local city/county govt. and they can and will fine you into bankruptcy if a garden is against the rules. Brother in KC put up a 12′ tall board fence so he could grow tomatoes in private. Should have moved in my humble opinion.
Private is always right. Ask John Az. Big Tech is private. That trumps the Bill of Rights. Ask Az.
I don’t know why the British didn’t use this way back when. Just tell the printers not to let the Revolutionaries print anything with their paper or printing presses. Tell the cobble stone makers that the patriots can’t stand on their cobble stones and rant.
500,000 troops is not an invading army. It is an occupying army. Kind of feels like Ukraine is done. Bakhmut…whodathunkit, I mean, besides thinking people…the same ones who thought enough to hold strong in the face of medical tyranny and not get all shot up with poison. Lots of people are going to die. Gonna be hard for awhile. For some of us, the last few years have been an opportunity to see how tough we are. We’re gonna be fine. The gender confused and the average vaxxxed up suburbanite who believes the system is there to serve them, ehhh, not so much.
Not sure it’s an just an occupying army, Liz. I’d say it’s more a You-Can-Try-Something-If-You-Want, NATO-But-It-Won’t-End-Well kind of army.
De-nazification and de-militarization, 2 goals stated upfront.
My opinion, (I’m not alone) is the first few months attempt to salvage the territory and its infrastructure was a mistake. ‘Nice try’, so to speak.
Now it going to be done by force since there is no reliable party to meet regarding negotiating a settlement.
I don’t think the Russian Federation wants to occupy. They do want to be entirely done with Banderistan and the US/UK/NATO FOB.
Until they divvy the place up (allowing annexation by the neighbors) a significant size force will be in place to keep, as you point out, the US/UK/NATO axis from making any moves to re-militarize the territory.
It wouldn’t have been a mistake if the conflict was only between Russia and Ukraine.
Ukraine was willing to negotiate and tried 3 times at the beginning.
Each time their US/NATO masters told them to break it off and keep fighting.
All that blood is on NATO’s hands.
If it were the case, yes. The overthrow of the government by the US in 2014 would be the indicator the Territory would not be allowed to act on its own.
True. Russia should have known.
Not George, did you see the report that the US offered Russia 20% of Ukraine in return for them stopping the further liberation of Donbass?
Mighty big of the US to offer Ukraine to Russia.
Oops! It proves Russia’s point that they are fighting NATO, not Ukraine.
You can’t kill a great idea like National Socialism. Nor crush a people who want to be free like the Banderas.
Of course the latter were and are fools and assholes who tried to take the whole place and tried to use International Criminals to do it. They got used instead.
In any case, they will conduct an unending guerilla war in the homeland no matter how things turn out in the rest of Ukraine.
Fuck the Banderas. Lager camp sadistic guards, butcherers in the villages, knifing Poles, Jews, and Russians after marching them naked on Main St. and flogging them. Families, old women naked, flogged, murdered. Think of your grandmother.
Fuck National Socialism. It’s a moral flaw to be one. A mortal sin, if the apologist of mass murder dies without confession, perhaps.
God, if there’s a God, doesn’t approve of that ideology. But even without a God, basic human decency abhors and recoils at this manifestation of evil.
Repent, so called Catholic Janos (a pagan god, the two sided one), for your own good.
Tens of millions of German civilians died after the outbreak of your peace at the hands of people like you.
You may fool these people, but you don’t fool me.
You’re not Catholic. Your rendering of Thomas Aquinas’ name is Spanish was an exercise in the most grotesque schmaltz. Not your best effort.
But in general, I have to hand it to you – you are a master of such things. I could not have written a post like yours in praise of women. Is it genetic I wonder – pass down on your Y gene? Hitler admitted the superiority of Allied propaganda. After he saw the movie, the Battleship Potemkin, he said, That was great. I want to go out and become a Russian communist now.
What part of “We are going to weaken, sanction, and starve Russia into submission and then we are going to break it up into pieces so that we can exploit their resources” do you not understand?
It seems quite obvious to me. It also is very clear to the Russians that they are under attack.
I think the 500,000 is Russia saying “You want to destroy us? You and what army?”
Liz-
The US is already prepping Poland to be the next proxy up against Russia.
Poland has the added bonus of being in NATO, so a Russian reaction could be used to invoke Article V.
After most of NATO’s weapons have been destroyed by Russia, or sold on the black market, NATO will be left with little ammo or equipment, so that war won’t last long…
Heres another one folks!
newsweek.com/yolk-defense-covid-chicken-egg-shortage-conspiracy-theory-1778612
Yolk Defense Against COVID? Chicken Egg Shortage Fuels Conspiracy Theories
As Americans continue to suffer from the reduced supply of chicken eggs, and the resulting spike in their price, many have subsequently turned to the world of conspiracy theories in search for simple answers to a complicated issue.
The ongoing shortage—that in recent months has driven up egg prices across the U.S.—has seen the basic foodstuff price reach a record high in December, when the average cost for a dozen eggs in U.S. cities hit $4.25, up $1.78 from a year earlier.
As market and industry experts explain, this rise is largely driven by a combination of factors, including a major bird flu outbreak that has killed millions of birds across the U.S. and wider inflationary pressures in the economy.
Or they really are trying to kill as many people as possible.
Lest we forget chicken farms burning down with a couple of hundred thousand chickens getting roasted.
Poor lil gals did not deserve to be housed and used so poorly then to be burned to death.
They also murdered millions of chickens against the Avain flu.
Murder must foul or is that fowl?
Another farm lost power and the poor birds died from overheating.
People should treat chickens and animals better they have personalities.
I heartily concur. “All creatures great and small.”
If eggs were being sold at $1.78 a dozen, the chickens must be kept in unfathomably disgraceful conditions.
I pay £3 for half a dozen eggs (although the supermarket would presumably be cheaper) and I think that’s cheap for what you get. Dirt cheap eggs = unacceptable standards.
Yes we buy ours from the local farms around here.
The funny part is that the local places often have them cheaper than the chain grocery stores, and we can be relatively sure that they aren’t being fed some kind of chemical stew.
I have a little flock of poultry that includes eleven hens. They all have names. They are aging, so we get 2-4 eggs per day, depending on the time of year. If I didn’t have to worry about wild predators and loose dogs, I’d let them totally free to range about. They eat grain, grass, bugs, and kitchen scraps.
Despite the prices in the grocery store, I GIVE THEIR EGGS AWAY. I guess I’m just old fashioned and out of sync.
Agreed, GA. I understand that each person makes their own choice. I buy organic, cage-free eggs. I think they taste better. But mainly I want to support companies that treat their birds well. Frankly, I think the product is healthier and brown eggs (or other off white colors) has never been an issue for me. I can’t always buy organic meat, but I do buy grass fed for largely the same reasons.
Also, I try to stay out of the middle of the grocery store (processed food aisles). My grocery bill is higher than it could be, but I consider it an investment in my health and humane food companies.
“I pay £3”
Alba,
How much is that in real money…(referencing the “Ugly American) comment from the 50s)? Standards have no linkage to price.
If I may interrupt. Today, one British Pound is worth $1.21. So $3.63 for 6 eggs is 60.5 cents per egg or $7.26 per dozen
That’s pretty expensive by my standards. Yesterday, I bought a dozen large white eggs at WalMart for $4.10. They probably came from unhappy, oppressed chickens. It’s sad, but life sucks all over.
I didn’t have to go to Walmart, hm. I walked 2 minutes to the corner shop. That’s why they cost a little more. Like I said, I could get them a little cheaper in a supermarket (but they might not be local eggs, as mine were). I saved some petrol for you to use, as I have for the last 20 years. 🙂
Your views on animal cruelty are something I can’t do anything about. Chickens tend not to ‘feel oppressed’, they tend to feel pecked (or have their beaks removed), and to feel sick, because they get more diseases living in unnatural proximity to thousands of other birds.
They will also be pumped full of prophylactic antibiotics to make up for said shit conditions. Those antibiotics will contribute to the possibility that one day, when you really need an antibiotic, it won’t work.
Personally I’d rather pay a little more for what is a very cheap product, even in its most expensive incarnation.
EF
“Standards have no linkage to price.”
It is possible to have low standards and a high price. iif you are particularly uninterested in business ethics – or indeed ethics in general. It is absolutely not possible to have high standards and be able to sell eggs profitably at $1.78/dozen.
Alba,
I agree in essence. I can become violent when I see animals abused.
HOWEVER, I am loathe to trust advertising copy…
“The chickens are free-range, lovingly cared for by their farmer friends, who are paid a living wage while working in the shade…. The chickens, who are all named and respond to our kindness, WANT you to eat their eggs…they are freely offered daily….
Etc.
The majority of ‘free range’ chickens aren’t living in chicken paradise – certainly in the UK there are minimum standards which sometimes don’t mean much more than that there is an exit from their shed where they can get outside if they can find it. But I have even seen examples of non-free-range sheds where there was a reasonable number of chickens per square metre sufficient that they could move around and weren’t actually attacking each other.
There is a happy medium, even where chickens are not kept like JHK’s happy chooks.
Well said. Take what you want but pay the price – Emerson. The price in this case is moral.
The early Quakers were very strong on this. They wanted to preach all over England but felt that the horses and stable boys were being abused. So they walked instead of taking coaches.
130 attacks on food processing plants in two years.
Nothing to see here.
Scare tacttics are currently being employed re avian flu allegedly having ‘passed to mammals’ and ‘what will this mean for humans?’. Maybe they will fit in an avian flu scare before we get the SEERS ‘Catastrophic Contagion’ in 2025. We have to be made to forget that life wasn’t always about pandemics.
They tried that shit with covid, remember?
Supposedly your cats and dogs could give you a human disease. Kill them now!
Also a tiger in a closed zoo in New York supposedly got covid from a zookeeper who was not sick. Because of course they spent time together in a closed room with no circulation, as zookeepers are wont to do with the tigers.
That’s the kind of bullshit they throw out to see if it sticks.
It didn’t fly 3 years ago. Most of the replies I saw on social media (which they monitor for our reactions) were “This is the hill I will die on”.
Or: “This is the hill they will die on and then they will be dog food.”
I believe some zoo animals were given mRNA covid injections and died. Don’t remember the details.
Yes, later. I think they killed some endangered gorillas.
But the “Omigod a tiger got the rona!!” was in early 2020, before the GMO product was rolled out.
“when the average cost for a dozen eggs in U.S. cities hit $4.25, up $1.78 from a year earlier.”
I always thought the price was too low for a dozen eggs, if they are good quality.
Now it is too high . . .
Going off to my local egg supplier with 8 greenbacks in hand to put into the “honesty” box for a week’s supply of eggs.
Still seems to me like a good deal . . .
Now I am seeing headlines claiming that the bird flu has now spread to mammals.
Wondering if that’s yet another attempt to rid us of our pets.
I mentioned that just above! I think it is to start another flu pandemic scare and allow them to kill off more poultry.
Just been having a whatsapp exchange with my daughter. She thinks I am doing something reprehensible in discrediting science when there is such an attack on it already!
My wife and I have 5 hens. We get about 3 eggs per day, more than we can eat. So we eat a lot of eggs and use some for barter. Price of chicken feed hasn’t risen at all.
Rumors of chicken feed made by Purina is reason for poor egg production by hens! An egg/chicken farmer on Tucker show says his hens are producing much more after changing feed.
GA, you are right to be suspicious of what the experts and scientists tell us. Look who pays their salaries. Big government and big corporations funding academia or employing them directly.
The authorities had great success with the pandemic narrative. And those people are generally unimaginative, repeating what has worked well in the past.
As always, the sheep embraced their servitude and ignorance, obeying Big Brother. I still see a few in masks – the true believers, the Branch Covidians. I’ll bet they long for the return of those good old days when they could be Nazi mask enforcers.
My daughter would never want to force anyone to do anything – she’s not like that. But it terrifies me to see how easily she falls for all this stuff. I hadn’t sent her anything for ages, because she has told me she finds it really upsetting (the WEF agenda and so on) and considers there’s nothing she can do about it if it’s true, but she totally believes there was a scary pandemic and that the government and its scientists tell the truth. I think living in Singapore for 6 years has made her more compliant. Singaporeans have high levels of trust in their government, in a benevolent dictatorship kinda way.
GA, who was it who tossed off a description of Singapore as “Disneyland with the death penalty”?
Nanny goes wild.
“ I think living in Singapore for 6 years has made her more compliant.” That’s funny. I would suggest that your daughter is brainwashed; although perfectly compliant, of course…
“She thinks I am doing something reprehensible in discrediting science ” This reminds me of a WWII adage among bomber crews: “The flak is heaviest when you’re over the target.”
I missed yours, which was better. And Paula’s spot on, they have been floating this out for years to see what the reaction is.
Americans turn to conspiracy theories because the media puts out pure bullshit like “a bird flu outbreak killed millions of birds”.
That is a lie. Those birds were murdered under the excuse that they were being saved from a scary disease. They were not sick.
Sound familiar?
One is reminded of the Holodomor. The Capitalists are every bit as ruthless as the Communists.
Yes, one is reminded of the Holodomor.
People who fall for that will fall for anything the government tells them.
You love Big Brother, Stalin.
Putin condemns him.
You love Timothy Snyer, who invented the Holodomor, supports the 1619 Project and is still pushing the Russiagate bullshit.
You shouldn’t throw stones.
The Holodomor is disputed to exist?
Never heard that one before. What a whopper.
Of course it is disputed and it is no surprise that you don’t know.
We are surrounded by a sea of propaganda and “Everyone I know believes it so it must be true” is the result for the vast majority of easily bamboozled and gullible people.
I am not impressed.
“Agenda history” is as useless as “agenda science.”
There was a famine in the Ukraine.
The jury among genuine historians is be out on the exact causes, and the exact extent (only Ukraine? rest of Russia? other areas of western Russia?). .
The temptation to build on Holocaust history and to piggyback on the term itself is too great for some to resist.
Bear in mind that the word “holocaust” to refer to the Jewish genocide of WW2 (does not encompass other genocides or mass starvation, expulsions, fire bombings of civilians populations, etc. that occurred in the context of WW2) was coined well after the fact.
People use the word with great confidence. The convenient word lets them think they know what they are talking about.
Same goes for “Holodomor.”
Big new word! Whee!!
The famine was in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. Many people starved in all three countries. Note that you don’t hear about the people in the other two countries. That should be a clue to the agenda.
There was a horrible drought that year, same as in the US.
Famines were common back in the old days. We will find out what it means when we return to ”local farming”. It’s all well and good until someone loses a crop.
Anyway, the Soviets tried to buy grain on the open market to feed the people but the Brits had sanctions on them and no one was allowed to sell to them.
But it wasn’t turned into a “Holodmor” until Timothy Snyder wrote a book in the 80s and the media started hyping it big time.
And now we have a big portion of the population convinced that a Georgian tried to kill Ukrainians, (but only for that one year), and that is why Ukies hate Russians.
Except that the big Russian haters weren’t even part of Ukraine at that time, they were part of Poland.
Stalin said, he would just give the farmers enough food to remember what it tasted like. Not enough to keep them alive. A master of sadism, eh?
Islander: Still clinging to the Neo-Marxism of your youth I see. Still refusing to do the inner work of uprooting things that have been proven to be untrue. It’s hard work and you cherish yourself too much it seems. As a reader of unz.com you have no excuse. None!
Jarek:
WTF is neo-Marxism?
“my youth”??
Take your meds and go to bed.
It makes more sense to be a conspiracy theorist than to be a coincidence theorist.
The subtext of labeling differing narratives as “conspiracy theory” is that somehow conspiracy doesn’t exist. And so the idea is a phantasm of the mind.
But the American Revolution was a conspiracy. And the assassinations of Julius Caesar and JFK were conspiracies. And countless other examples from history.
To believe the word of known liars is to be gullible, but common.
To be labeled a conspiracy theorist is a compliment in such a world.
Total
“Control the oil and you control entire nations; control the food and you control the people.” ~ Henry Kissinger
======
“Sound familiar?” ~ Paula D
——
Ya, it does; like the ‘pandemic’.
======
“Too much sorrow, too much pain
Piss, death, decay
Love is lost again, this never-caring rain
Nothing ventured and nothing ever gained
Blocking out the past, I’m spinning out again
Total…
Fast food junkies and sugar-laced delights
Fat is beauty, and truth becomes the lie
Bewildered following
Savior to the One
Merge into the One Totalitarian
Total…
There’s enough conflict within to wish for strife without
Avoiding people who like the plague
We blindly follow blind, conforming citizens
Merge into the One
Totalitarian
Total…” ~ ‘Total’, by Killing Joke
youtu . be/tof7-wn_1s0
Totalitarian
There are several research papers that examined the effects of chicken egg yolks on spike proteins.
They are easily found on PubMed.
I’m enjoying my breakfast poached egg even more since I read one of these articles! Perhaps that’s why I’m still here, despite two jabs – I have a poached egg at least 2 days in three.
But I’m sure they’ll find a way to poison our eggs as well, via injection of chickens or graphene in chicken feed, or whatever. There are things I know I just can’t do anything about, so I’ll just enjoy my eggs anyway.
Bill Gates has some huge initiative over here ‘vaccinating’ farm animals.
Or they will inject humans with the molecule you can get from tick bites, that triggers meat allergies in some people.
They’ve already discussed the possibility of doing this. I wouldn’t get any new vaccines if you paid me.
Bill thinks eggs cause high cholesterol.
I don’t give a flying eff what Bill Gates thinks.
About anything.
He obviously has a problem with estrogen mimicking.
And vitamin D deficiency.
Not to mention the autism.
Are you listening, Bill?
Even as a teenager, I used to wonder why oh why, on tv, they kept having the same talking-heads on who didn’t appear to have much, if anything, in the way of qualifications for what they were talking about.
Fast forward to the present and there’s someone on Twitter, if recalled, who has ostensibly themed their channel/nickname on Bill Gate’s apparent ‘man-boobs’.
It’s possible it’s the same one who may have gotten one of those artificial intelligent online art services to do a comic-book-style morph of that Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman character with Bill Gates. It’s quite effective/successful perhaps in part because there doesn’t seem like there’s much to morph between the two.
Sometimes Gate’s looks like he got one of those old-fashioned bowl cuts.
But enough about Gates. 😀
Bill Gates and Alfred E. Neuman:
Obviously separated at birth.
I got an ad on Facebook the other day from Merck.
They wanted to remind me that it is calving season and to vaccinate my calves to protect them from “tough weather”.
Tough weather? I don’t have calves, but I’m pretty sure that I would not vaccinate them against tough weather.
You have to wonder who would fall for that! Apart from Greta, obviously.
Maybe Bill Gates is vaccinating the chickens against weasel attacks and stormy weather.
Speaking of chickens. Did you know if you soak a recently deceased chicken in very hot water, the feathers are easier to remove?
However, Talmudic Law requires that chickens be dry plucked. Don’t ask me why. So for generations Jewish wives and mothers have had to follow this difficult practice. They were known as ” the mother pluckers of Brooklyn”.
hm – yes I knew about the hot water thing – factory chickens are dunked in boiling water before machine plucking.
As for those Brooklyn ladies, hmmm … 🙂
“They were known as ‘the mother pluckers of Brooklyn’.” ~ hmuller
——
And PILF’s for some, too, I guess.
I just watched a video by a farmer on YouTube saying the mass produced chicken feed has been reformulated with less protein, and hence the chickens aren’t laying as many eggs. Many other farmers concur on the video and also in the comments section. Many change the feed or start making their own, and the chickens start laying again. We supplement our feed with grubs, grains and such. Hens do slow down or stop laying in the winter time or when they are molting ( losing and replacing their feathers). I do ‘t understand why chickens molt in late fall/winter, you’d think they’d do it in the spring or summer.
Jimpa-
Yes.
There are tons of anecdotal reports from chicken keepers that switching from, “Producer’s Pride,” brand feed to locally produced stock has restored their hens to normal, healthy egg laying.
With that volume of reports, it’s clear something is happening.
The switch to local feed also ties in neatly with our host’s thoughts on the coming decentralization.
We are living in the days of Caligula but worse!
Caligula had his horse elected to the high office of Consul. Our Caligula’s got Joe Biden elected to the Presidency. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
One a horse, the other a horse’s hindmost component.
As of this January, the average price of a new car is 50k and a new truck 60k.
Worse yet Doc is that everyone finances a depreciating asset.
How many people would buy real estate for $100K, that they knew would be worth $20K in ten years? Answer: Not many to none.
Soon there will be no more ICE vehicles, and consequently, substantially less personal car ownership, which is the goal anyway.
We have thirty years of petroleum dependency remaining. The electric car is the true depreciating scrap heap.
Maybe. The Big Oil Boyz say the horizon is not that long.
Dumbass Biden says build a $20B refinery- that won’t turn a profit for 10 years – but we’re phasing out fossil fuels.
The Boyz say, yeah, um, no. We’re doing stock buybacks instead, GFY Joe. Good for them.
Agreed 100% on EV’s – all cars (except the $200K limited edition exotics) depreciate to zero – people who buy anywhere near new, might be retards.
I drive a 21 yr. old toyota tacoma. I paid ten G’s for it 10 years ago. I could sell it for 10 G’s today. Of course inflation ate some of that but I also drive it every day.
Yeah Stelmo you have the skill, tools and resources to keep an older vehicle on the road; alot of people don’t.
It’s hard where I live to keep an old car from rotting out.
That’s why I need to replace my ’05 vehicle.
Uh, oh. SEF, you got me beat on that vehicle, but here goes:
At the tender age of 20, I decided I’d spend no more than $1K per year, on average, for the rest of my life, for a car/truck. Got keys at 15, will give them up at 75, so 60 years, or $60K — lifetime.
1) Had a 1990 Ford Mustang, paid $900, drove it 5 years, sold it for $500, with a blown motor. Result: $60/year vs. $1K/year budget.
2) Had a car in the shop & drove the shop loaner. Asked the mechanic what he’d take for the loaner. Give me $100 – gave him $50 and drove it away & all the next year. Result: $50/year.
3) Had a small Chevy truck, paid $500, drove it for 5 years, sold it for $200. Result: $60/year.
4) Currently drive a 2004 Hyundai Santa Fe, paid $7K (way too much) in 2012, so cost to date: $640/year – but she’s got plenty left in her.
Starting with this long-term budget, the question for any dealer is, how much is that new car? Oh, $50K? Will I get 50 years out of it?
Here’s an alternative scenario. A young couple buys 2 new cars. Payments are $300/mo/ea, conservatively, so $7200/annually. The $7200 x 60 years of driving is $432K over their lifetime. GTFO.
They can’t send their kids to college but have spent $432K on near-zero value assets vs. my well-under $60K.
Where do I spend my savings? I spare no expense – none – on the highest-end bedding & mattresses. Why not, I spend 56 hours a week enjoying them! A car, yeah, not so much.
Nice job on the Tacoma! Ten years, driving for free baby!
A ball-braking buddy of mine says I’m a genius – pioneering a new concept in disposable cars. Park them strategically around town and when one breaks down, fuck it, just leave it and walk to the next one.
Ron this is my third Tacoma. Toyota was buying them back and crushing them. My first one was a 2000. I paid 12,000 drove it 4 years and sold it back to Toyota for 17,000. Four years driving,net cost -$5000. Ka-Ching! Next I bought a 96 for 6 G’s drove it 2 years , sold it back to Toyota for 9 large. Net cost -$3000. So I’m up 8 large. I buy the 2002 for 10, shit it has a new frame from Toyota so I still have it 10 years later.
Sounds like some of the neighborhoods where I’ve worked.
If you scrounge some milk crates the tires and rims it would give you pocket money.
SEF – That’s awesome! I hear the Tacoma’s have a long life anyhow. The smaller ones are hard to come by because of the Chicken Tax, going back to 1964.
It imposed a 25% tariff on import of small trucks into the US. That’s why you saw the Taliban driving hundreds of Tacoma’s all over hell & creation – they weren’t coming to the US.
The result of the 25% tariff was that the sticker price for a small truck went to maybe $15K vs. $17K for a full-size truck. So, it was a no-brainer. For the delta, everybody bought full-size trucks & small trucks gathered dust.
Only one thing better than driving for free – driving for cash baby! A step ahead of the man the whole way! Keep it up!
Tacoma’s are the No. 1 vehicle for holding resale value. Toyota Corp. repurchased thousands and crushed them all because of bad frames. My 96 was 17 years old and they bought it back at 150% full retail price. You would never see an American Company do that. I’ve had Fords and Jeeps with bad frames and it was tough luck pal your on your own. Most people went out and bought another Tacoma with the check. I did.
I drive a ’96 Outback.
Paid $3,000 for it in 2010. Of course, I have paid for some biggish repairs. But she is still going fine. i see quite a lot of these around.
The town values it at $2,000 plus for the excise tax . . .
But I see some for sale at Carfax for $3,999.
????
Nice, so if you’re under +/- $9K to $10K aggregate for repairs, you’re running under $1K/year.
My local mechanic says if I take care of her, she’ll go forever.
Just 156,500 mi. on her now.
Is it still shiny though? To a lot of people, that matters most.
“Is it still shiny though? To a lot of people, that matters most.
”
Whom are you talking to?
(Hint: I do not consider myself “most.” )
Islander – you took me completely wrong. A joke. You seem very utilitarian, a trait I admire. Certain you don’t give a rat’s ass about a car being “shiny”.
Most people – not you – will make the poor decision of financing a new car because it is “shiny” vs. driving a dusty older car. Their priorities like most, are style over substance.
Lighten up Francis.
Apparently, repo men are quite busy rounding up autos from people who cannot afford their $1000 per month car payments.
Average price of an EV is about $60,000 now, and that’s factoring in the handful of sh#tbox, ‘affordable’ $45,000 golf cart models that will barely get you to the vegan and back once a day.
There’s a meme floating around with the gecko saying ‘saved $60K on a new battery by having a gas car’.
And you have not even factored in the cost of outfitting your home with a charger.
My vote for the weekly money quote, “the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.” Bank of America has been convicted 3 times now for illegal management of their customers (marks?) accounts, they’ve been fined (AKA, “cost of doing business”), but no one has gone to jail! WTF? A crime with no perpetrator? The 20,000 bankers who run this country are not simply criminals, they are (incredibly) incompetent. Anyone else notice the World Economic bloc forming in the Global “South” (BRI, SCO, EEAU, et al) that will NOT include America? JHK’s long-term vision of a “post oil” economy is chugging onward!
“Bank of America has been convicted 3 times now for illegal…” Wells Fargo is even worse. WF should have been given the corporate death penalty long long ago.
A corporation has the same rights as an individual. Except we individuals have the right to go to jail for our crimes.
“A corporation has the same rights as an individual.” The only rights corporations have ever had were those created out of thin air by the PTB: in our case, Congress and our deplorable court system. Our elected reps could just as well change the laws, but they of course never will. Don’t you find the fate of the Arthur Anderson accounting group interesting? I can’t at this moment tell if it was a corporation or a partnership. It / they were convicted of crimes in 2001 & as a result effectively went out of existence. The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the convictions in 2005 but to no avail. It is still dead, dead, dead.
People should switch their accounts to community banks or local credit unions.
This was discussed at length after the 2008 fiasco.
Now the idea seems to have gone down the memory hole.
Islander, we did this years ago. I can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t do the same. It’s one of the few things that you can do to fight back against the big banks without any effort, loss, or inconvenience of any kind.And still – people keep going back to be cheated and abused when they have a clear and easy choice.
I was surprised how many people were still using BoA. They are awful.
I suspect they may offer people more gimmicks as to how you can use your phone to manage your account.
Like to quickly track how much money just disappeared from your account without waiting for a statement.
I agree. As a self-employed RE agent, I’ve dealt with BOA many times in the past. They were terrible, to the point I would recommend to the homeowner that they not accept an offer if BOA was the lender. I hated working with them.
Something else that a lot of people don’t know is that savings banks have a whole different insurance scheme, and accounts are insured much better than with FDIC.
I think the additional (to the FDIC) scheme is called Depositors Insurance Fund.
Here is info at the website of a local savings bank:
“Watertown Savings Bank is proud to be a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Depositors Insurance Fund (DIF). This means that all WSB customers’ deposits are insured in full. Regardless of the number of accounts or the total funds, Watertown Savings Bank’s deposits are safe and secure. Enjoy an extra layer of security peace of mind knowing that all of your deposits are insured thanks to WSB’s membership in DIF.
Not many banks qualify for DIF Insurance. In fact, many local banks recently acquired by larger banks are no longer eligible to offer DIF Insurance.
All types of bank deposit accounts are covered, including savings accounts, checking accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), money market deposit accounts, and retirement deposit accounts. The first $250,000 per depositor is insured by FDIC. All deposits above the FDIC insurance limits are insured by DIF.
. . . “
So many of those really good ideas went down the memory hole.
I did switch to a CU.
And I did amass a lot of bags so I wouldn’t have to use paper or plastic.
But then covid19 took care of that with the fake fomites scare.
I ignored the bag/fomite nonsense.
German researchers showed very early on that it was nonsense and the Robert Koch Institute was blowing hot air.
I still use the heavy-duty plastic bags I got about six years ago from a local retailer who was trying to beat the plastic bag ban.
The banned bags were the standard one that are, I don’t know, 1 micrometer thick.
This rogue retailer went ahead and offered customers very robust bags that were too heavy to come under the ban. I am against plastic bags (festooning trees, choking turtles, etc), but if they last six years, it’s hard to complain, plus you just fold them up and keep them in your purse.
Years ago I got into the habit of washing out plastic bags and hanging them out to dry. Although I’ve seen no one else do it, it seems to be accepted.
If a bag has a tear in it I can still use it to wrap clothing or something else.
I treasure the heavy-gauge ones (mostly 2~3 liters volume). You can use those for years.
I have a big supply amassed over the years of sturdy cloth Trader Joe’s bags, and then some of the reinforced plastic ones.
The problem was, in CA during the fomite bullshit, they wouldn’t allow us to use our own bags.
And then like a year later, they started allowing it if we bagged everything ourselves (which I don’t mind and sometimes do anyway).
The fomite nonsense deep-sixed the results of the plastic bag bans that had taken years to institute and get written into local laws.
A lot of that foot work had been done by idealistic high school students.
So all of their “green” efforts were blow off because of “fomite fear.”
Keeeerect. Or gold or green cash which USED to be best.
When I was in elementary school, BoA sponsored a “savings program” and the school went along with it, hoodwinking their pupils into handing over cash to BoA.
Every week I brought a dime to school in a little cardboard envelope that had two of those round cardboard attachments and a string that fastened around them to keep it closed.
Then we all handed over our little envelopes to the teacher, who wrote on the outside how much we had “saved” so far.
I did that for two years. I asked my mom around 2010 what happened to that money? She said “I have no idea”.
By then the interest should have made it a tidy sum, but somehow all that money handed over to BoA by the school (and I assume other schools were also involved) went right down the Memory Hole.
At least, I’ve never heard of any lawsuits or anything about the program.
Paula, you might try checking on your state government’s website for how to apply for unclaimed money. We did this a while back and discovered we had money left in checking accounts we’d closed years ago. The impetus is (of course!) on you to chase the money, to “claim” it. Otherwise, they just keep it. But state gov can institute a search and, when anything is located, they have to give it to you.
Interesting. I wonder if it’s still on their books. Seems unlikely.
Just thinking. What exactly holds the USA together? What is the tie that binds? What will be the glue that keeps states together through the hard times coming?
I think that glue is gone. It is a victim of the Deep State. Washington, DC no longer acts like a “glue” to bind the country together where interstate issues such as mutual defense matters. It has evolved into its own state, the fifty first, with its own agenda. The Dems actually attempted to make it a state.
Its own agenda. The agenda of the East Coast Mob, infiltrated by the shenanigans of the globalist WEF. When a representative is elected to the Congress, they no longer belong to their constituenct, the belong to the Deep State. When is the last time that a Rep was on the news, representing their folks back home on an issue.
Specifically, how many members of the Deep State from the Southwest have been hammering on CNN or Fox for a nation wide water supply resolution to move fresh water from where it floods to where the drought is that is threatening the entire country’s food supply. Nothing, Nada, Nein, Nix.
Our foreign policy, Deep State centered is a joke. Ukraine, where the USA went to die. WE are going to weaken the Russians? Who believes this baloney. More than half the US population that are too stupid to realize how the DS is lying to them and how much of a lock the MSM has on their minds.
The Constitution puts very little under Federal control as written. It is the power mongers elected to that Swamp that have accumulated power unto themselves over 250 years that have sought to guarantee their re-election and pensioning. We now have the situation that the executive branch controls the Deep State in all aspects. That is exactly what the FF were afraid of.
The dissolution of the US is forthcoming. Common interests have disappeared, the Deep State no longer protects the country as a whole, like the border situation, but protects the Mobs East Coast and WEF interests. California is growing away from the East Coast Mob and may be the first to say, “No Mas”.
A small yet unquenchable situation is brewing in Arizona. Kari Lake is refusing to kowtow to the Deep State. The most aggregious example of vote manipulation in a while occurred here in Maricopa County in 2022. The opposition, Kari Hobbs, the SOS, ran the election from her office. Surprise, 40 to 60% of the voting machines did not work on election day AM. As most same day voters are conservative, what an effective method of suppressing the Right side vote. It is still going on in the courts. I wonder if Krysten Sinema’s decision to leave the scoundrel party has something to do with the Lefty invasion of Arizona.
By the way, the official reaction by the Arizona press, and the former governor Ducey was that every was on the up and up and all voters had the chance to vote in spite of the “glitches”. Uh huh, there were no disgruntled folks that after altering their plans to vote just walked away. If this miscarriage is allowed to stand, the validity of the vote is going to take a huge hit. Fully authorized by the state level Deep State. Ducey ended up being a RINO bum. He put up all those RR cars as a barrier and a breath of fresh air blew through Arizona. After the election, his true colors showed up, he endorsed Hobbs immediately instead of waiting for the courts and removed the barrier at the border with nary a whimper. No Abbott was this man. Kari Lake is starting to create real fear in the DC Deep State. I will guarantee she will be dealt with.
Things will continue until they can’t, J. We are currently at “can’t”.
“We now have the situation that the executive branch controls the Deep State in all aspects.” ~ JAZ
John – you have this backwards.
Chicken and the egg?
Suppose it depends upon how you define Deep State. Personally, I see the Deep State as tentacles far & wide, much broader, wider & deeper, and made up of more interests than the Executive Branch of the US Gov. Could be wrong, but I see the Executive Branch operating under the Deep State thumb.
You are correct, sir.
They don’t like the head executive, his head gets blown off.
Mary – you are the sweetest, but really, you don’t have to call me sir :-))
Should I call you Shirley?
😉
You can call me anything you want, just don’t call me late for dinner.
No. Use your noggin.
The definition of Deep State is that it is not elected government.
Jeez.
You’re absolutely correct to mention voting “irregularities” (which appear to be rather “regular”), but aren’t dicey elections just what the Duopoly wants? The 2000 election had a clearly minority “winner”, even Florida was eventually called for Gore, 2004 had weird results, 2016 was, of course, obvious, and then 2020 was icing on the cake…you’d think ONE of the 2 (identical) parties would have begun to advocate for a more transparent process, yet, neither one has. Consider the # of electoral challenges could be eliminated with a simple Paper Ballot/Ink Marker solution. As long as a Deep State-approved candidate wins, no one cares how the people vote.
You seriously think that it is in the “common interest” of the country to spend billions of dollars and confiscate thousands of people’s land in order to rip up the country with a pipeline bringing water from the east to the desert where you live?????
There are millions of people who disagree with that, JohnAZ. Your gimme attitude towards other peoples’ water and land and money is duly noted.
Duly noted that we build pipelines for oil.
If Colorado residents can’t collect water on their own land because the state of Colorado “owns” the water, I’d like to see Colorado up and make a claim on the water that falls on land of residents in totally different states.
I’d almost like to see them try it . . .
When the US dollar becomes worthless, then the Feds reign will be over. The tax, borrow, and spend system is the glue that holds it all together.
When the value of the money runs out, so will the Feds. That’s how the central government will unravel.
Was there ever a time this country was not governed by a smirking shiftless class of degenerate politicians? At the age of 76 I look back on a time when we did not lock our doors, mothers didn’t worry till an hour after dark where we were and we were part of extended loving families. Time spent on a farm in Kansas where the stove in the kitchen was the size of a locomotive and required wood, water was fetched in a bucket from a pump in the yard and the outhouse was about to fall down. Climbing the windmill to sit and watch the landscape and the goldfish in the stock tank. There was a small building there with two front doors and full of cans and machine parts. Years later I found out a hobo had come during the depression looking for work, they took him in and later sent for his wife and daughters and from Chicago they came to live in that building till times got better. That is the stock that raised me. Happy to have what they had and not aspiring for material luxury. Long nights as a Marine in Vietnam, waiting for god knows what and sleeping on the ground while it shook from B52 raids I carried those qualities, proud to be descended from those people. We have let the halfwits loose and now will suffer the consequences. Stand up and tell these woke bastards what you think of them and never back down.
Hey, Redrock! I tutor kids for a living. Last week, on of my cherubs had a science assignment to test who has the fastest reactions to stimuli. The choices were between girls and “other gender types”. I told my student that there are no “other gender types”. In fact, there aren’t any genders outside of linguistics. There are two sexes, male and female. Convinced him to write his report using the words “boys” and “girls”. What a shitshow we live in! Each of us has to use the power of “No!”
When children grow up on farms they will observe how in farm animals there are two sexes and no genders. The process of makin’ more bacon will eventually be observed by farm children everywhere in the process of doing their daily chores at the pig pen. It won’t be too hard for them to figure out on their own that it might start with copulation and finish with the appearance of the cute and cuddly little piglets. Those piglets will be future bacon, pork chops, and chitlins.
They will also find out that very big animals with big balls hanging down on on their hindquarters – animals like stud bulls or stallions – get treated with more fear and respect. They’ll notice that when big animals haven’t been neutered, that the males of whatever species of mammal it is are larger, more muscled, and possibly more aggressive and dangerous. They will notice that in a flock of chickens the roosters are more showy and colorful and a lot more likely to fight. If you have a bunch of peafowl running around loose and squawking, it will be obvious which ones are the pea “cocks”.
But most children today grow up in a sort of teletubbie world. The only animals that ever show up in their existence might be a neutered golden retriever or a cat. All school children experience today is a totally artificial and climate controlled environment made possible by fossil fuel energy. So it’s possible for many of them to experience a lot of confusion with sexual/gender issues. The roles are all smudged up and confused, with women required to do what was formerly men’s work. The environment children are growing up in is extremely delusional and toxic.
Sanity will return during the Long Emergency when home and small farm based animal husbandry will return. Men will have their chores and tasks that only they can do, tasks requiring a lot of physical strength and endurance. Tasks like logging and plowing. And women will have equally vital chores and tasks that fit their sex and their own unique abilities – like raising healthy and successful children. And that’s how it was before the industrial age and that’s how it will be after the industrial/fossil fuel age. There will be no “green” industrial age. fuggedaboudit
Cats are alpha predators in their own sphere. They were made for hunting small mammals like rodents. For their size, they are nasty.
However, there’s another side to them. If they make the decision to adopt you, they are sweet, cuddly and loving (yes, they make their own decisions, not you). A child could do a lot worse than having a cat – and learn a lot from them.
Dogs have owners.
Cats have staff.
My two stray cats have three jobs: garden security, morning alarm service and purr therapy.
That is the ancient ideal of Man – many things to many different people. A good husband, brother, friend and father – and a terror to his enemies and the enemies of his people.
Christianity is a psychic castration of much of our psyche – as if the “bad” parts aren’t needed.
Confucianism recognizes 5 basic relationships.
1) Man and his overlord
2) Father and son
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger brother
5) Friends, i.e. equals
Relationship rights and obligations are spelled out.
Notice there is no provision made for “the stranger”. There is no parable of the good Samaritan. Such a person would be condemned for wasting precious, limited resources on a stranger when there are relatives in need.
I witnessed this philosophy in practice during five years in Korea. For example, someone who hired the most qualified person versus a relative to help in his business was considered selfish and cold hearted. Nepotism and taking care of family comes first.
In many ways public courtesy and concern for the comfort of others was absent. “Hurray for me and to hell with you” was the guiding standard. You could see it in their driving. You could feel in the low intensity food riots which they call grocery shopping.
I found all this odd because the Koreans are genetically one big family. (I won’t say a happy family.) Americans come from many diverse tribes, yet display more courtesy to strangers.
Yes, at our best we are better. But as it is: Their streets are safe and ours are not.
Confucius on the Mo Tzu doctrine of universal love: He would treat the bad the same as the good? That is not justice.
The Golden rule (positive caring) should include the Silver rule: Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. Add to that Confucius’ Justice and you have something very good.
Such as combination is Us at our best, in our terms, the Old and New Testaments.
Redrock – thanks for your service. Semper Fi.
Nice post redrock.
I actually know someone very similar background, he was an Air Force pal of my father’s, he is from small-town Indiana, was in Vietnam as Air Rescue I think, your comments remind me of him. He did well in life after he retired.
That America is before my time, as I was shortly before the Marines arrived in Da Nang in 1965, but I’m sure as a GI brat, several of my dad’s peers shared your background.
I’m glad you made it back and you’re in this space.
Be well!
My sense is that the America of your formative years, especially small-town Kansas, or Indiana, but even densely packed Lower East Side Manhattan or Brooklyn had a pretty solid foundation.
Americans survived the depression, and a society that still trusted the government mobilized to fight WW2.
Big-city America was more diverse, but socially the foundation was much stronger. At some point, we got to a place where the US of A foundation became economic prosperity.
(Immigration is good for the economy! THEY say. My parents are foreign born, but American had over one generation to digest the immigrants into Anglo America, 1925-65, immigration quotas limiting Eastern/Southern Europeans… like me!!)
Money is always what enticed most immigration to America, but now that is the only thing that seems to pull Americans together.
Dmitri Orlov’s writings are very interesting and thought-provoking, as he rationalizes how and why Russia survived the USSR implosion, and why America might not survive such a thing, should it happen.
However, to add to JHK
“…Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture..”
That culture, to large degree even among people who were, and remain, atheist communists (a sizeable minority of the Russians in Donbass, for example), is infused with the beliefs and traditions of Orthodox Christianity. And a sizeable proportion of Russian are observant, and even devout Christians who pray.
To me, the fact that Russia survived and rebounded is a MIRACLE, right in front of us.
But on a secular note, as Orlov would say (probably has said, and I got it from him), Russia’s common values gave them a foundation. And those values came from what–the Constitution? Free Enterprise? NO, the Church.
America was always diverse, but the past thirty years, especially the past 15, the differences are pulling society apart.
And in world, in a USA, where the economic pie is shrinking, that does NOT bode well for society and order.
My dad was an immigrant from England and he told me that the immigration reform in 1925 limited all immigration.
Because of social media I now know people who grew up in the Soviet Union and they tell me that they were raised with “We are all human and must live in peace with each other” official propaganda. That came from the state.
Maybe the church also taught that, but we can see from Ukraine, who have had 30 years of US propaganda dividing them that church doesn’t do much good when you are learning in school to Hate and Fear other people.
Yeah, the worst are the Catholics from the west, but I saw a video of a Russian in a liberated elementary school in the east (which had been dominated by the Kiev regime and taught official policy) showing books in the school library which were full of anti-Russian propaganda. And the east is Orthodox.
This is why the CRT and the trans bs they are teaching little children in the US are so dangerous.
Get them while they’re young and you can bring them up the way you want, whether it’s Kumbaya harmony or Kill em all and Let God sort them out hatred.
For instance, when I grew up the official policy was integration and “We are all equal” propaganda. The schools, the TV, the movies and the radio all preached social harmony.
What we have in America today is two generations of young people brought up to hate their fellow Americans. Hence: Antifa.
This will not end well.
Do you agree with Mr Kunstler and Mr Putin that Communism was a worthless ideology? An abject failure in practice?
We were taught in school that Catholics and Protestants were fighting in Ireland.
None of that was actually true. The fighting wasn’t in Ireland, and it wasn’t over doctrine.
No fighting in Ireland?
Have you ever heard of the Easter Uprising?
There was much fighting in Ireland, later only in Northern Ireland.
You come up with some very strange ideas sometimes. It was about far more (or less!) than doctrine, true.
When do you think I was in school, Jarek? Sheesh.
I’m sure I have no idea. But there has been much fighting in Ireland – for centuries. Maybe they didn’t teach you very well?
Redrock, I too had a rural and small town upbringing and remember with affection so much that is gone now. To quote Randy Newman:
Now they’re gone, they’re gone, they’re really gone
You’ve never seen anyone so gone
Some bones hidden in the canyon
Some paintings in a cave
There’s no use trying to save them
There’s nothing left to save
I realize he was writing about another culture, but you get the picture nevertheless.
We still had real hardiness and cohesion back then, whereas we’re now weak, debased, fearful, ignorant, and delusional in a way that no one would have believed possible. I blame the weaponizing of the internet by the Deep State for much of this. People, even those who represent minuscule portions of the population, make for themselves a “community” online. They feel no need to be part of or contribute in any way to the actual physical community of which they are a (useless) part, yet they expect that same community to provide for all their physical needs. They are essentially termites, eating away at the fabric of the house until it cannot stand any longer. They’re aided and abetted in this effort by the usual suspects.
In Denmark, women used to leave their babies in their strollers parked outside supermarkets while they shopped inside. What incredibly peaceful societies we once created!
Then our Leaders committed an act of treason and opened our borders to the 3rd World. What sane Danish mother would leave her baby unattended now after the Muslim invasion?
When my first was a baby, I left her regularly sleeping in her pram outside Safeway for 15 or 20 minutes. Once she was in a ‘stroller’, which I’m assuming is a buggy, she was able to sit in the seat in the trolley.
Old ways are best if they create such a society. Any reformers must be very careful not to do more harm than good. But Leftist reformers are notorious for not caring and condemning all “olds”.
I can remember staying outside the store to “watch the baby”. I was probably 2 1/2 feet tall. What was I going to do?
That is hilarious.
That is hilarious.
Thanks for “grounding” the discussion by making it about yourself and therefore meaningless.
You are still two and half feet tall.
When the Fight For Fifteen started, people did not see it for what it was, an attack on the fast food industry.
Idiots such as Andrew Cuomo couched it in terms of not being able to support a family on what mcDonald’s workers make, as if the teens working there a few hours after school were raising families or something.
The government was using a false reason to go after the biggest purveyors of beef.
They didn’t want us eating beef.
BTW the foods mentioned above aren’t ‘healthier’ than McDonald’s, but McDonald’s is blamed for driving the obesity epidemic, even though its most frequent consumers are not obese.
It’s about the beef, and it always has been.
What is wrong with making $15 an hour?
I understand the green eyed monster, but go ahead and apply at Mickey-Ds. You won’t know if they will hire you unless you try!
When other workers at more complex jobs only make 8, 9, and 10 dollars an hour, there is no valid reason for teenagers taking your order at a fast food place to be awarded 15 dollars by the government.
Those are the kind of job minimum wage was meant for.
I’ve know adults who worked there and made a decent income, because McDonald’s does offer a career path.
There was no legitimate reason for government to get involved.
As I said, it was about the beef.
When other workers at more complex jobs only make 8, 9, and 10 dollars an hour they all get bumped to 15 an hour when the government gets involved to raise the minimum wage.
If a dumbass can’t offer more than 8, 9, or 10 dollars an hour they should not be in business.
And that is my beef.
Cuomo raised the wage for one industry. Capisce?
You’re a dumbass who isn’t worth ten cents an hour.
MacDonald’s used to use tallow—beef fat—to fry the French fries. They were really crisp (I hear—I was not allowed to eat any fast food, and there was not a McD’ where I live).
Anyhow, along came some do-gooders and guilt-tripped McD’s into changing to plant-oils—I guess, maybe canola. The new axiom was that beef tallow would give you a heart attack and was not “heart healthy.”
Now we find out that the plant-based oils are the bad oils, and they should have just stuck with beef tallow.
Whenever I see the phrase “heart-healthy” I know there is a food/nutrition scam going on.
.
Meanwhile high in the air over the western USA a China-owned & operated “weather balloon” is hovering (somehow). China has admitted this. The Biden regime has also admitted they intend to take no action against this. Regime spokesidiots are parroting a variety of BS excuses for the failure of the US military high command to take action.
A new standard for bone-headed stupidity has been set.
Apparently no one remembers the deliberate failure of the NASA high command to even consider remedial actions to attempt to save the space shuttle Columbia before it disintegrated upon re-entry. And almost no one remembers the Martin-Bellinger report which precisely predicted the nature of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor before it happened.
They are probably sending the balloon over North Dakota so they are review their ChiCom land holdings out that way. Why do we agree to sell American lands to foreign nationals? This is the dumbest thing ever. Non-Mexican citizens cannot freely buy land in Mexico, so they are smart on that front.
Reports this AM say it has stopped over a top secret federal site in Montana. Malmstrom AFB. China has admitted it is theirs. Looking at it in close up, it sure looks like is has solar panels on it,
Powering what?
The government’s excuse for not taking it down is that it might hurt someone where it lands.
A couple of bullet holes in it might let it float down gently so our techs can reverse engineer it.
Can you imagine this? Float a balloon over the country with EMP devices on board. Or float a fleet?
Or over our fleets? Biden is a coward.
Do you agree that foreigners shouldn’t be able to buy land? That public interest must sometimes trump private gain?
There is a report a second one is over Canada.
Apparently there is some debate within the ‘circle of leaders’ in the US regarding what to do.
These are high-tech instruments, not hot air balloons.
I find it more than a bit disturbing, though not really surprising, there is no plan to deal with such airspace incursions.
No Southern border security, apparently no airspace security, so what is the most expensive military on the planet doing?
One answer is running a laundry-of-sorts in the territory called Ukraine for the greater benefit of the MIC Ike warned us about.
Another is stocking the arms bazaars of the Taliban and Ukro-Nazis,
Open to the list growing…
Who knows how many of those Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons over the years have really been Chinese Communistic spyware?! They know nobody would suspect Mickey Mouse?
” Looking at it in close up, it sure looks like ” it has slanted eyes looking down at the ground, spying . . .
(:-))
The most salient point in today’s excellent post is, to me: “…the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.”
There is footage today of speaker McCarthy saying the cop who murdered Ashli Babbitt on the capitol grounds was just doing his job.
That murderer will never be held accountable. Neither will the orange imbecile who encouraged his followers to walk into an obvious trap. He should have bailed the J6 crew out and paid for their legal defense – ALL of it. Accountability? Naahhh, not gonna happen.
I knew on September 12th that if the smirking son of a bush who facilitated 911 and his cronies got away it, our country would cease to exist. That is the case.
Here lies the United States. Cause of death: stupidity.
Stupidification, in all ways possible.
It is number one on the authoritarian agenda.
Did you see that picture of the recently divorced Majorie Taylor Greene looking at McCarthy with open adoration?
She’s gunning for him. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac – or is it wealth? In any case, the two usually go together.
Majorie Taylor Greene is why grocery bags are big enough to put over heads.
I know a number of men who think she is quite attractive.
Marry a girl who looks at you like that. Or as the newlywed Mrs Trudeau looked at Fidel Castro as Mr Trudeau looked on, a perv and cuck.
They went to see him on their honeymoon…..
“I know a number of men who think she is quite attractive.”
Once her mouth moves she becomes disgusting and her mouth is always moving. In her case an insulated bag with lots of fiber padding to muffle the voice would be a fine idea.
Apparently, Margarine Tailored Gangrene likes kinky tantric.
Can rednecks, farmers & hunters shoot at the balloon with their rifles, or is it too high up, out of range?
@BRH Any rednecks, farmers and or hunters who did shoot at that balloon would be held accountable.
I’m wondering if a 308 win-mag would reach it….
The balloon is at 40000 feet or so. It has already been buzzed by jets.
Pretty much out of range for the average concerned citizen.
Only way for us to pop China’s magic bubble is to fight weather balloon with weather balloon – or several… fastened to a parachute harness (one with a working parachute would be a bonus), worn over some really warm clothes, with a large electric fan fastened to the back. And don’t forget the oxygen bottles – or the rifle.
It may take a few of us, but I think we can take it down.
Chinese spy balloon adrift over Montana . . .
Blinken blinked—canceled his trip.
Time for some lyrics to “Moon over Montana” or maybe “Slow Balloon to China”?
The USA Is Downwind From China ^u^
“Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Would you like to glide in my beautiful balloon?
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly, we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
For we can fly, we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon
Suspended under a twilight canopy
We’ll search the clouds for a star to guide us
If by some chance you find yourself loving me
We’ll find a cloud to hid us, keep the moon beside us
Love is waiting there in my beautiful balloon
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon
If you’ll hold my hand we’ll chase your dream across the sky
For we can fly, we can fly
Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon” ~ Up, Up And Away, by The 5th Dimension
Wouldn’t that make a great first date?! A balloon ride!
youtu . be/UKkNlwpajNk (official audio!)
Zazelle, thanks for the trip down Nostalga Melody Lane. I was just thinking of the German-English 1980’s hit by Nena “99 Luft Balloons”.
Funny, the Chinese are using a spy technology that goes back 250 years.
On that You Tube version you can see the cover and on it, it says of course, ‘Go where you wanna go.” That’s China! Yaayy!
After another YT version of that song that I almost posted instead, that Age Of Aquarius song by the same band automatically played, speaking of memory-lane. And I wondered, briefly, what age this would be and thought, the age of demise or something like that.
But, yes, I’ve heard of 99 Luftballons too.
I also hear China apparently has a balloon over South America, so maybe they’re working on 99 eventually.
250 year old tech, ay? Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been taken down.
That airship is at 60,000 ft. That’s a 20,000 yard shot. Straight up. .300 win mag No way. 3000 fps muzzle velocity the bullet would not even reach it for 20 seconds. I call it an airship because balloons don’t hover. That thing is in the jet stream and would be in New England by now if not for some pretty good propulsion units installed. Props won’t work that high so has to be ?? the military knows what this thing is but lips are sealed.
ZeroHedge is reporting the balloon may be headed to east coast. I’ve seen reports that China has researched using balloons to trigger an EMP.
“That thing is in the jet stream and would be in New England by now if not for some pretty good propulsion units installed.” Hot air balloonists regularly use the constantly varying winds at different altitudes to zig zag their non-propelled craft back & forth over the landscapes they fly over. This way they can often land very close to their starting points. No on-board lateral propulsion necessary since Mother Nature provides. So there is no reason the Red Chinese drone can’t do the same thing just by varying its altitude. If USAF jets can buzz the thing, they could easily have shot it down long long ago. But good US flyboys always follow their orders handed down from above….
It’s UFO. It’s your duty to shoot all such things down. What have you got to lose at this point except the ball and chain?
Jarek, if you have the hardware to hit something many miles up there, expect a visit from a three letter agency.
tresho . . .
“Meanwhile high in the air over the western USA a China-owned & operated “weather balloon” is hovering (somehow). China has admitted this.”
Ahem . . .
We have been told this by the MSM. How is your Mandarin?
Thought not !
. . . also *told* it was at an altitude of 150,000 feet.
“The Biden regime has also admitted they intend to take no action against this.”
Well . . . of course not!!!
Hello . . . ????
Do the math.
‘We have been told this by the MSM. How is your Mandarin?” Undoubtedly better than yours after 3 semesters at my nearest university. A decent troll, unlike you, would have posed the above question in Mandarin. Here is a link from those who don’t know Mandarin, MSM (supposedly) direct from the Chinese foreign ministry. Google is your friend if you care to look further into it: “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Remarks on the Unintended Entry of a?Chinese Unmanned Airship into US Airspace Due to Force Majeure
2023-02-03 21:32
Q:?According to media reports, a Chinese unmanned airship has?been?spotted in US airspace. Do you have any comment?
A: The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure.” Source website ends in “.cn”
Tresho . . .
Your statement, “Google is your friend if you care to look further into it.”; unfortunately, precludes any further comment on my part, other than to say . . .
Google is NOT my friend. No! Hell No!!
Google is actually the Warden of the enantiodromic panopticon within which we have all been been imprisoned — including myself.
FWIW . . . I haven’t used Google for 2 decades.
Makes me a moron, doesn’t it!
Moron! Moron! Moron!
Hi Jim, I have not commented in a while, I’m one of your patreon people– just to say, your posts help me sane in this insane world. Thank you.
I like knowing there is someone with some reach, who gets it.
It’s funny porn should be mentioned, I’ve been meaning to post about that here, but it didn’t quite fit the topics of the day and I got tired.
I was talking to a woman who was having to reenter the dating scene after a bad marriage.
She was talking about the need to find a man who didn’t get vaxxed, as well as all the other considerations.
One thing she said surprised me- she told me that the majority of men she knew in her age group and under (this would be about age 50 down) were all heavily into pornography, which disgusted her.
A number of years back, I was talking with a woman in her early twenties, so I guess she’d be in her late thirties or early forties now, and she was talking about her circle of friends being into porn, and she almost felt like there was something wrong with her, because she was turned off by it.
I told her that adults who didn’t outgrow an interest in that stuff were cases of stunted development.
The woman I was talking to more recently told me she had seen a meme online that feminism ruins women, and porn ruins men.
She said at first she was offended, because she considers herself a feminist, but when she thought about it more, she saw that there was an important point buried in that statement.
After I started thinking about this more, I started with my conspiracy theorizing again, and I can see that the normalization and easier availability of pornography in America correlates exactly with the introduction of globalism and the undermining of our country.
It was initially promoted as a free speech issue, if you’ll recall, when they started having ‘adult’ magazines like Hustler and Penthouse, with explicit covers, on display in places frequented by families with young children.
I will be posting more on this as my theories develop.
I think this is an issue we are going to be hearing more about.
I like your correlation that feminism ruins women, and porn ruins men. Very accurate. Also, the statement that adults still addicted to porn is akin to stunted growth and development is spot on. If someone cannot get past a porn addition, then what hope is there for that person to love, learn, and grow into a healthy, committed adult relationship with another person? So totally true.
I would love to hear more on this topic from you, or anyone else here reading and willing to comment. This is an interesting area ripe for discussion. Thanks.
Bell,
I’m ruined! RUINED, do you hear me?
Interesting,
Cowbell, let me what you think of chapter 5.
It sets up a pornographic chapter 6 which I have not written yet.
Lola De’Tomaso could tell my explorer to keep it in his pants because there is not going to be any exploring down under.
What do you think I should do?
I don’t want to be ruining any men.
This world of the 47th Century keeps getting more and more interesting. I can just imagine that breath-taking beauty singing her song besides the antiquated piano. Very nice embedded link with the music. Looking forward to Chapter 6 this time next week.
It would be an interesting concept to explore porn and sexuality between people that far into the future. There certainly will never be any way to completely eliminate desire men have for women, whether real or illusory.
“It sets up a pornographic chapter 6 which I have not written yet.”
Dog,
Your explorer, in his travels, finds a cave wherein he discovered…polaroids of naked farm animals.
Hilarity ensues….he got some ‘splainin’ to do.
Rename her Lola Hot Tomato, restructure the book as a graphic novel with lots of fornicating fruits and vegetables.
Sorry, you’ll have to find an appropriate synonym for “fruits” as that one is already taken.
The Job/Career As A Glorified Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Porn never did anything for me, but people are different.
These days, too, like music, film and other art, people can entirely produce, upload and/or live webcam their own, so that’s all added to, and I guess replaces some, of the kind of fiction/pro porn that grandma and grandpa may have enjoyed outside of their own sex life.
Insofar as some people are addicted to porn, well, others are addicted to something else, like gambling, alcohol, smoking…
…or getting up every weekday at 7am to go into a workplace to do the same thing over and over again while their children are somewhere else, being raised by the relative strangers of pseudocommunities.
I mean, take a look, too, at how all of us here are ‘communicating’ with each other. How does that affect us? How often are we on our digital devices? Is it healthy?
“or getting up every weekday at 7am to go into a workplace”
Working for a living is not a lifestyle choice.
See response here:
February 5, 2023 at 3:02 pm
It’s a very valid topic, and yes, porn is a huge problem in our society.
It ties in also to the glorification nowadays of ‘sex work’ (e.g., prostitution and probably sex trafficking, as well).
And that’s coming from the Woke Jacobins.
If you want to see another’s comprehensive look at what porn does, a woman named Gale Dines is fantastic – she gives lectures and does all sorts of research and writing about it.
Agree completely that porn addiction is a sign of stunted development. But also programming, as we’ve been programmed not to be ‘prudes’ and ‘uncool’ so to accept all sorts of nasty behavior as normal. Remember when gratuitous sex scenes started cropping up in movies? Yuck. One of the reasons I tend to watch old movies: Better scripts, polished actors, and no embarrassing sex scenes. The interesting thing about sex scenes is from what I have read, actors were traumatized by them, but performing in them was the price they paid to be able to be A-list actors.
I used to wonder why certain actresses were in so many films, when the public didn’t seem to be clamoring to see them or they didn’t have all that much talent.
A man who was a lot more worldly because he travelled the world as career military, told me the ones who got the featured roles were the ones willing to appear naked.
The public likes movies with ‘Happy Endings’ don’t you know.
I took a college philosophy class once where a student’s or group of studen’t project included playing a film for the class called ‘I Spit On Your Grave’.
A few students walked out while it was playing, but most stayed if recalled.
I can’t imagine anyone left in the class if someone would have played the movie in today’s colleges.
“…and yes, porn is a huge problem in our society.” ~ MaryQueen
(shrug)…
Our society, or perhaps more accurately their society that we play a role in that they script for us, is a huge problem.
“It’s a very valid topic, and yes, porn is a huge problem in our society.
It ties in also to the glorification nowadays of ‘sex work’ (e.g., prostitution and probably sex trafficking, as well).”
It’s very little known that both Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas went on record as opposing making prostitution illegal. IIRC they both thought that ancient institution served as a method to somehow de-fuse lust among a portion of the population.
Rosie Palmer would like to have a word with you about that.
And PMS (remember that meme from 20 years ago?)
My own theory is PMS, is natures way of driving away infertile males. Mama Nature wants lots of babies and she wants them NOW!!
Watching people copulate has always been the norm (for men anyway). Extended families have shared shelters forever.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe when Erk and Drk wanted to make Spark, they’d leave the warmth of the den and “have relations” outside in the blizzard so nobody got offended?
Where did the term ‘undercover” originate?
Good Question…haha
“Watching people copulate has always been the norm (for men anyway). Extended families have shared shelters forever.” The 1991 movie “Black Robe” depicts this scene rather convincingly. No privacy, only one huge shared bedroom, in Ye Olden Tymes.
A funny thing about western societies, we can sit in a movie theater amidst the company of hundreds of strangers and watch the most intimate scenes btw people portrayed.
When the film ends, we get up and pretend that everything is as it was despite the graphic depictions we just witnessed together.
I like to look around the theater during the ‘racy’ scenes to see how involved the audience is. Nobody will meet your eye.
All right, BB, you have only yourself to blame for inspiring this memory.
‘A preacher was telling his congregation that anything they could think of, old or new, was discussed somewhere in the Bible and that the entirety of the human experience could be found there.
‘After the service, he was approached by a woman who said, “Preacher, I don’t believe the Bible mentions PMS.”
‘The preacher replied that he was sure it must be there somewhere and that he would look for it.
‘The following week after the service, the preacher called the woman aside and showed her a passage which read,…
‘”…And Mary rode Joseph’s ass all the way to Bethlehem.”‘
Yee Haw!! Bareback!!
Beryl,
I know more about feminism than I do porn. But both seem to create unrealistic expectations, both for the adherent (for lack of a better word) as well as their potential romantic partners. Much of both porn and feminism aren’t based in reality and create shame and anger when our real world experiences don’t measure up.
That’s my two cents anyway.
That’s an interesting thought.
Well, let’s take a look at the words porn, unrealistic expectations, and things not “measuring up”
I saw an interview a while back with a female psychologist discussing penis size and porn. The average erect human penis is around 5 1/4 inches. The penises featured in porn are much longer, leading many male viewers to worry that they are inadequate and somehow got cheated. They watch porn and think that if they have a little wiener that not as many women will be interested in them. They think they are too small when they are simply normal. And the psychologist says this is maybe the reason there are so many penis enlargement scams, pills, and potions out there that gullible men purchase. Porn is making them feel inadequate and insecure about their bodies. This lady also insisted that penis size is a much greater issue to men than it is to women. Us guys are so concerned about “measuring up” that many of us have grabbed a ruler and just had to get a figure. A woman it seems would be far less likely to think of looking for a measuring tape when encountering the penis of her partner.
So, watching porn could make some men shy away from relationships with women in real life, then.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will hurt them.
Things like tinder, instagram, and only fans are the equivalent for women. Who needs and actual man when you can get validation and bucks from many virtual men.
And actual man would have to be perfect, the summation of the best qualities of all her fans.
Beryl
Naomi Wolf wrote an interesting piece on just that about 20 years ago.
nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/
A friend of mine has a son with a friend in his 30s – probably late 30s now – who has never had a girlfriend (he’s very shy). My friend’s son said himself (to his mother) that his friend almost certainly could never relate to a flesh-and-blood girlfriend now, after decades of wall-to-wall pornography. No single woman can compete with the the sheer variety and level of boundary pushing that men have willingly embraced through online pornography. Not to mention that most of them are into teenagers. Their very brains have been changed and their gratification requires more and edgier all the time because of the tolerance effect.
“And actual man would have to be perfect, the summation of the best qualities of all her fans.”
I’ve never been on Instragram, although I’ve seen screenshots of some of the airheads that people follow, as part of some story or other. But you’re talking about a tiny percentage of hot young women, as the vast majority of them would never be judged Instagram-worthy.
And attractive people of either sex have always got together with equally attractive people. Their market value is higher, whatever sex they are.
Studies show that women (contrary to popular belief) are FAR more picky in this regard than men, finding only 20% of men attractive in the least.
Of course like everything else, they project this on to men and then blame us for a having a score card – while theirs is far, far more strict.
“Studies show that…” ~ Jarek
Some people can fall victim in various ways, such as through questionable or flawed studies and/or personal experiences, to self-reinforcing feedback loops that, over time, and as per the Butterfly Effect, can increasingly skew and distort their perspectives of reality, such as about women and so-called race, that can be hard to back out of.
Jarek, women still read romance novels.
As comedian Craig Ferguson said, the gossip tabloids are pornography for women.
Beryl,
Yes! Romance novels were my next best suggestion for what porn should be compared to. Talk about unrealistic expectations!
Response to Woodchuck:
Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden. Wearing their Birthday Suits, naturally.
Eve stares at Adam. “That’s it?”
Adam (huffily): “Well it’s the biggest one in the world.”
Eve (rolling her eyes): “Technically, it’s also the tiniest.”
Adam (angry): “I want my rib back”.
I was watching a James Corbett video, one of the ones he does with the other James, and they had a guest on who wondered how Pornhub could exist without some sort of big money backing.
It is apparently free, and it has a bunch of videos on it that had to have cost money. And it isn’t just watching adults having normal sex. There are some really degenerate acts easily available to watch.
All three of the men on that video agreed that watching porn is harmful to men and society so therefore the money spent on providing it free had to be deliberate.
It was deliberate. It’s in some document (a table) that Alex Thomson on UKC has shown a couple of times. It’s from some Communist playbook on how to corrupt the West from within – it included free pornography (to corrode relationships between men and women), feminism, indoctrination in schools, attacks on religion and a whole bunch of other things. I can’t remember the exact source, but I think it features near the beginning of a book by Christopher Story, possibly the one on the European Union. CS did research into NWO/illuminati and was apparently poisoned in 2010.
Wealthy men of the Tribe funds porn. Always has, always will. And yes, there is an agenda behind this. And it has worked.
I’ve been reading about an interesting phenomena: Very scantily clad women – sometime little more than underwear – working out while they film themselves for their followers in Instagram. If any man looks at them, they try to destroy the man online.
Sometimes it backfires. One woman was shamed for doing this when the man just glanced at her and then came over to ask if she needed help with a weight. She ended up apologizing after being shamed.
Men need their own gyms, free from distraction and harassment. Some of the women are quite impressive – and yes, sometimes men might actually be drawn into that. And sometimes it’s just the woman’s heated imagination and passive aggression. In any case, men need their own gyms – like women get to have.
For gyms that choose to stay coed: Ban people from filming themselves perhaps. Let “influencers” or real fitness coaches rent out the gym or get their own.
Bear in mind that the people who participate in internet fads tend not to be wrapped too tight.
Social media is an internet fad? Or crack cocaine for the female mind? And yes, many men as well.
No, the videos lying in wait for a man to look are a fad.
The videos showing how to steal a Kia Rio started a fad too.
Nice deflection. You can’t stand the idea of men having their own gyms – or their own anything.
Will there be gyms during the long emergency? I doubt it. Bicycle riding will be providing excellent cardio workouts for everyone. With an unreliable electric grid and chunk coal very costly, upper body workouts will be the norm for many males who will be slinging heavy wood splitting mauls. They be a bustin’ next years stash for the wood heater. When most people everywhere are physically exhausted at the end of the day, say from doing a day of field stoop labor or field clearing, the gym will be the last place they’ll think about. A wood fired hot tub would be more likely. You prop up a heavy galvanized metal livestock watering tub and get some hot wood coals going under it. Do it outside in winter and enjoy watching the steam coming out of the really warm water.
“A wood fired hot tub would be more likely. You prop up a heavy galvanized metal livestock watering tub” Finnish saunas and tiny indigenous wigwams with a pile of hot rocks within meant no tubs of water were required.
I had an invitation once to experience a native american type sweat lodge or something, it was a simple and home made setup in someone’s big backyard. My understanding is saunas are one of the best ways for getting detoxed and rejuvenated. I’ve got plenty of wood and rocks around here but I’m lacking a wigwam.
Hi, Beryl,
Pornography certainly seems to be getting “normalized.
Last night I went to see the film “The Whale.”
It opens with a morbidly—-impossibly—obese man watching gay porno on his laptop, supposedly jerking off. Then he has a heart attack. The whole thing is totally gross.
We catch glimpses of a man sucking off another guy—. WTF:? We now have to be exposed to porn when we go to the ;movies to see an Oscar-nominated performance?
The plot of this film is a poster child for intersectionality: gayness, obesity, minority, far-right=wing politics, fundamentalist religion —the American society shown resembles a freak show. Just watching these people act out their weirdness and the disgusting sight on screen of this ugly heap of flesh feels like a kind of pornographic setup.
The thing is, in some respects US society is a freak show, but some films that home in on this aspect of the USA have done so with much more interesting characters, stories, settings, and plot lines.
With this film the “plot” basically consists of looking at this monster. And a couple of other weirdos. Just looking at them being weird and mouthing cliches in the current woke “sensitivity” lexicon.
The film makes a demand for our empathy but shows nothing to empathize with. Still, it dares one to refuse empathy, be disgusted, and walk out.
Which is what I did. It was just too boring, contrived to push modern-day empathy buttons, with no redeeming qualities. Pornography as an idea can go beyond the depiction of sex acts.
It is shocking to me that In this dreadful film has been nominated for some top awards. The “controversy” over whether it shames the obese or not is just another crazy twist in the cultural discourse.
Allied with this is the evident death-wish on the part of consumers for their celebrity stars to go down in flames.
Rock musicians burning out and dying young, movie stars offing themselves by accident or otherwise (Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, James Dean, Natalie Wood, Heath Ledger, John Denver) – this tends to stoke, or revive, their popularity. Who wants to look at the withered face of Kirk Douglas (notable for having raped the above-mentioned Natalie Wood) at 100?
You can even argue that Ernest Hemingway’s decision to eat a shotgun blast revived his literary reputation, which had sagged near the end of his life.
“After I started thinking about this more, I started with my conspiracy theorizing again, and I can see that the normalization and easier availability of pornography in America correlates exactly with the introduction of globalism and the undermining of our country.”
————————————————-
Henry Makow has been writing and speaking about this subject for decades.
henrymakow.ca
According the Matthias Desmet, you really don’t require an extensive organized “Conspiracy”. You can create a somewhat messy Conspiracy resulting in messy, confused numbers and data just by brainwashing people in a particular Ideology and then people will adopt biases and act so as to make Reality try to fit their Ideology in order to create a twisted totalitarian Utopia. One third of “totalitarized” people will buy the narrative hook-line-and-sinker. One third won’t buy the narrative, but will keep quiet and conform to the Herd, and 10% to 30% won’t buy it and will resist.
The big new Utopia is to be created by Technology and Transhumanism to save the planet….
Mattias Desmet
The Psychology of Totalitarianism
I think that Desmet says that if you Brain Fuck a society by socially isolating and atomizing the people while inducing an extremely highly level of ambient anxiety and then suddenly give them a narrative that resolves their anxiety and creates a new social bond and gives them meaning, then the people will subconsciously defend that narrative to the end even if it is absurd and doesn’t make sense.
You want to create a bogeyman, like Trump, Putin, “anti-vaxxers”, etc. to be the lightning rod for their anxiety for them to attack.
This analysis probably goes a long way to explaining RussiaGate, the Covid lockdowns, the vaccines, and Ukraine.
Explains a lot about the climate hoax too. People are hanging on to that one for dear life, even though it has been exposed as false not only by science, but by the undeniable fact that this stuff didn’t happen.
There are a lot of young women with a overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility, and a lot of free-floating anxiety.
This can be a good trait in nature, as the ones who are always alert to trouble are the ones whose families survive.
When we live in a relatively safe environment, and someone plays on those anxious feelings that have nowhere to go, you have women afraid they destroyed the planet if they threw away a piece of aluminum foil instead of recycling it.
I can’t speak for the young men. I do know that a guy with anxiety is more likely to reach for a beer than make a doctor appointment.
Maybe that’s what the games are all about. An escape from real-world anxieties.
Boys used to play video games in the same room with their friends. Now they play with strangers.
I have never understood why so many hold on to (often absurd on their face) beliefs that have virtually no meaning in their daily lives.
Climate change, 9/11, etc.
When contradicting information surfaces, it makes me curious, and I find the discovery process quite exciting, TBH .
Others seem desperate to live in fear and stay in the comfort zone of being told what to do.
@ Night Owl:
These belief systems really are an interesting pathology. There are probably several reasons for it.
I think a lot of people like the idea of catastrophic climate change, or the Rapture, of some kind of apocalypse, for the simple reason that their lives as they are now living them are unbearable: without meaning or worth, or unbearably oppressive. They long for some kind of drastic change–and probably fantasize about being a person of some special importance in this changed world. Or, it could be that life is so unbearable to them that they really don’t want to live, and they view a cataclysmic situation as a kind of desirable form of assisted suicide.
I also think that some people get fixated on some kind of goofy belief systems because they are idle, empty-headed people in need of something to think about.
Also, imagining that the black helicopters are coming for you and the authorities are listening in on your conversations is a way of imagining that someone has some kind of interest in you–that you are important enough or dangerous enough that the PTB is paying attention to you.
What this really means is that you are desperate for attention, and the reason you are desperate for attention is because nobody pays in attention to you.
I have a friend like that. He engages in many elaborate rituals to secure is phone from…well, I’m not sure what. He has a hat to secure his head from…something. He thinks his neighbors are continually surveilling him. I guess he thinks EVERYONE is continually surveilling him. The truth is, he is not of the slightest interest to anyone. But it pleases him to think he is Secret Agent 007.
A lot of these absurd belief systems are gateways to fantasy worlds.
Fantasies are the mind’s defense against unbearable stress. Everyone engages in this to some extent. So–judging from the Western world’s descent into fantasy, you might conclude that modern life is a life that subjects people to unbearable stress. Maybe one of the worst stresses is anomie–being reduced to a non-person of no importance to anyone and no human connection with anyone, and of no interest to anyone.
There are of course other stresses, and some of them are much more severe.
@ Anthea and about the apocalypse…….
In Israel during the general era of Jesus, Judaism consisted mainly of 4 different sects. The really interesting one was the Essenes, the Jewish apocalypticists. They were expecting the end of the age to be just around the corner. Men like John the Baptist lived simple, celibate, and holy lives, getting ready for the time God intervenes and destroys the forces of evil, setting up a new kingdom. Jesus was preaching an already familiar message that had been in circulation from other sources. Preaching that the kingdom of God was at hand, it was here! Repent and make way. I think the Essene’s were pacifists who wore white robes and went through frequent purification rituals involving water, thus the popular message and ceremony with John the Baptist. Essene’s had their own communes where they lived apart from the rest of urban Jerusalem. They were the opposite of the Zeolots, who were focused instead on rebellion, urban warfare, hidden daggers etc. They were really not that different from the Rapture enthusiasts, who believe the second coming and the end of the age is arriving at any moment.
@Anthea, excellent comment.
Yes, such women are typically terrified of men and their ambient anxiety makes them very hard (and dangerous) to work with.
At the drop of a pin, they will try to get their husband (the State) to destroy men who have frightened them or crossed their huge boundaries. That why the State put women of the same ilk in HR – as a way to keep men down. And the birthrate as well…..
@ Jarek:
No one is “terrified” of you. You are not that important. You are terrified of everyone else, though of women in particular. So much so that you fear to get a job or engage with other people at any level.
So, being an idle fellow who is of no interest or value to anyone, you have woven a fantasy to fill your otherwise empty head.
I’m of great interest to you. I’ve told you the truth about yourself after all. In a deep sense, I’m your best friend.
That’s also my take on him, as well. I’m guessing he sits around viewing OnlyFans sites and hanging out in the Manosphere.
His hate seems to get more obsessive every week. Notice he can’t respond to anything, no matter the topic, without touting fascism or hating on women and blacks.
Desmet does not make sense.
Not too worry, German Panzers are rolling east once again, not Tigers this time but Leopards, which retired US Colonels & Generals on CNN & Fox assure us will be “Game Changers” in the war on the eastern front.
Don’t think the Russians are ignoring the symbolism of confronting German tanks on the Dneiper in 2023; the specter of it figured prominently in Putins somber words yesterday at the commemoration of the end of the battle of Stalingrad 80 years ago. We may not think of Stalingrad much here, but when you lose 1.1 million soldiers in a single campaign, it looms rather large in the historical National Conscience. On an ominous note, Putin stated that he would defend Russia’s borders with all means at his disposal, an oblique reference to Russia’s nuclear arsenal. I hope policy makers in Brussels & DC heed Putin’s words and realize Russia is not a country to be trifled with.
Those Panzers still bear the Eisen Kreuz.
An Abrams weighs about 140-150,000 lbs. In my town half the bridges are weight restricted. You can’t take a log or cement truck over them. Of course the bridges in Ukraine are in much better shape. The Abrams is an overweight pig. The Russian T-90 is quite a bit lighter at 90,000 lbs. and 1/2 the price.
and Russian tanks run on plain old ubiquitous Diesel. Abrams need Jet Fuel.
Yes they do bear the Iron Cross but my guess those symbols will be sandblasted off and replaced by LBGQT iconography (rainbow flag with plenty of bright colors)
Yep, and instead of a name like ‘Fury’ on the barrel it’ll be Karen, Sally, Kitty and Jodi.
Or they can just add 1 “r” and call it “Furry”
Someone pointed out to me that ‘trans’ is not a sexuality.
Sex and Gender are not the same.
Sex is biological,
Gender is Cultural. ‘Trans’ is gender.
Gender is linguistic. Trans is nothing.
Trans doesn’t really exist except as a delusion.
As a social construct, it is certainly not a sexuality.
It certainly does not belong on a flag with other sexualities.
Why must we even have a flag celebrating alternative sexual proclivities? So some people have something to wave in our face without dropping their drawers?
Thank you, hmuller.
Why is there a flag to start with, denoting sexuality?
I preferred the days when people kept their sex lives to themselves. Why is it anyone’s business and why is it shoved in our faces?
I agree, Mary. Don’t wave your freak flag in my face, oh young tattooed one.
I am most certainly not interested in your sex life.
Yes, some one here educate me, what is the significance of the “Iron Cross”?
Is it Prussian? German? I associate it with WW2 aircraft and tanks, and the SS symbol.
How come the politically correct Germans didn’t just put three stripes, black/red/yellow and be done?
I think for the Germans, it links back to very early Christianity, I’ve seen vintage WWI and earlier uniforms where the buckles had “Gott Mitt Uns” – (God is with us).
Ironically, the “Iron Cross” (a form of tatzenkreuz) motif wasn’t used on WWII vehicles. It was used by the German Empire and the Weimar Republic before the WWII and by the post-war republic, but not by Nazi Germany. The Nazis used a Balkenkreuz on their vehicles.
The Iron Cross has its roots in the cross of the Teutonic knights who conquered Prussia for Jesus. So yes, Prussia and Germany. No, WWII and SS.
Blackbird, that is true for vehicles, but the Iron Cross (Eisernes Kreuz) was adopted by the Nazis. It was on flags and it was an award.
True. I was trying to correct the “tanks wearing the iron cross” meme that is so popular lately.
I think Germany should have used the iron cross on their vehicles in WWII – it looks so… German.
The Eisernes Kreuz goes back much farther than the Nazis.
Some pretty knowledgeable peeps on the forum today. I always wanted 2 airplanes, P-51 Mustang and ME-109.
I was working in Germany and a colleague invited me to his Family estate. My first evening there, he was showing me to my room, we walked down a hallway that had several photographs of the Family and the property. One of the photos was of a man standing by a Messerschmidt-109 but in the wrong livery. He was surprised to hear me name the plane. He pointed to the guy and said “my Father, in Spain fighting the with Franco”.
After supper, he asked if I would like to see the plane? Whaaaa?..Yes!! We again walked the hallway with the photos, took a turn and we were suddenly in an enormous hanger and there she was, back in the livery of fascist Espana.
When Spain ‘surplused’ the plane (1966?), his Father went to the auction, bought his old plane, dis-assembled it and brought it home on the train (minus armaments of course.). He overhauled it and continued to fly until his death.
I kick myself for not getting a picture of my smiling mug in that cockpit. It was a tight squeeze.
Nice story BB, I thought the coolest thing about the 109 was the upside down V-12 Daimler- Benz engine.
Stelmos,
I was fascinated by the 20 mm “Tank Killer” Cannon that fired through the Engine Crank-shaft. Not all variants had that but, I tell you, the Germans are
non-Pareil when it comes to thinking outta the box. Imagine trying to get THAT timing just right.
Actually, the cannon fired through the propeller shaft. The propeller was connected to the engine via a gearbox, and the cannon barrel slid through a tube between the two banks of cylinders.
That was cool that you had the opportunity to sit in a 109, even if it was the Spanish version – the one you see in all the movies.
The Messerschmidt I’d want parked in my garage would be the 262. With those four 30 mm cannons you can bust open any can thrown at you. And with those two turbojets, you can get out of trouble even more quickly than you got into it.
Speaking of P-51s, surplus Mustangs were available for as little as $3,500 in the late forties.
@blackbird, Re; buying a Mustang for $3500.
In the sixties I remember going w/ pops to the auctions at Fort Harrison (west of Helena Mt.). There were cases of M1 Garands, 1903 A3 Springers, .45ACP’s, mountains of ammo all going for pennies on the dollar, Unertl sniper scopes, survival gear, all surplus. For my dad it was an opportunity to visit / some old friends. (he was Quartermaster) For me it was a chance to really see all of the cool stuff on shows like; Combat, 12 O’clock High, McHales Navy.
I think the western leaders are greedy/stupid enough to push Putin to use the nuclear arsenal. But I’m especially cynical these days.
A lot of people should be hanging for crimes against humanity. Nuclear war will blow all that away.
Yep. I guess they suspect they may be caught, so they have to get ahead of it by blowing everyone up.
This does make sense to the PTB.
That “We have to destroy the city to save it” mentality (like they used on the Branch Davidians for example).
I think they all work for the same paymasters, and those investors do not want their investment flash-fried.
So here we go! The news this morning is a total train wreck! Kevin McCarthy says that Ashli Babbitt’s death was caused by an officer doing his job! The Chinese Ballon is keeping an eye on our missile sites, Biden and his son keeps making more money and they think we are all jerks. The Squad has shown its true colors. Too bad girls!
We are losing in Ukraine although CNN is ready to have a victory parade in NYC. Jobs report is out. We employed a lot of waitresses! Our local stores have quit sale flyers since there’s nothing on sale. And bring your own bag, no more plastic bags.
As I said before, we need a real house (and senate) cleaning. We can’t survive this with the people we now have in charge. They no longer fear the people. As Jim said recently, wait until all the free stuff comes to an end.
It will be interesting to see how CNN & the US State Dept. spin it when the Ukrainian army totally disintegrates, which by some accounts it’s pretty close to doing now.
Does that balloon have Biden Industries printed on it????
XXhttps://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/670a25da86aa2cf03007126eb974b1d3a84427892539101845505e1a435667d0.jpg?w=800&h=985
Did Mister Babbitt have anything to say about McCathy’s remark?
I do not get it. The GOP side economists are all expounding about the need for Fed control with higher interest rates to control the heavy spending inflation that has occurred. We are heading into a recession.
Uh, what happened in January. Inflation moderated to the 5% range and the jobs report shows 3.4% unemployment with new jobs up 517000 instead of 168000 predicted.
????????
Having more man hours producing more goods will offset spending with inflation, IMHO.
Numbers like this, pumped up by the MSM, sure does not help 2024 GOP chances.
I do not understand, Biden was smirking this AM.
I can make a report show anything I want. If you believe those figures welcome to hell.
I understand about data fixing, but I hear no counter data from the alternatives, and they do exist. Trends count, if the measuring technique stays constant.
This allowed Biden to stand up and tell the US population,
“See that”, I was right all along.
Drives me crazy as I switch the channel.
Consider: If you keep watching the tv, the drive will be rather short.
@ JohnAZ:
If you wanted to go to the trouble, you could figure out your personal inflation rate for yourself, just by keeping track of prices. As far as an increase in employment, I suspect this count arises from all the instances in which one person has two or three jobs and is counted two or three times.
Even assuming BLS statistics were true, it takes quite a bit of analysis to unpack their meaning. For one thing, people continually enter and leave the labor force. Young people reach an employable age; old people die or retire; some people become disabled. And…uh…bazillions of undocumented immigrants flow across our southern border.
In order for employment to even remain stable, jobs must increase at the same rate as the increase in the labor force. For employment numbers to actually improve, jobs have to increase at a rate that is greater than the increase in the labor force.
Another thing, re your idea that, “Having more man hours producing more goods will offset spending with inflation, IMHO,”
I assume you are talking about GDP.
GDP doesn’t really measure actual production of goods and services. GDP includes government employment. By any kind of honest accounting system, government employment would go on the debit site of the ledger as an overhead expense.
Also, about 20% of the US GDP is from health care. Karl Denninger frequently points out that health care work is not production; it is an overhead expense. It may indirectly contribute to productivity (by getting the sick back to work), but probably not, since it mainly disables and kills people.
It’s very easy to look at economic data all wrong, even if you had hones data.
When was the last time that “We”, as a coherent, unified society and culture, threw a young Virgin into the volcano?
Since the Chinese Comm…nudists still practice necromancy does this mean that “We” are at a strategic disadvantage in negotiating with the Chinese unless we also practice necromancy?
Does the big negotiator and Hollywood “Swinger”Henry Kissinger still live in a spartan apartment that resembles a Holiday Inn hotel room with books and dirty laundry piled on top of the extra twin bed? Is Kissinger’s messy bedroom still bugged by Alexander Haig?
Haig was demonized as a monster. Was he in reality a fine man, a patriot, an officer and a gentleman?
Haig lived in town here. We’d see him around. Once I saw him at the hardware store.
@JHK
…choreographed, of course, by the global ruling elite as but a single puzzle piece in the large picture of global depopulation and industrial downsizing, eh?
Well, good luck to them, I say most disingenuously, bunch of genetic mutants with illusions, delusions of longer term survival.
Henry Kissinger sounded the alarm about AI. If yer AI is as proficient as it needs to be in order to run the sims and flip the billions of switches that execute the step-down industrial transition, then it’s “smart” enough to realize that the busted empathy genes [psychopathy] and busted satiation genes [greed] of the ruling elite are not the human creature that belongs on this magnificent Earth. Algo has their number. So, guess who will be joining the rest of us in this “reset”.
None of this is true, of course.
~toktomi~
JHK participated in a show, still available on You tube, called,
“The Prophets of Doom”.
One of the experts talked about AI and the singularity.
JHK, peak oil, another peak fresh water and AI.
A really good discussion of 12 years or so ago. Looking back at it shows how accurate the prophets were then.
Speaking of fresh water, has anyone read about California dumping it’s fresh rain water (when it rains to excess) into the ocean? Forbes.com had a story on it, but there was other coverage as well. Sorry I don’t have a link.
Dumping fresh water into the ocean turns it into salt water, thus rendering it obsolete for irrigation. These people can’t be this stupid. Maybe they can reroute their $5M per black resident to some sort of rain water reclamation project?
Doesn’t surprise me. All of California is high on dope and meth, they can’t think straight to save their lives. Look at London Breed, mayor of San Francisco. A total nut job! And let’s not even get started on Newscum!
Yup. The crisis has been apparent for decade. On a fairly regular basis, at least every few years, California, is innundated by heavy rains – even Southern California. Yet nothing has ever been done to collect this resource.
I know right. If they had any brains they would dam Yosemite Valley and fill it with water. Bunch of stupid rocks. Oh, wait a minute . They already did that with the Hetch Hetchy Valley. The problem with run-off is there really is no practical way to store it without flooding something.
Indians used to use cisterns. How hard can it be if Indians could do it?
A long time ago I read an article about the landscaper who planned NY Central and Golden Gate parks.
They hired him to plan something for LA. He came up with a plan to turn the area around the San Gabriel and LA rivers into parks.
Most of the time they would be parks available for the citizens to enjoy, but when the once-a-decade heavy rains came, the area would flood and the water would sink into the earth.
The TPTB in LA decided to ignore that plan and build houses all over the place, turning the riverbeds into cement culverts.
Which the idiots who moved to LA scream should be turned into freeways, because in their tiny little minds adding yet another freeway to LA would magically stop the traffic that the last 50 freeways did not alleviate.
And then they bitch and moan when the occasional rains go into the ocean. You know, the water cycle. How dare they!
Yes, California needs dams on all their rivers to store water.
One huge problem is the river environmentalists who want to tear down dams. For 3x ample, they have been trying to tear down Glen Canyon dam on Lake Powell since it was built.
Dammit people, don’t you realize that is you take a good part of the boomer generation and move them to the SW, you better take care of the fresh water situation. For Damn once, think proactive instead of reactive.
If I was in charge, ha, one of the first things would be to stop snowbirds from migrating here. Until the water storage is back under control.
Swimming pools, oh boy. If the choice was farmers versus swimming pools, which should happen.
Couple of facts about pools here, unless you are willing to dip into 70s, you are limited in pool time to 3-4 months a year. The nighttime temps keep the pools low. In the summer, pools lose 2 inches from evaporation a day, a huge loss.
Phoenix and Tucson are going to be hurting units, THIS YEAR. LA next year if trends continue.
This SW situation is a very good indication of why the Federals cannot fix much of anything. Reaction instead of pro action. Having Doug Ducey and his denial crowd from the Deep State in office meant nothing was acknowledged.
“because in their tiny little minds adding yet another freeway to LA would magically stop the traffic that the last 50 freeways did not alleviate.”
Yep, the Jevons paradox so often foils environmentalists who don’t do their homework.
A word for Hetch Hetchy. It was said to be even more beautiful than Yosemite, and the destruction of it broke John Muir’s heart.
But the gimmes in California got water to make lawns, so……it all evens out.
Hey Junkies and illegals need water too. Have a heart.
@JohnAZ
yup, sounds like the James Howard of “The Long Emergency”.
I’m not sure that this is the same James of yore.
~toktomi~
Well, rainwater flows into the ocean anyhow.
The idea of “dumping fresh water into the ocean” sounds like someone misunderstood something.
That’s where the ocean comes from—-fresh water flowing into it . . . .
“That’s where the ocean comes from—-fresh water flowing into it . . . .” The remainder of the conversion is done by the heat of the sun and the varying winds.
And civilization means not letting nature take its course without serving us. The art is to not uproot it completely, to strike a balance.
Once the fresh water goes into the ocean, it become salty and useless to us without a large expenditure of energy to desalinate it.
Coincidentally, I am seeing AI pushed heavily on LinkedIn right now, by people I follow there.
The AI is supposed to do all the tasks now (if you use them) that lower-level workers do, even up to writing blogs and data crunching.
But none of these people broach the subject of what happens to those replaced workers.
Mary, 517000 new jobs this month, they are going somewhere?
Those are the vacancies from people losing their jobs.
Zing! Statistics don’t explain themselves, John. Often the explanations are an attempt to hide the truth. Technology takes jobs. The new ones it creates don’t equal the ones lost. That’s why they do it: To save money.
Capitalism is your ideology, your love. You need defend her, not run from her hideous blemishes.
Yep.
There is no job boom. There are a lot of desperate people posting on NextDoor begging for jobs and ways to keep the wolf from the door. People are really hurting.
@MaryQueen
A question more germane to the current state of the world might be this. What happens to the 7E9 dead bodies?
seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-on-the-cusp-of-becoming-first-state-to-legalize-human-composting/
Hmm, composting humans, or their feces?
Definitely ‘human remains’ according to the article.
Well, two birds with one stone and all that . . . why not?
Returning humans to the cycles of nature is very appealing.
Surely that explains the popularity of people reserving places in forest settings for the interment of their own remains.
Well, there are definitely plenty of human remains for composting these days. More every week.
islander – re forest settings, an earlier iteration of my husband’s Will stated that he’d like to be ‘buried under a fruit tree, such as a hazel’. The wording always amused me as it sounded as if the tree was already there and they’d have to get him underneath it. 🙂
GA:
Yes, it is pretty hard to dig a hole near a tree because of the roots. But it should be possible to dig a few narrow holes and put the ashes into them. And the rain would soak them into the ground and nourish the tree. This the best we can aim for when it comes to “interment” which means “into the earth.” Works for me!
I am having the same thoughts because I have to get my father’s ashes into the ground, and I know the tree where he would want them to be —but there is a little problem with the location of the tree . . . Have to sneak in there in the off-season, but after the ground has thawed . . . I’ll have to check into “concealed-carry” laws for shovels . . . . .
Ah, yes, if you choose cremation, it is techinically possible, if not entirely legal! He was thinking of a normal burial, so a whole coffin.
It was inevitable along with the new “euth yourself” laws in Canada, I’m guessing that’ll be here in the US soon enough.
Right now the Harpies in DC are aflutter about a CCP Balloon over Montana.
“A Spy Balloon” they squawk. “Shoot it Down!!!”.
My Dad worked on the Silos and other underground constructions.
I used to drive by them everyday, I’ve been inside LCF 1-M, ( launch control facility) Every LCF has a “wing” of 10 MM-III’s Each Minute-Man III has three independently targeted re-entry vehicles. This was during that fleeting moment of sanity known as Glasnost.
Just like in the movies, there’re two guys wearing ascots, sitting 15 feet apart on office chairs mounted on tracks.
My point is, there’s nothing to be gleaned via a Balloon that can’t be discovered via sitting in your comfortable automobubble.
The LCF’s try to appear as a normal installation, -Basketball court, Volleyball court, chin-up bars etc. In the 11 million times I drove past them, not once did I ever see anybody above ground.
Years ago, a KLM flight wandered over Russian territory and was immediately shot down.
If the government is not there to protect our borders and air space, what is it for. Again, Biden’s Mob does nothing.
I’m thinking it was JAL007 flying over Sakhalin Island on Lang-ly business and had happened before. So, KaBlooie!
Thanks for the correction? I thought I remembered that the one had passengers on board.
Another situation , remember Gary Powers in 1960 in XB 70 spy plane over Russia. His getting shot down embarrassed the heck out of the Pentagon.
Are the Chinese just floating surveillance over us, what a way to do it. Who needs satellites and high altitude aircraft. We are too afraid to deal with it.
Yes, JAL-007 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight (heavy) CIA wanted to know when the Rooskies were able to detect the overflight. It was done several times before, the USSR finally got tired of it and shot it down. I remember it well b/c I was in the air a lot in those days.
I also remember Francis Gary Powers in the cockpit of a U-2 getting blown outta the sky and captured. They usta fly right over my house en route to North Pole and Commie land. Do you remember Sonic Booms? The SR-71 gave two booms, it was just a dinky little smudge waaaaay up high.
Let’s get the facts straight. KAL007 – Korean
Airlines Flight 007. September 01, 1983. New York to Seoul with a stopover in Anchorage.
All 246 passengers and 23 crewmen dead after the Russians shot it down. Included on the list was Congressman Larry MacDonald.
A 247th passenger decided at the last minute not to board the flight. His name – former President Richard Nixon – sheer luck, premonition, warned off? Makes you wonder.
Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts. Our rulers tell us a story, we believe it, and that settles it.
However……..
“The place: Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island.
A Korean Air Boeing 747 carrying 269 passengers and crew from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul, South Korea, is 587 km off course – a world record in the history of civil aviation. For five hours and seven minutes the aircraft flies undetected over the most heavily defended airspace in the world, in a region that is a hotbed of superpower reconnaissance activity.
When Soviet radar finally discovers the bogey, officers at the secret Sokol air base scramble a Sukhoi-15. The supersonic aircraft, piloted by Lt Col Gennadi Osipovich, approaches the 747 from the rear. He levels up alongside the 747 and fires three warning bursts – totalling 520 rounds – from his canon. Osipovich is hoping to force land the intruder, but he sees the Boeing trying to evade him.
Having positively identified the intruder as a foreign aircraft, Soviet ground control officers order Osipovich to shoot it down. He fires two air to air missiles which explode 50 m from the 747. Minutes later the aircraft hits the ocean. There are no survivors.”
Yep, there they were, flying along, minding their OWN business, 587 km off course. An innocent mistake, of course.
Jeez. The bullshit people believe.
An flight named 007. What is that about satanists and their fondness of signaling and numerology?
rbth.com/blogs/2013/09/24/target_destroyed_the_hidden_secret_of_kal_007_29607
Herr Muller, Thanks for hitting the ‘Refresh’ tab. You’re correct, it was KAL-007.
Paula, the reason the plane was so far off course is a matter of debate.
1) As you implied maybe it was aiding in some spy mission over Soviet territory.
2) Someone typed the wrong numbers into the navigational settings. This raises a lot of questions about how the plane’s location went unnoticed by the pilots thereafter.
3) My favorite explanation based on 5 years in Korea and getting to know how the people act and think. We know KAL awarded cash bonuses to pilots who saved on fuel. Maybe these pilots were willing to take a gamble with everyones’ lives to take a shortcut, save fuel, and collect some cash.
I know it sounds ludicrous to us. But you’d be amazed at the the way they cut corners and jeopardize safety to save a little money.
I was in Seoul in 1995 when a new five story supermarket collapsed during rush hour (5 pm) killing 500 people. Many load bearing pillars had been eliminated from the original blueprints, a swimming pool added to the roof, and building inspectors placated with bribes.
That could be how they got the pilots to go along with the plan, for sure, hmuller.
No one wants to risk their lives, unless there is money involved.
This sounds like a manufactured scare hype to me.
A weather balloon? Seriously?
The Chinese have satellites, just like we do. Why would they need a weather balloon?
It sounds absurd. I think this is another bullshit story put out to see who falls for it.
If you didn’t fall for covid you shouldn’t fall for “weather balloon”.
Or swamp gas (methane?) UFO’s.
I think it is at the least a diversionary story.
Directly from the English language (Red) Chinese Foreign Ministry website (ends in ‘.cn’) “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson’s Remarks on the Unintended Entry of a?Chinese Unmanned Airship into US Airspace Due to Force Majeure
2023-02-03 21:32
Q:?According to media reports, a Chinese unmanned airship has?been?spotted in US airspace. Do you have any comment?
A: The airship is from China. It is a civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes. Affected by the Westerlies and with limited self-steering capability, the airship deviated far from its planned course. The Chinese side regrets the unintended entry of the airship into US airspace due to force majeure. The Chinese side will continue communicating with the US side and properly handle this unexpected situation caused by force majeure.”
I expect even after the above, ” this is another bullshit story put out to see who falls for it.”
It is quite common for them to rile up the masses on a Friday, as I observed earlier.
But yeah, an off-course balloon causing mass hysteria because of media hype? The Washington Post had FIVE articles about this on their website yesterday. The story was hyped beyond belief on every possible media outlet.
This is a test, it is only a test.
Maybe the “weather balloon” is following a homing beacon from Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. Its mission : to collide with and blow up the device, destroying incriminating evidence.
You may say, “Yeah, but it’s too late, there are copies.”
But are they legally certified copies of the original data with a chain of custody recorded? You see, on a legal technicality the copies may not be admissible evidence. Destroy the original and that’s one less Biden problem.
Now all they need is an unexplained garage fire.
@bd
agreed, full 3-d audio and visual [+ whatever other RF wavelengths might be in play] surveillance.
Well, of course, fuck this shit! But waving bed sheets at the aurora borealis will do little to mitigate the effects of those lethal injections that so many volunteered for.
~toktomi~
I recently purchased all 4 titles of Jim’s World Made By Hand series and received them in yesterday’s deliveries. I am looking forward to digging into these soon and enjoying the plot lines as they apply to our present lives.
I gleaned everything I could about Union Grove, New York in all four books and used the information to guide my years long search for property that would be advantageously situated after a collapse. I’m not kidding.
SoCal auto club is promoting a new guide of some sort for EVs. The person interviewed on the radio this morning sputtered on and on about this exciting transition! Who can afford to buy an EV? I see social chaos and collapse
I’ve talked about this before at this site, the creeping authoritarianism in our society, and how some people just loved it.
I used to call it ‘everybody wants to be a narc’.
This man explains it pretty well.
I’m thinking of how many issues in our society would just go away if people would just learn to mind their own damn business.
They get trained to think everything everybody else chooses to do is their business, and that’s how we get totalitarian societies, biggest The Man is going to save them from the bad people doing the bad thing, like maybe eating at McDonald’s or eating at home but cooking on a gas stove.
“”There’s something totalitarianism offers, which [some] people deeply enjoy…it takes away all control you have over your own life. But it gives you incredible power over the life of your neighbor…For some people, it’s a great substitute for freedom.”
https://twitter.com/JanJekielek/status/1619702121427013634?cxt=HHwWhMDU2e6fq_osAAAA
The covid scam sure brought out the mini-totalitarians—the enforcers, the Karens—in force, didn’t it.
Yes, it really did expose the authoritarian mindset types.
A simple approach; “I will not Comply”!
I think a big part of the Karen mindset is that they don’t see other people as their friends, neighbors, and family, but rather as enemies and competitors. So anything that hurts or disadvantages other people is good for them.
Public acceptance of drug-testing for employment is one example. The Karen type will think, “Since I don’t smoke weed, this will decimate my competition for the job. I will be able to get on at Home Depot.”
Same with the covid measures. For one thing, it gives the Karens a long-frustrated opportunity to harass others–people whom they always viewed as enemies anyway. And if the unvaxxed lose their jobs, the Karen view is, “More for me!”
Yes, there are more women like that than men. Thus “Karen” is utterly appropriate.
As near as I can tell, the US government got tired of losing all of the 4th generation wars, and decided that it wanted to win one for a change. So they are waging a 5th generation war against us.
True dat.
As near as I can tell, the US government hasn’t won a war since 1865 when we won a hard fought victory against ourselves.
One of my favorite sayings from a bumper sticker sold at a Southern Civil War battlefield museum, juxtaposed over the stars and bars:
“Confederate States of America: Fighting Terrorists since 1861”
Pardon me folks, I know this is not my site but I must add to cowbell81’s quote.
My first philosophy professor was a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris (also member of the French Underground fighting the occupying Germans). He never stopped inveighing against American’s self-exalting editing (re-writing essentially) of the issues that led to our Civil War, pointing out that Tolstoy in Russia — like all European noble folks who’d been “titled” land— was essentially no different from the US’s plantation owners in the period before our so called “War to End Slavery”.
For all of us students who’d read Upton Sinclair’s 1905 published novel “The Jungle”, he had to lead us to connect how Harriot Beecher Stow’s 1852 published “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was really a virtue signal (not his label) of its time that gave cover to the fact that in the industrializing north the land-dispossessed poor and uneducated flood of immigrants out of Europe suffered conditions often worse than what Negros suffered in the south because in the South (as characterized by Margarette Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and Samuel Clemens’s writings) the 3-4 generations relationship between owner/slave families was commonly more similar to kindred, explaining why “chattel” were often better clothed, housed and fed than poor White’s off the plantation.
Tolstoy (who liked to dress up theatrically as proletariat to work in the fields with them), as with all of titled families in Europe, could expel commoners who’d occupied the acreage for centuries.
A century without plague resulted in swelled European population crowding into cities like described by Dickens in his 1847 book “A Christmas Carol” (the last paragraph of the book describes the transformed Scrooge “….as good a master as one could want”). In the 1938 British movie of JB Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion” (Hollywood’s 1956 “My Fair Lady”) Liza Dolittle’s father addresses Dr. Higgins and Colonel Pickering as “Governor’s both”, acknowledging that his commoner lot in 20th Century England remained less than “equal”, though legally a “freed man”.
Sinclair’s book had more to do with actually ending conditions of slavery; eventuating legislation that ended child labor, legalization of labor unions, agencies to enforce workplace safety and, finally (not until the 1940s) enacting laws which criminalized companies hiring goons to brutalize striking workers. In other words, effecting legal balance against hegemonic economic, political and class power. The book’s public impact compelled President Teddy Roosevelt’s administration to nudge forward the four decades legal slog toward true worker class emancipation.
Emphatically, a clarion rebuke to Lincoln’s meretricious excuse for invading and destroying the South’s agricultural culture, an atrocity carried out with an army of which a great proportion comprised newly arrived European poor who’d been lured {recruited} by issue of desperately needed clothes (uniform) and avoidance of starvation. If Lincoln hadn’t opted for war to prevent the South’s secession there’d likely be no Lincoln Memorial.
Stowe’s book was written and first published in her hometown of Cincinnati, terminus of the “underground railroad”. A little understanding of how the owner/manager class of the industrializing North was using the flood of Negros from the South to break unionizing efforts awakens grasps of why two of the largest pre-Civil War riots against the “Road to Freedom” occurred in Cincinnati.
The expression “Wage Slave” is credited to the American writer and associate of Sinclair, Jack London, but in actuality it was coined by Southern Plantation owners pre-Civil War, horrified in witness to the horrible working conditions that Sinclair was decrying in the next century.
As history repeatedly shows, selective strands pulled from the dense fabric of history allow demagogues to build a “narrative” justifying authoritarian overreach w/concentration of power. The French and Russian revolutions most particularly illustrate how the wobble can stabilize to extreme of “left” or “right” — even alternatively if history’s lessons aren’t headed or get “Cancelled”.
Interesting points, Cavepainter.
Propaganda has been around for a lot longer than the internet, for sure.
The “first” slaves in the USA were Indentured Servants from Europe (mostly Ireland).
Although there are some questions as to their status, these “Servants” who were supposedly “Indentured” for a specific period of time and were due for Freedom upon that times’ expiration.
The reality is, they were “Free” to die homeless and hungry or stay working with Master and Mistress on the farm for no pay but room and board.
I am astounded by the “Reparations” discussions going on in Ca. and other states. I think there is a small silent population namely, the Native (First Nation) peoples of the Americas. They have remained largely un-assimilated and ignored. If anyone has a claim to “Reparations” it is they.
The first African slaves in NAmerica came off a Spanish ship, which the English had siezed in the Caribbean. The settlers in Jamestown didn’t quite know what to make of them. By 1619 the Spanish & Portugese had been running slaves into Brazil and Latin America for 100 years already.
Thanks Cavepainter. That was a post well worth the read. Very interesting.
Slavery was outlawed in Europe after that bad experience with the Roman slaves, many of whom were enslaved because of debt they were unable to pay. (Take note: that is coming again).
So when the first Africans came to the US they were held under the existing indentured servant laws and freed at the end of their term. That is where the ”free black men” came from. They could even vote in some colonial states.
It was a freed African slaveholder who first got the law to say that Africans could be held for life. He had an indentured servant he wouldn’t free. The slave sued. The court ruled for the black slaveholder.
Eventually the legislators changed the laws for all.
.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrible-fate-john-casor-180962352/
Underground railroad vs “rat line”. Two different phrases for the same thing except one being beautiful and positive, the other ugly and negative. The power of words. The power of the Tribe.
I saw pretty much the same out west. Four Apaches holding Henry repeating rifles.
Their Slogan?
“Fighting Terrorism since 1492.”
Even a casual reading of history, period epic literature or diary accounts allows recognizing how “victimology” is overplayed, preventing grasp that — to the contrary — history’s course is due more to inadvertency than deliberant intent.
The tsunami of Europeans into North America was unmanageable, treaties not-with-standing. At best, nothing more than temporary pacifications.
Accounts given by the likes of Cabesa De Vacca contrast with the glib “noble savage” characterization adopted by Eastern gentry a hundred plus years later while pioneer families were still being mercilessly slaughtered.
Today, there are so called “Indian reservations”. For perspective consider if “the shoe was on the other foot”.
That is to say, would there now be “European Reservations” if native tribes had united instead of continuing their age-old savaging of one another, had superiority in weaponry and adopted European strategic military planning?
Well, maybe; if they’d also adopted Western Culture which they’ve yet to enjoin.
We’re living on conquered land. The Liberals still aren’t willing to accept the implications of that. Because it they did, they’d have to leave.
Poor idiots.
Paula,
Last month I sold a Sterling Spoon on ebay, it commemorated 150th year abolishment of Slavery in Denmark. 1788-1938
Did Denmark have slaves? Or did they traffic them? Or was it virtue signaling?
I have never heard of slaves in Denmark.
Is this a duplicate? My original post does not seem to be going through! Chalk this up to Chinese censorship.
It’s a foreign object over our airspace, SHOOT IT DOWN ALREADY!!!!
wwwXXX.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/chinese-spy-balloon-forecast-to-fly-over-these-states-in-the-next-few-hours/ar-AA1753dR?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=b0b93f6c17cc428287c0265d1082b390
To any readers here in the balloon’s flight path over the coming days, I would strongly suggest trying to take it down. Do we have any small aircraft private pilots on here? If so, do your best to protect us and take this thing down. I cannot believe the weak spine of our leaders on this, yet another example not to trust our government and think they are doing what is best for us.
What do you think a balloon is going to do?
Censor his comments to the Kunstler blog, apparently.
It must be stopped!!!!
“What do you think a balloon is going to do?” I have no idea. All I know about it is what I can glean from the MSM and internet postings. As far as I can tell, I still have electrical power to my home, satellite radio is still working, and I am live on the internet.
A troll could do, right? Aren’t they like two miles tall. give em a groundhog to throw at it,
a giant a**hole ground hog mutated on steroids of course. Probably more like a whale. that’s what I think about that.
China has no creativity or sense of humor. These giant balloons could be made in the shape of a human rear end, and function as “mooning” balloons. Something to add insult to injury and make the news far more interesting.
Well, ladies and germs;
An earlier topic was gas stoves. Below is a pic of the exact year and model of gas stove that I have in my kitchen…some would call it an assault stove, or perhaps a stove of mass destruction;
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/5735821353133610/?ref=browse_tab&referral_code=marketplace_top_picks&referral_story_type=top_picks
That’s a big-assed stove! Are you stashing Leopard tanks too?
Dis,
Sadly, no tracked vehicles, other than a D4 and a TD9.
The stove? Some would say that I am…compensating….
Every man should own a dozer or two. But a good tank can be quite the handy tool too. Never can tell when you might have to put on a show of force to keep a motherfucker in line. Just don’t let the damn things run you over like Jeremy Renner.
OMG. Do you live in a diner?
Beryl,
No…just cook a lot. I should also mention that I have it’s doppelganger in the basement…US Stove brand, double oven, griddle, 6 burners. Use it for making beer.
Wow. I envy you.
I have to hurry up and get a gas range before I can’t.
How many deplorables can you fit in the oven?
The beast of Hillary would nicely fit in there, and feed a lot of homeless people to boot!
“How many deplorables can you fit in the oven?”
Saint,
40 hommes et 8 cheval
How dare you!
I was referring to having a Facebook account…
You have a restaurant stove? Wow.
It has a high capacity for burning magazines…
EF has often mentioned the ‘smouldering’ Salma Hayek. 🙂
Alba,
The oven does not get hot enough…
https://www.google.com/search?q=dawn+to+dusk+snake+dance&source=hp&ei=qSvfY8DTGtaJ0PEP-quhIA&iflsig=AK50M_UAAAAAY985ufpTnSDbphNgS-YihSpGXoIgF3rO&ved=0ahUKEwiAzOj_wP38AhXWBDQIHfpVCAQQ4dUDCA8&oq=dawn+to+dusk+snake+dance&gs_lcp=Cgdnd3Mtd2l6EAwyBQghEKABMggIIRAWEB4QHTIICCEQFhAeEB06EQguEIAEELEDEIMBEMcBENEDOggILhCxAxCDAToLCAAQgAQQsQMQgwE6BQgAEIAEOggILhCABBCxAzoFCC4QgAQ6CwguEIAEELEDEIMBOggIABCABBCxAzoICC4QgAQQ1AI6CAgAELEDEIMBOggILhDUAhCABDoLCC4QrwEQxwEQgAQ6DgguEIAEELEDEIMBENQCOhEILhCABBCxAxCDARDHARCvAToLCAAQFhAeEPEEEAo6BQgAEIYDOgUIIRCrAjoKCCEQFhAeEA8QHVAAWL49YOFRaABwAHgAgAFRiAHvC5IBAjI0mAEAoAEB&sclient=gws-wiz#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:78d00f31,vid:OOm3ScZZZjs
I’m not going to click on that because I know what it is. I watched the film once on TV with my husband and I have to say it was one of the most revolting films I’ve ever seen. We had no idea what it was before watching it.
Sadly for him, no doubt, he missed Ms Hayek’s performance. By the time he got back, things had turned a bit satanic. Why anyone watches sick shit like that is beyond me. No accounting for tastes, I suppose.
Biden won’t even secure our southern border from a bunch of illegal Mexicans coming over. What makes anyone think he would be willing to secure our border and airspace from a Chinese spy balloon. No doubt, someone in a high-level government job was paid off to let this incident proceed.
We wont do anything because we let our balloons fly randomly too.
If the CCP wants to surveille our missile silos, all they have to do is drive the back roads of Great Falls Mt. They’re easy to spot, 10 ft. Chain link fence and a big slab of concrete in the middle of it, sensors on the corners. Don’t stop and stare b/c that will summon a Helicopter.
Boytoy Biden lovee China long time.
You sound like a woman I knew once in Las Vegas.
“Knew” as in Adam “knew” Eve.
“You pay me noooow.”
Doesn’t China operate spy satellites? Why would they resort to hot air balloons. Besides, there are Chicom spies inside every University in the United States. Some comrades say the Bidens are on their payroll.
F-Troop “It is BaLLooooooN!”
youtube.com/watch?v=KlyERnu7zUw
The arrogant geniuses have united and basically kidnapped all major governments and countries, and we’re being held hostage. We’re on a runaway train doing 150mph, headed for a concrete wall. The collision will be heard around the world.
I recommend “Locomotive Breath” by Jethro Tull c.1970 as soundtrack. Turn it up!!
If the whole forest falls, is there anyone left to hear it?
We will all be rendered deaf and blind, bleeding from the eye sockets and ear drums.
The Chinese spy balloon is probably chock full of bioweapons. Watch for it, COVID Part 2 will soon be underway, just in time for summer swimsuit weather.
“The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens.”
People forced to eat cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies don’t have a place to put a garden.
Most of Northern Virginia consumes these products, and most residents have enough space for 3 or 4 large gardens.
As so often, your virtue signaling on behalf of the world’s downtrodden has exposed your cluelessness.
Forced to eat.
Having to pay rent on a place with 3 or 4 large gardens does not leave a lot of time for gardening.
The home repair dilemma. You have the job and no time, or you have the time but no job.
When I lived there, I ate virtually none of it. No one with a yard the size of 3 or 4 large gardens is renting either.
Get rid of tv and internet and you’ll free up a lot of time.
While people aren’t forced to eat junk food, it’s hard for poor people to avoid it. The dollar stores where many people get the greater part of their food are absolutely full of this crap. There are a few relatively non-toxic things to be had there (beans, rice, a few frozen vegetables), but most of it is unimaginably bad.
Having grown some veggies the past few years, I can attest that it isn’t particularly cheap to get a garden started. Seeds have become remarkably expensive, as has everything else that is at all related. We grow in containers, and even the once cheap plastic ones have become expensive.
I don’t know if dollar stores vary much but when I lived in CA I went to a dollar store that had a LOT of produce and it was the same stuff that I paid $5 more for at Albertson’s. It was the best kept secret.
@ MaryQueen;
Our Dollar General in Odessa, Missouri, has never carried any produce. They didn’t have much of a grocery section until the town’s only grocery store closed about five years ago, at which point they expanded their grocery section. However, the town’s only grocery store has recently closed again. This is the third time it’s gone out of business in the past ten years–in a town with a population of 5,000. Other towns in the area have thriving grocery stores with less than half the population.
None of the Dollar General stores in this area carry any produce. To me, it doesn’t look like any of them have room to add a produce section.
There are two Dollar Generals in my town. The one by me doesn’t have produce but the other one does.
My friend was the manager of the other one and she was quite proud of the produce section. I never actually went to hers, because the one by me is very close.
But the one by me has expanded its grocery section over the years, bit time.
Thank You for shoplifting at Walmart, we have all of your gardening needs.
They made record profits during the great sickness.
Time for payback…
Organic bananas at Trader Joe’s: .25 cents each.
People choose to eat crap. Sure, it’s addicting. But they still choose to eat it.
if you need 2000 calories a day you need about 20 bananas.
$5.
Sure, but think how many fruit flies you could feed with the bananas, and how many people you could feed with the fruit flies – with artificial banana flavoring of course.
Lol
Think about how many maggots you could feed with your unburied body…
My chickens think maggots are primo food.
Your chickens and Klaus Schwab think alike.
Bird brains unite!
A meal at McDonald’s cost more than that.
So do Lay’s potato chips.
MaryQ, In rural New England and Pennsylvania, areas I’m familiar with, there are a few deals to be found like what you mention but you need time and mobility to take advantage of them. None of the dollar stores carry fresh produce and distances are daunting.
Where I live, it’s much more expensive to shop at your small local store (especially for fresh produce, of which there is little). But everyone in town can walk there, whereas it’s 8 miles to a better stocked grocery store and that takes both money (gas) and time. Today, our little grocery has cabbage, potatoes, carrots, bagged lettuce, onions, green peppers. That’s it.
That is weird. A bunch of stable produce and then green peppers out of season?
I would expect in-season produce like maybe oranges, instead.
I have fresh green peppers all year round. I grow a lot of them, chop ’em up, and then place in vacuum seal freezer bags, this process is very fast and easy. I’ve always got a small thawed bag of either hot peppers or sweet ones available in the fridge.
“cabbage, potatoes, carrots, bagged lettuce, onions, green peppers”
That looks like a pretty good assortment.
What do you expect?
It’s winter. Eat root vegetables and cabbage.
On the topic of Ukraine, here is a popular thread that’s been going around.
No idea if any of this is true or not.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1619121813258207233.html
Victoria Nuland already admitted publicly that there were US bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
Furthermore, Zelensky is busy destroying records from Metabiota — Joe and Hunter Biden’s cash cow that was doing gain-of-function work.
Yes, in Russia’s initial move into Ukraine, they went past the Donbass and secured the bioweapons labs and 2 of the nuclear power plants.
That was a wise move, imo.
Our overlords frequently present us with a new piece of “news” on a Friday, in order that we may chew it to bits over the weekend.
I’m guessing that the “Omigod there is a Chinese weather balloon over Montana!!!” is this weekend’s diversion, meant to distract Americans from their upcoming defeat in Bakhmut and also provide our monitors with information on just how much bullshit people will swallow.
A win/win project, as the saying goes.
The timing is pretty handy. If it is carrying an EMP we could be hours away from 75% of the Eastern Grid going away years.
Why would China make a practice run on something like this?
Well if an EMP is the case, I just want to say it has been real nice chatting with all of you here through the years. We may not be able to convene here on Monday to tell the tale, so good luck and God Speed!
Last blog Thorshammer mentioned setting off nuclear bombs in order to set off an EMP blast.
I asked him if there was any other way to do that besides nuclear bombs, but he never answered.
And now the media is telling you that a weather balloon can do it?
We need someone to come on this blog and let us know what is actually possible. Cause I’m doubting the balloon story.
I thought EMPs occurred as a result of a nuclear blast?
“I thought EMPs occurred as a result of a nuclear blast?” There are other ways to produce EMPs but AFAICT the biggest EMPs are produced that way. US gubmint has EMP testing platforms they use to evaluate how military equipment can stand up to it.
Thanks, tresho.
K-Dog is an Electronic Engineer in another life.
I doubt a significant EMP pulse generator can be put on a balloon.
Too heavy, the balloon would have to be like something Richard Branson would fly in.
httpx://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
Thanks, Dog. I figured someone would know. It seemed unlikely to me, but what do I know?
The bullshit was flying fast and thick though.
Yes, we never stop falling for ’em.
TBH, the entire thing has a whiff of DOD psyop to it.
Lots of crumbling narratives at the moment.
They are piloting CDBC.
I heard a guy on the radio describe US foreign policy as a being based on a recognition that the US is deteriorating. He said he thought rather than fix our own problems we want to make sure all other countries in the world deteriorate much faster. In terms of the Mr. Kunstler’s view of the long emergency the strategy is to make sure that other countries suffer more than we do. The show was a discussion about Mr. Blinken’s visit to Asia and his attempts to get Asian countries to be more involved on our side in our war against Russia. Of course no one mentioned the root of the long emergency being the end of cheap energy, just that the US is in decline. This view makes sense of our goal to “Weaken Russia” by bombing the gas pipeline to Europe and now trying to get South Korea and China more involved in prolonging the war in a food exporting country.
Discovering the bomb first made us crazy. Literally! Our decline can be directly traced to that single event. Make of it what you will.
Oppenheimer warned the crazy bastards, and for that he got stripped of his clearance, his reputation ruined, and harassed by the FBI for the rest of his days. Exactly like they’re doing dissidents now. We almost certainly came closer to pre-emptively bombing the USSR immediately after WWII than anyone today knows. The Generals and the spooks were certainly down with it, right up through the Kennedy administration.
It’s not widely known, but on April 24, 1945 there was a dogfight over Berlin between North American P-51 Mustangs & Russian YAK fighter planes; 5 YAKs were shot down. It caused an international incident but was quickly smoothed over & buried.
As usual, you are quite the historian, brh!
There’s a Tibetan restaurant up the road in Northampton. They serve Yak. It’s good. Leaner than beef. More like Bison. I’ve never had Mustang but years back there was a joint over in Chicopee that had horse burgers. I hear they were also pretty good.
About the same time Patton took a pellet at the base of his skull.
I’ve always wanted a nice Pellet Rifle but I wasn’t going to drop $200+. On a whim I stopped at WM and took a stroll thru the clearance aisle. Lo and behold, there was a Crosman “Black Lightening” for $50, msrp was $280. It was rated @1400fps. Break-barrel.
At Point Blank, it’ll punch a hole thru a 5/8s piece of plywood. Not bad for a bb gun!
@ badberries – theoretically, a pellet rifle powerful enough to penetrate skin could be loaded with curare, the stuff pygmies use on their poison blowgun darts. Such a load would kill any mammal it hits regardless of where the point of entry was.
An invisible hand wants to kill off white people. A nuclear war between white Russia and White NATO/US would be the fastest way to do that.
Isn’t there an signed international agreement that allows over flight? The balloon counts as over flight.
Maybe they are just trying to keep the flying lanes open.
You know, in service to international law and all.
Right now the restricted airspace over Russia must be costing the western air carriers a fortune. Russia covers 11 time zones. It really puts a damper in the great circle routes. China and all the Arab states still routinely fly over Russia giving them a great advantage. Once again the western agenda screws itself.
TMTB (the morons that be) obviously didn’t game out the Sanctions game.
It’s like someone trying to harm someone else by kicking them ending up with a broken foot instead.
And then they whine that the other person broke their foot.
Wah!
“… Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President…”
There will never be a better authority on the subject of War than… Edwin Starr. He told us everything we’ll ever need to know about the subject…
‘War, huh, yeah, What is it good for? Absolutely nothing
Oh war, I despise… ‘Cause it means destruction of innocent lives
War means tears to thousands of mothers’ eyes
When their sons go off to fight and lose their lives
War, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreak
War, friend only to the undertaker
Oh, war, is an enemy to all mankind
The thought of war blows my mind
War has shattered many a young man’s dreams
Made him disabled, bitter and mean
Life is too short and precious to spend fighting wars these days
War can’t give life, it can only take it away
War. What is it good for? Absolutely NOTHING…”
However, you’ll never hear that song anywhere near any of the vast Global tentacles of the ubiquitous and vast and all-powerful MIC Deep Death State.
“As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries.”
Since each of us every day is ‘Getting Effed’ from one direction another… from various people and social and business institutions… it’s only fitting that we would escape from this endless abuse through video games and by pursuing a different form and way of getting effed. Sometimes, the problem just provides the solution.
Russia and China have accumulated enough gold to implement gold standards. It is now overwhelmingly in their interests to do so.
Weather service is saying up in Jim’s neck of the woods wind chill down to -60°F tonite. I’m about 150 miles south of that area, we’ll be at -35°F. Well, the wind certainly is howling out there, and its goddam cold, but I think -35°F is a bit hyperbolic. The coldest temp I’ve seen around here is -24°F in that wicked winter of 2014.
Might have to let the bears come in tonight, brh! Keep in the garage if you can. My advice, just empty the refrigerator altogether and leave everything out for them. No point in making them tear the doors off and ruin a perfectly good fridge.
DA, the bears are hibernating. We won’t be seeing any bears around until about late March. After that watch out!
You know that bears don’t necessarily hibernate non-stop all winter, don’t you? I know around here they remain quite active, even though we’ve had snow on the ground for several weeks now. They slow down quite a bit, but they’re still up and around when they get hungry.
Really? It seems like they’re always hungry.
What kind of bears do you have in New Mexico, Grizzly or Blacks?
I have to say wildlife is taking a beating as suburbs expand — which KDog covers pretty well on his blog — but bears seem to be thriving and multiplying.
Little blacks only down here in NM. Grizzlies are well north of here. Might be some in the Colorado high country, but mostly north of there too in Montana and Idaho, I think.
Bears do pretty well living off human leavings, and we leave A LOT. I’ve had several run ins with them in my time here, but none of them were threatening. The black bears are really shy unless directly threatened or REALLY hungry, but then again it only takes one close call to put the fear of god back in you.
Bears don’t go into true hibernation but Woodchucks do. Seems we have a rather exceptional specimen in these environs.
I’m in mid central Wisc., the really cold spell that our host can expect tonight & tomorrow just departed. With wind chill we expect -11.
Last week I had 40 robins in the BY, it was cold!! News Flash, not all Robins migrate. Per Audobon Soc. Robins have been seen in January in every state and lower Canadian Prov.
Robins are acting weird this year. I didn’t see any the past 2 winters, but this year there are massive flocks everywhere, and they are getting drunk on fermented berries and flying into windows and cars.
It’s really freakish.
This is the first winter I’ve noticed them too.
About mid-December I saw roughly 60, it was hard to count because they were all agitated, flying short distances and engaging each other constantly. They all disappeared only to re-emerge last week.
I had to look for images of American robins, as I knew they were different from ours, but had never seen one.
Ours don’t flock – they are solitary, very territorial birds, which only live about 14 months, so not only do you only ever see one coming to your bird feeders, but you rarely see the same one two winters running.
Ours beat yours for cuteness, though. 🙂
birdspot.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/robin-4.jpg
Wow that is cute alright, GA.
Our robins aren’t cute at all, IMHO. They are more handsome.
I didn’t know any birds lived for such a short time. That’s kind of sad.
And as to the solitary thing, I always saw them alone or with maybe one other bird. That’s why these huge flocks are confusing to me.
We had an ice storm on Monday. On Tuesday I slipped on the ice and fell.
Now I have aches and pains, especially in my right thigh.
I don’t like ice.
Ice is treacherous, especially black ice. I invested a year or two ago in a pair of Yaktrax. They are magic!
Hope your aches and pains clear up soon. It’s a good excuse to be kind to yourself, though, whatever your view of a treat is. 🙂
I skipped a dance class on Thursday night. Not sure if that’s a treat, but I wasn’t up to going.
Up until the past few days it’s been a warmer than normal winter. But our local TV meteorologist said the winters of 1913 & 1933 were warmer.
1933 wasn’t a good year: the Dust Bowl was raging, the Great Depression was bottoming out, in Russia the Holodomor was in full force, and the National Socialists siezed power in Germany. (Events that still affect us to this day)
1934 started out really bad: When FDR was inaugurated 4 March, there was not a single bank open in the entire USA, and the population had no idea where their next greenback was coming from. All the $ they had was what was in their pockets at the moment (hint: it was very very little).
WHoops, should have said “1933 started out really bad”
I’m starting to think it might be a good idea to keep a reasonable stash of cash at home.
I’ve been doing that for a while, but it will only serve until they outlaw cash altogether – I’m guessing a couple of years or so from now.
Enough people have to have cash to keep the stores open. They aren’t going to keep them open just for a few with cash.
@ Paula D:
Yes, and even barter will be problematic. How many people can produce something they can barter?
When FDR Confiscated Gold, my G-pa didn’t comply, we still have some of the “Buttons” that came outta the Cyanide plant.
Project Veritas confronts YouTube “head of global trust and safety” for blocking public from seeing their video of the Pfizer directer bro.
https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/status/1621565450214596610
I quite enjoy these videos, mostly because we can see the absolute cowardice of these people when exposed.
“You touched me. I am going to call the police.”
LOL.
I absolutely love seeing these ghouls called out on their totalitarian bullshit.
They look like deer in the headlights, or they smirk.
You just know it wrecks their day, sometimes their entire week. I like that.
This is an excellent and very important book (both volumes); however, I wish that Whitney delved a bit more deeply into the linkages between organized crime, “Intelligence” and the Democratic National Committee.
Whitney’s “Hot” and sexy, and she turns me on, notwithstanding that she’s “Caucasian”…..
Whitney Webb
One Nation Under Blackmail – Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, VOL.1 and 2.
Scene from the 1970’s classic movie “Mandingo”.
Drunk plantation patriarch struggling in the sultry Louisiana heat and humidity drinking a glass of bourbon whiskey:
“You need to git yourself a white woman, son.”
“Why Paw, I wouldn’t know what to do with no white girl.”
“You gotta make love to white women with their clothes on, son.”
Perhaps the patriarch wouldn’t struggle so much if he said no to bourbon whiskey in all that heat and humidity
I saw it at the Drive in. Pretty racy stuff for the times.
One pregnant question that I have for Putin (King Priam) of Russia (Ilium) is:
“Is Putin ethnically a Nordic, Viking Aryan, or a lowly “Slav”? My understanding is that ever since the ancient time of the “Rus” in Ukraine that the Nordic Viking Aryan invaders of Russia have basically ruled-the-roost in Russia. Is this correct?
So, if it is correct, and Putin is an “Aryan”, then why is he siding with the “Slavs” vis-a-vis the Ukrainian “Na…zi’s”?
The Nordic creators of Rus were invited – per the Primary Chronicle – were few in number, and were quickly absorbed into the native Slavic population of the area.
Longer lasting than their genetic contribution was their cultural contribution, which allowed the eastern Slavs to consolidate into the first organized polity in the area, Kievan Rus.
Where the Scandinavian (primarily Swedish) genetic contribution from the viking days is most likely to be found, in the territory of the former Soviet Union, is in the Ukraine.
Lol wait, are you saying that Putin is indeed on the side of the Azovs? I had a theory at kinda the beginning of all of this that Putin was working with Zelensky to ultimately drain the West in a long drawn out war. I mean where is the war footage? You would think all of these bloodthirsty news channels would be showing scenes from the battlefields every day but no. It is another weird scenario in this crazy world.
Putin looks very Oriental to me. So did Lenin for that matter.
I saw Lenin (what was left of him) We’d been drinking and were laughing when one of the Cyborgs standing watch hissed at us like a snake with red eyes.
Perhaps he’s descended from the “radiant Alans”, who are now thought to have originated in central Asia. A very interesting read is “Russka” by Edward Rutherford. Although it is a work of fiction it gives an interesting perspective on the beginnings of culture and history of Russia. All of Rutherford’s books are enjoyable, with my very favorite being “Sarum” which is about Great Britain.
Thanks for the tip re: Rutherford, I’ll track it down. I miss my Rus friends, they can’t communicate with me. No news out, no news in. I have a brother in Bucharest, I worry this ‘dust-up’ will morph into something truly horrific.
tresho, you beat me to it. The first time I ever looked upon a photo of Putin I was impressed by the Mongol eyes and general caste of the face.
You do see it frequently in Russians and we all know why. Brezhnev had that oriental look to him too, as I recall.
It is balloon!
Them Chinaeers are up to no good.
youtube.com/watch?v=KlyERnu7zUw
Yes someone else knew the reference!
I see you beat me to it by about 10 minutes or so.
It was hypothesized last night that the Chinese are just observing how we react to an invasion of our airspace.
Well, Biden failed
Again.
BTW, the Pentagon reaction is utter BS. They saw this thing in the Arctic and did nothing. Montana is sparsely populated.
Even more so, they could shoot a couple of holes in it and allow it to fall gently to earth.
Nope, there is something more devious going on here. Remember the corrupt connection between the Biden Mob and Ukraine, the same thing exists between the Bidens and China.
Biden’s Mob is the biggest enemy the USA has.
John,
We have 60’s era technology that would allow an aircraft to snag the balloon and recover it’s payload. The US used this system to recover film capsules ejected from low altitude spy satellites of that era.
We could then chalk crude messages on the damn thing (Mao eat shit, etc.) and send it back to the Godless Commie’s.
Verily, a blow against the empire….
“Green Berets” with the Duke . The Fulton extraction System.
I always wanted to try this ever since I saw the movie at the local theater.
youtube.com/watch?v=Zh2ocefMTX4
Just watched a PBS Frontline show about Putin and the US Presidents he’s dealt with. Had Sec of State Blinken and other current government officials making comments on it. It was total propaganda for the war mongers. It even had continuous semi-subliminal messaging in it. It was very disturbing that a supposedly mainline news show would be used this way. I think the vast majority of those watching the show will be programmed to its message to one extant or another. After that show, realizing US ” leaders” actually think this way, I think nuclear war is a major possibility. Quite frightening.
It is very disturbing that PBS, funded by all of the nation’s taxpayers, has become a propaganda outlet , pushing biased, nonobjective narratives.
In fact, objectivity as a value of journalism is under attack, as shown clearly in a segment of the most recent program at UK News.
Speaking of subliminal messaging, I watched New Year’s Eve fireworks around the world on TV with friends (their TV, not mine) a year ago – before the invasion.
The displays from even the crappiest of US puppets were professionally filmed clips from the crescendo of the display.
Then Moscow: grainy video (apparently shot from the balcony of a high rise hotel – for that “looking down” perspective) of some fireworks going off – your family could have done better, probably did.
The message was clear – and readily devoured by my friends – “Russia sucks more than anything!” Which was rising as a chorus from all of them before I could even point out the obvious manipulation. I didn’t bother pointing out the obvious.
Russia, Russia, Russia.
As a veteran of the fiasco war, I was “raised” to think of Russia as a mortal enemy that was going to blow us to kingdom come. That did not happen.
Then I watched the failure of the USSR diversity-socialism experiment as saner heads in Moscow finally prevailed. The US made lots of promises to get the USSR to dissolve which we never kept.
Now I watch Russia use private ownership to enrich itself as it pulls away from the NWO domination of the West and moves toward the East and China. They have discovered they do not need us. Pan-Europa is dead.
The USA has acted like a bully boy since 1991, primarily using NATO as its excuse to push at Russia over and over. Like all the bullied boys in the movies, Russia has finally got its back up to whoop the bully.
Summarizing, who is the bad guy here? I believe so many people are backing the Russia point of view is that they consider the current government of the US to be so evil in world affairs that Russia is now the good guy, the bullied hero that has finally said, “Enough is enough.”
Russia is becoming, in conjunction with China and other members of BRICS+, unafraid of the USA. They also recognize the stupidification of the USA going on by its Deep State. Russia is acting like us last century and we are acting like them. They already know that socialism kills nations, sorry Jarek, so they will just wait until the US destroys itself. The USA will dissolve as surely as the USSR did. The king of the mountain’s lifespan is shrinking as international fear disappears.
One more,
The bully element of the USA, the MIC, needs its enemy to play Wag the Dog with the American public. Who can that be?
Ask the neocons.
Russia, Russia, Russia!!!!!!!!
If Russia and China didn’t exist we’d have had to invent them. The terrorist state in DC has to have fictional terrorists to survive.
It will be the USA under some guise of the Neocons that lights the torch too.
Ready for the electric grid crash. Who needs electricity? Screw electricity.