JHK’s Three-Act Play
Clusterfuck Nation
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If you are shocked and bewildered that totalitarian tyranny creeps through our country without opposition, the reason is simple: there is no official opposition. The capture of government looks nearly complete by a party that lusts to punish its citizens for the pleasure of watching them suffer, while it steals everything they’ve worked for and forecloses their future. At least half the country objects to this. Where is a party that stands for them?
In the natural order of the American system, a Republican Party would have stepped up to check the wretched excesses of a Democratic Party bent on breaking everything that has allowed people to thrive in this land: property law, economic liberty, free speech, now even your physical health. This Labor Day Monday is the last moment in this epic political psychodrama that the Republican Party has an excuse to kick back and do nothing about the parade of insults flung in the nation’s face by persons who believe in nothing, and who will stop at nothing.
These insults lately include especially the perversion of law to harass and hinder political opponents, the prosecution of a foreign war by proxy in a corner of the world where America has no explicable national interest, the deliberate failure to defend the country’s borders against hordes of invaders, the rigging of elections with ballot fraud and hackable machines, the censorship of information of all kinds, and the weaponization of public health authority against the people. These are all campaigns carried out by the Democratic Party.
This fall season will be a dreadful time of testing whether the country can endure any more of this. Congress is back in session this week. Congress is the only place in the federal government where an opposition party has the authority to direct events. Mr. Comer who chairs the House Oversight Committee has assembled enough evidence of bribery and treason for Speaker Kevin McCarthy to commence an impeachment inquiry right away into the conduct of President “Joe Biden.”
I’ve used quotation marks around Mr. Biden’s name since he ascended magically to this office in 2021 because it is obvious that he is only pretending to run the executive branch, and has been since day one on January 20, 2021. His March 5, 2020, Super Tuesday victories, after a drubbing in the Iowa Caucuses (4th place) and New Hampshire primary (5th place), had an odor of supernatural contrivance. His campaign from “the basement” was a joke, and it’s still entirely possible, despite three years of massive gaslighting, that his victory in the 2020 election was a fraud.
I believe the reason “Joe Biden” was installed in the White House was to allow Barack Obama to run the executive branch and all its agencies in secret from his headquarters across town in the DC Kalorama district, and the reason he is allowed to do this is because the Democratic Party has committed so many crimes against the country that a tremendous effort had to be made to cover them up, or else scores of figures in high places could have been subject to investigation and prosecution, including Mr. Obama.
It’s also possible that an impeachment inquiry in the House will lead to evidence of Mr. Obama’s role in the Biden family’s bribery adventures abroad, including the participation in one way or another of high diplomatic officials under Mr. Obama such as US Ambassadors to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt and Marie Yovanovitch — as well as their nefarious roles in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Expect former Secretary of State John Kerry to surface in that mix, too. His stepson, Christopher Heinz was in business for a time with Hunter Biden and Devon Archer during the Burisma caper.
You might hear a lot about the coming fiscal year 2024 spending crisis again starting this week. It must be resolved by the end of the month or the government supposedly runs out of money to pay for all the things that the government wastes our money on, from underwriting drag-queen story hours to paying the pensions of retired Ukrainian government officials. Wouldn’t that actually be a fine opportunity for some vigorous de-funding of government activities, such as the DOJ’s special prosecutor operation, Homeland Security’s censorship office, every dollar apportioned to Ukraine, the FBI’s continuing Jan 6 witch-hunt, the Department of Health and Human Services Covid-19 hoodoo, and probably a hundred other trespasses against the public’s sense of decency and good faith?
Or else, isn’t the country ripe for a new party that actually represents the interests of the country? More than a year remains before the 2024 election — if it is even allowed to happen. We can’t go on with no party opposed to the degeneration and destruction of the thing known as the USA. Take this final day-off of the summer to think about that. And think about the emblematic frozen face of Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, a human deer-in-the-headlights waiting to collide with an implacable force. You are that force.
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Bravo, Mr Kunstler. You and others like you are performing a heroic service.
Yes. We didn’t know how heroic when it started.
j
The worse the better
Sorry, Jim. I’m not holding my breath for a genuine counter movement to emerge just yet. Still too may obstacles in the way and the force is still too strong in the brain dead woke brigades. Their time in the meat grinder will come soon enough, but that time is not yet.
But not to worry. Another blatant election fiasco in 2024 combined with another scamdemic induced economic downturn just might do the trick. Fool me once, fool me twice, and all that. We’ll see…
IF there’s an election next year — a big IF, as JHK said — it likely will be the last election, at least the last election where our votes matter even a little bit.
Agreed. But that might be the precipitating event too.
On that note, here is a speech from a show I’ve been watching. The president is trying to get the legislators to pass some necessary reforms, which they have already voted down once:
“It’s time for us to understand the society has changed.
It is not going to wait and forgive anymore. There won’t be yet another revolution.
There won’t be yet another revolution.
There will be the last one.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2JgKl2W4D0
I think that’s kind of where we’re at.
Just like WW1 was the war to end all war?
No, more like the last revolution of the country as it is known.
there were no nukes in ww1–now there is and this war to happen within a year or so(maybe tomorrow) will end all wars and 2/3rds of life,90 to 98 percent in the 5 years after
Oh, the Zelensky show. He then went and did it in real life. He was changing Ukraine into a Globalist “nation”, bringing in massive numbers of 3rd Worlders, teaching the Trans to kids, etc.
At least he did some good, right Beryl?
Was he, Jarek? It is the United States and their globalist cronies who have that agenda and want to foist it on other nations.
A lot of Ukrainians wanted to “move toward Europe (the EU)” and away from “the Rus”( whatever than is) but that seemed to be more of a desire to be modern and have more of the ‘stuff’ they have in Europe, if you ask me.
Beryl,
The Rus is a term for Russian people.
Happi,
No nuclear war yet. That comes later, to consolidate power in the hands of the revolutionaries. Most likely, it’ll come as a hypersonic missile attack on the US after we fuck somebody or other and/or butcher another international crisis, and somebody (Russia or China) decides they’ve had enough.
Uncle Bob, there will be an election in 2024 and the Democrats will probably win it again in a squeaker because the Republicans will probably trip over themselves like they always do wailing about dead fetuses, federal deficits, supporting proxy war in eastern Europe not to mention fear mongering about China which is just a waste of media space. I don’t think having Trump on the ballot helps either. Sorry, I’m still a DeSantis man. As I always say after my pessimistic prognostication, “I’d be happy to be proved wrong”.
DeSantis to me doesn’t appear to have his heart in it.
DeSantis is backed by the Bushes.
You could not pay me to vote for DeSantis.
To be fair, however, you could not pay me to vote anyways.
You actually think issues will matter in 2024?
The country, including most Democrats, has clearly had enough of Biden, but the massive vote fraud engine remains in place in blue states and in every swing State, and I don’t see the Republicans doing
anything about it, since they are making lots of money at our expense….
No, at least in Wisconsin, the voting commission won’t “clean” the voter registration rolls of inactive voters.
So you disagree with Tucker Carlson’s prognostication that “Biden” will get us into a hot war in Ukraine so that he can suspend constitutional rights due to a national emergency? (Replace Ukraine with global warming, as others have posited Delaware’s resident “genius” may do.) I think he may do something like that if he falls far behind the GOP candidate, though it may be unnecessary if Trump is nominated.
That’s all common sense, till you get all DeSantis-y…
If you think whether Trump is on the ballot or not, means nothing, … you know nothing at all about this country. It is Trump against the entire establishment. Without him, tens of millions will not vote at all. I’m quite sure you have never attended a Trump rally. Go to one, and perhaps you will begin to understand.
@SteveK9 – Some people are starting to smell the coffee after years of blissful ignorance.
Trump IS the establishment.
The Chinese Communists paid handsomely – gov Kemp are you listening? – to install the “voting machines” that limited Trump to a single term. They did that on Trump’s watch.
Trump failed to secure our borders, although he did go thru the motions and improve the situation temporarily. Why did he never finish his largely symbolic wall?
The censorship machine hit high gear under Trump, even getting him kicked off his beloved Twitter and he was somehow unable to do anything about it. Is a sitting president as powerless as he professed to be?
Trump’s “economic success” was a result of printing money – the same behavior as his predecessors and of those who succeed him.
Did you see the ludicrous video last week of Trump branding those who would lock down the country and impose mask mandates “Covid Tyrants?” Did it occur to you – or anyone – that Trump is the original covid tyrant?
What makes anyone with two brain cells to rub together think anything would change if Trump were to gain office again? He would turn over the executive duties to one of his family, definitely NOT his daughter this time, while he tweets about what a great job he is doing fighting off the impeachments that happen every 15 minutes.
Trump is a diversion, a deep state punching bag, complicit with the WEF program to eliminate the middle class in the USA. Everybody pay attention to Trump while the country goes to hell.
I’m not buying it.
For those who seem focused on the border or Covid to damn Trump – here’s a list of trump’s accomplishments – a partial list btw – by 2018
And while slamming his covid policies let’s not forget that early on we had no idea what was going on so the excesses – mandates social distancing and the vaccine – weren’t as obviously BS as they were seen to be as we got more information.
Trump accomplishments (in case you’re interested).
Posted on October 18, 2018
[Directly from the Bedard and Theissen articles] In the Washington Post Friday, former Bush speechwriter and columnist Marc Thiessen said that Trump has proven to be successful at keeping his campaign promises. He wrote, “The fact is, in his first two years, Trump has compiled a remarkable record of presidential promise-keeping.”
Economic Growth
4.2 percent growth in the second quarter of 2018.
For the first time in more than a decade, growth is projected to exceed 3 percent over the calendar year.
Jobs
4 million new jobs have been created since the election, and more than 3.5 million since Trump took office.
More Americans are employed now than ever before in our history.
Jobless claims at lowest level in nearly five decades.
The economy has achieved the longest positive job-growth streak on record.
Job openings are at an all-time high and outnumber job seekers for the first time on record.
Unemployment claims at 50 year low
African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American unemployment rates have all recently reached record lows.
African-American unemployment hit a record low of 5.9 percent in May 2018.
Hispanic unemployment at 4.5 percent.
Asian-American unemployment at record low of 2 percent.
Women’s unemployment recently at lowest rate in nearly 65 years.
Female unemployment dropped to 3.6 percent in May 2018, the lowest since October 1953.
Youth unemployment recently reached its lowest level in more than 50 years.
July 2018’s youth unemployment rate of 9.2 percent was the lowest since July 1966.
Veterans’ unemployment recently hit its lowest level in nearly two decades.
July 2018’s veterans’ unemployment rate of 3.0 percent matched the lowest rate since May 2001.
Unemployment rate for Americans without a high school diploma recently reached a record low.
Rate for disabled Americans recently hit a record low.
Blue-collar jobs recently grew at the fastest rate in more than three decades.
Poll found that 85 percent of blue-collar workers believe their lives are headed “in the right direction.”
68 percent reported receiving a pay increase in the past year.
Last year, job satisfaction among American workers hit its highest level since 2005.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans rate now as a good time to find a quality job.
Optimism about the availability of good jobs has grown by 25 percent.
Added more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs since the election.
Manufacturing employment is growing at its fastest pace in more than two decades.
100,000 new jobs supporting the production & transport of oil & natural gas.
American Income
Median household income rose to $61,372 in 2017, a post-recession high.
Wages up in August by their fastest rate since June 2009.
Paychecks rose by 3.3 percent between 2016 and 2017, the most in a decade.
Council of Economic Advisers found that real wage compensation has grown by 1.4 percent over the past year.
Some 3.9 million Americans off food stamps since the election.
Median income for Hispanic-Americans rose by 3.7 percent and surpassed $50,000 for the first time ever in history.
Home-ownership among Hispanics is at the highest rate in nearly a decade.
Poverty rates for African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans have reached their lowest levels ever recorded.
American Optimism
Small business optimism has hit historic highs.
NFIB’s small business optimism index broke a 35 year-old record in August.
SurveyMonkey/CNBC’s small business confidence survey for Q3 of 2018 matched its all-time high.
Manufacturers are more confident than ever.
95 percent of U.S. manufacturers are optimistic about the future, the highest ever.
Consumer confidence is at an 18-year high.
12 percent of Americans rate the economy as the most significant problem facing our country, the lowest level on record.
Confidence in the economy is near a two-decade high, with 51 percent rating the economy as good or excellent.
American Business
Investment is flooding back into the United States due to the tax cuts.
Over $450 billion dollars has already poured back into the U.S., including more than $300 billion in the first quarter of 2018.
Retail sales have surged. Commerce Department figures from August show that retail sales increased 0.5 percent in July 2018, an increase of 6.4 percent from July 2017.
ISM’s index of manufacturing scored its highest reading in 14 years.
Worker productivity is the highest it has been in more than three years.
Steel and aluminum producers are re-opening.
Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and NASDAQ have all notched record highs.
Dow hit record highs 70 times in 2017 alone, the most ever recorded in one year.
Deregulation
Achieved massive deregulation at a rapid pace, completing 22 deregulatory actions to every one regulatory action during his first year in office.
Signed legislation to roll back costly and harmful provisions of Dodd-Frank, providing relief to credit unions, and community and regional banks.
Federal agencies achieved more than $8 billion in lifetime net regulatory cost savings.
Rolled back Obama’s burdensome Waters of the U.S. rule.
Used the Congressional Review Act to repeal regulations more times than in history.
Tax Cuts
Biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history by signing the Tax Cuts and Jobs act into law
Provided more than $5.5 trillion in gross tax cuts, nearly 60 percent of which will go to families.
Increased the exemption for the death tax to help save Family Farms & Small Business.
Nearly doubled the standard deduction for individuals and families.
Enabled vast majority of American families will be able to file their taxes on a single page by claiming the standard deduction.
Doubled the child tax credit to help lessen the financial burden of raising a family.
Lowered America’s corporate tax rate from the highest in the developed world to allow American businesses to compete and win.
Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.
Cut dozens of special interest tax breaks and closed loopholes for the wealthy.
9 in 10 American workers are expected see an increase in their paychecks thanks to the tax cuts, according to the Treasury Department.
More than 6 million of American workers have received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to tax cuts.
Over 100 utility companies have lowered electric, gas, or water rates thanks to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Ernst & Young found 89 percent of companies planned to increase worker compensation thanks to the Trump tax cuts.
Established opportunity zones to spur investment in left behind communities.
Worker Development
Established a National Council for the American Worker to develop a national strategy for training and retraining America’s workers for high-demand industries.
Employers have signed Trump’s “Pledge to America’s Workers,” committing to train or retrain more than 4.2 million workers and students.
Signed the first Perkins CTE reauthorization since 2006, authorizing more than $1 billion for states each year to fund vocational and career education programs.
Executive order expanding apprenticeship opportunities for students and workers.
Domestic Infrastructure
Proposed infrastructure plan would utilize $200 billion in Federal funds to spur at least $1.5 trillion in infrastructure investment across the country.
Executive order expediting environmental reviews and approvals for high priority infrastructure projects.
Federal agencies have signed the One Federal Decision Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) streamlining the federal permitting process for infrastructure projects.
Rural prosperity task force and signed an executive order to help expand broadband access in rural areas.
Health Care
Signed an executive order to help minimize the financial burden felt by American households Signed legislation to improve the National Suicide Hotline.
Signed the most comprehensive childhood cancer legislation ever into law, which will advance childhood cancer research and improve treatments.
Signed Right-to-Try legislation, expanding health care options for terminally ill patients.
Enacted changes to the Medicare 340B program, saving seniors an estimated $320 million on drugs in 2018 alone.
FDA set a new record for generic drug approvals in 2017, saving consumers nearly $9 billion.
Released a blueprint to drive down drug prices for American patients, leading multiple major drug companies to announce they will freeze or reverse price increases.
Expanded short-term, limited-duration health plans.
Let more employers to form Association Health Plans, enabling more small businesses to join together and affordably provide health insurance to their employees.
Cut Obamacare’s burdensome individual mandate penalty.
Signed legislation repealing Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, also known as the “death panels.”
USDA invested more than $1 billion in rural health care in 2017, improving access to health care for 2.5 million people in rural communities across 41 states
Proposed Title X rule to help ensure taxpayers do not fund the abortion industry in violation of the law.
Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy to keep foreign aid from supporting the global abortion industry.
HHS formed a new division over protecting the rights of conscience and religious freedom.
Overturned Obama administration’s midnight regulation prohibiting states from defunding certain abortion facilities.
Signed executive order to help ensure that religious organizations are not forced to choose between violating their religious beliefs by complying with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate or shutting their doors.
Combating Opioids
Chaired meeting the 73rd General Session of the United Nations discussing the worldwide drug problem with international leaders.
Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand, introducing new measures to keep dangerous drugs out of our communities.
$6 billion in new funding to fight the opioid epidemic.
DEA conducted a surge in April 2018 that arrested 28 medical professions and revoked 147 registrations for prescribing too many opioids.
Brought the “Prescribed to Death” memorial to President’s Park near the White House, helping raise awareness about the human toll of the opioid crisis.
Helped reduce high-dose opioid prescriptions by 16 percent in 2017.
Opioid Summit on the administration-wide efforts to combat the opioid crisis.
Launched a national public awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid addiction.
Created a Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis which recommended a number of pathways to tackle the opioid crisis.
Led two National Prescription Drug Take Back Days in 2017 and 2018, collecting a record number of expired and unneeded prescription drugs each time.
$485 million targeted grants in FY 2017 to help areas hit hardest by the opioid crisis.
Signed INTERDICT Act, strengthening efforts to detect and intercept synthetic opioids before they reach our communities.
DOJ secured its first-ever indictments against Chinese fentanyl manufacturers.
Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement (J-CODE) team, aimed at disrupting online illicit opioid sales.
Declared the opioid crisis a Nationwide Public Health Emergency in October 2017.
Law and Order
More U.S. Circuit Court judges confirmed in the first year in office than ever.
Confirmed more than two dozen U. S. Circuit Court judges.
Followed through on the promise to nominate judges to the Supreme Court who will adhere to the Constitution
Nominated and confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to develop a strategy to more effectively prosecute people who commit crimes against law enforcement officers.
Launched an evaluation of grant programs to make sure they prioritize the protection and safety of law enforcement officers.
Established a task force to reduce crime and restore public safety in communities across Signed an executive order to focus more federal resources on dismantling transnational criminal organizations such as drug cartels.
Signed an executive order to focus more federal resources on dismantling transnational criminal organizations such as drug cartels.
Violent crime decreased in 2017 according to FBI statistics.
$137 million in grants through the COPS Hiring Program to preserve jobs, increase community policing capacities, and support crime prevention efforts.
Enhanced and updated the Project Safe Neighborhoods to help reduce violent crime.
Signed legislation making it easier to target websites that enable sex trafficking and strengthened penalties for people who promote or facilitate prostitution.
Created an interagency task force working around the clock to prosecute traffickers, protect victims, and prevent human trafficking.
Conducted Operation Cross Country XI to combat human trafficking, rescuing 84 children and arresting 120 human traffickers.
Encouraged federal prosecutors to use the death penalty when possible in the fight against the trafficking of deadly drugs.
New rule effectively banning bump stock sales in the United States.
Border Security and Immigration
Secured $1.6 billion for border wall construction in the March 2018 omnibus bill.
Construction of a 14-mile section of border wall began near San Diego.
Worked to protect American communities from the threat posed by the vile MS-13 gang.
ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division arrested 796 MS-13 members and associates in FY 2017, an 83 percent increase from the prior year.
Justice worked with partners in Central America to secure criminal charges against more than 4,000 MS-13 members.
Border Patrol agents arrested 228 illegal aliens affiliated with MS-13 in FY 2017.
Fighting to stop the scourge of illegal drugs at our border.
ICE HSI seized more than 980,000 pounds of narcotics in FY 2017, including 2,370 pounds of fentanyl and 6,967 pounds of heroin.
ICE HSI dedicated nearly 630,000 investigative hours towards halting the illegal import of fentanyl.
ICE HSI made 11,691 narcotics-related arrests in FY 2017.
Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand introduced new measures to keep dangerous drugs out the United States.
Signed the INTERDICT Act into law, enhancing efforts to detect and intercept synthetic opioids.
DOJ secured its first-ever indictments against Chinese fentanyl manufacturers.
DOJ launched their Joint Criminal Opioid Darknet Enforcement (J-CODE) team, aimed at disrupting online illicit opioid sales.
Released an immigration framework that includes the resources required to secure our borders and close legal loopholes, and repeatedly called on Congress to fix our broken immigration laws.
Authorized the deployment of the National Guard to help secure the border.
Enhanced vetting of individuals entering the U.S. from countries that don’t meet security standards, helping to ensure individuals who pose a threat to our country are identified before they enter.
These procedures were upheld in a June 2018 Supreme Court hearing.
ICE removed over 226,000 illegal aliens from the United States in 2017.
ICE rescued or identified over 500 human trafficking victims and over 900 child exploitation victims in 2017 alone.
In 2017, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested more than 127,000 aliens with criminal convictions or charges, responsible for
Over 76,000 with dangerous drug offenses.
More than 48,000 with assault offenses.
More than 11,000 with weapons offenses.
More than 5,000 with sexual assault offenses.
More than 2,000 with kidnapping offenses.
Over 1,800 with homicide offenses.
Created the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office in order to support the victims and families affected by illegal alien crime.
More than doubled the number of counties participating in the 287(g) program, which allows jails to detain criminal aliens until they are transferred to ICE custody.
Trade
Negotiating and renegotiating better trade deals, achieving free, fair, and reciprocal trade for the United States.
Agreed to work with the European Union towards zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsides.
Deal with the European Union to increase U.S. energy exports to Europe.
Litigated multiple WTO disputes targeting unfair trade practices and upholding our right to enact fair trade laws.
Finalized a revised trade agreement with South Korea, which includes provisions to increase American automobile exports.
Negotiated an historic U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement to replace NAFTA.
Agreement to begin trade negotiations for a U.S.-Japan trade agreement.
Secured $250 billion in new trade and investment deals in China and $12 billion in Vietnam.
Established a Trade and Investment Working Group with the United Kingdom, laying the groundwork for post-Brexit trade.
Enacted steel and aluminum tariffs to protect our vital steel and aluminum producers and strengthen our national security.
Conducted 82 anti-dumping and countervailing duty investigations in 2017 alone.
Confronting China’s unfair trade practices after years of Washington looking the other way.
25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods imported from China and later imposed an additional 10% tariff on $200 billion of Chinese goods.
Conducted an investigation into Chinese forced technology transfers, unfair licensing practices, and intellectual property theft.
Imposed safeguard tariffs to protect domestic washing machines and solar products manufacturers hurt by China’s trade policies
Withdrew from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Secured access to new markets for America’s farmers.
Recent deal with Mexico included new improvements enabling food and agriculture to trade more fairly.
Recent agreement with the E.U. will reduce barriers and increase trade of American soybeans to Europe.
Won a WTO dispute regarding Indonesia’s unfair restriction of U.S. agricultural exports.
Defended American Tuna fisherman and packagers before the WTO
Opened up Argentina to American pork experts for the first time in a quarter-century
American beef exports have returned to china for the first time in more than a decade
OK’d up to $12 billion in aid for farmers affected by unfair trade retaliation.
Energy
Presidential Memorandum to clear roadblocks to construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Presidential Memorandum declaring that the Dakota Access Pipeline serves the national interest and initiating the process to complete construction.
Opened up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to energy exploration.
Coal exports up over 60 percent in 2017.
Rolled back the “stream protection rule” to prevent it from harming America’s coal industry.
Cancelled Obama’s anti-coal Clean Power Plan and proposed the Affordable Clean Energy Rule as a replacement.
Withdrew from the job-killing Paris climate agreement, which would have cost the U.S. nearly $3 trillion and led to 6.5 million fewer industrial sector jobs by 2040.
U.S. oil production has achieved its highest level in American history
United States is now the largest crude oil producer in the world.
U.S. has become a net natural gas exporter for the first time in six decades.
Action to expedite the identification and extraction of critical minerals that are vital to the nation’s security and economic prosperity.
Took action to reform National Ambient Air Quality Standards, benefitting American manufacturers.
Rescinded Obama’s hydraulic fracturing rule, which was expected to cost the industry $32 million per year.
Proposed an expansion of offshore drilling as part of an all-of-the above energy strategy
Held a lease sale for offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico in August 2018.
Got EU to increase its imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States.
Issued permits for the New Burgos Pipeline that will cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
Foreign Policy
Moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
Withdrew from Iran deal and immediately began the process of re-imposing sanctions that had been lifted or waived.
Treasury has issued sanctions targeting Iranian activities and entities, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force
Since enacting sanctions, Iran’s crude exports have fallen off, the value of Iran’s currency has plummeted, and international companies have pulled out of the country.
All nuclear-related sanctions will be back in full force by early November 2018.
Historic summit with North Korean President Kim Jong-Un, bringing beginnings of peace and denuclearization to the Korean Peninsula.
The two leaders have exchanged letters and high-level officials from both sides have met resulting in tremendous progress.
North Korea has halted nuclear and missile tests.
Negotiated the return of the remains of missing-in-action soldiers from the Korean War.
Imposed strong sanctions on Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro and his inner circle.
Executive order preventing those in the U.S. from carrying out certain transactions with the Venezuelan regime, including prohibiting the purchase of the regime’s debt.
Responded to the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.
Rolled out sanctions targeting individuals and entities tied to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
Directed strikes in April 2017 against a Syrian airfield used in a chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians.
Joined allies in launching airstrikes in April 2018 against targets associated with Syria’s chemical weapons use.
New Cuba policy that enhanced compliance with U.S. law and held the Cuban regime accountable for political oppression and human rights abuses.
Treasury and State are working to channel economic activity away from the Cuban regime, particularly the military.
Changed the rules of engagement, empowering commanders to take the fight to ISIS.
ISIS has lost virtually all of its territory, more than half of which has been lost under Trump.
ISIS’ self-proclaimed capital city, Raqqah, was liberated in October 2017.
All Iraqi territory had been liberated from ISIS.
More than a dozen American hostages have been freed from captivity all of the world.
Action to combat Russia’s malign activities, including their efforts to undermine the sanctity of United States elections.
Expelled dozens of Russian intelligence officers from the United States and ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle, WA.
Banned the use of Kaspersky Labs software on government computers, due to the company’s ties to Russian intelligence.
Imposed sanctions against five Russian entities and three individuals for enabling Russia’s military and intelligence units to increase Russia’s offensive cyber capabilities.
Sanctions against seven Russian oligarchs, and 12 companies they own or control, who profit from Russia’s destabilizing activities.
Sanctioned 100 targets in response to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and aggression in Eastern Ukraine.
Enhanced support for Ukraine’s Armed Forces to help Ukraine better defend itself.
Helped win U.S. bid for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
Helped win U.S.-Mexico-Canada’s united bid for 2026 World Cup.
Defense
Executive order keeping the detention facilities at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay open.
$700 billion in military funding for FY 2018 and $716 billion for FY 2019.
Largest military pay raise in nearly a decade.
Ordered a Nuclear Posture Review to ensure America’s nuclear forces are up to date and serve as a credible deterrent.
Released America’s first fully articulated cyber strategy in 15 years.
New strategy on national biodefense, which better prepares the nation to defend against biological threats.
Administration has announced that it will use whatever means necessary to protect American citizens and servicemen from unjust prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
Released an America first National Security Strategy.
Put in motion the launch of a Space Force as a new branch of the military and relaunched the National Space Council.
Encouraged North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to increase defense spending to their agree-upon levels.
In 2017 alone, there was an increase of more than 4.8 percent in defense spending amongst NATO allies.
Every member state has increased defense spending.
Eight NATO allies will reach the 2 percent benchmark by the end of 2018 and 15 allies are on trade to do so by 2024.
NATO allies spent over $42 billion dollars more on defense since 2016.
Executive order to help military spouses find employment as their families deploy domestically and abroad.
Veterans affairs
Signed the VA Accountability Act and expanded VA telehealth services, walk-in-clinics, and same-day urgent primary and mental health care.
Delivered more appeals decisions – 81,000 – to veterans in a single year than ever before.
Strengthened protections for individuals who come forward and identify programs occurring within the VA.
Signed legislation that provided $86.5 billion in funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the largest dollar amount in history for the VA.
VA MISSION Act, enacting sweeping reform to the VA system that:
Consolidated and strengthened VA community care programs.
Funding for the Veterans Choice program.
Expanded eligibility for the Family Caregivers Program.
Gave veterans more access to walk-in care.
Strengthened the VA’s ability to recruit and retain quality healthcare professionals.
Enabled the VA to modernize its assets and infrastructure.
Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act in 2017, which authorized $2.1 billion in addition funds for the Veterans Choice Program.
Worked to shift veterans’ electronic medical records to the same system used by the Department of Defense, a decades old priority.
Issued an executive order requiring the Secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs to submit a joint plan to provide veterans access to access to mental health treatment as they transition to civilian life.
Increased transparency and accountability at the VA by launching an online “Access and Quality Tool,” providing veterans with access to wait time and quality of care data.
Signed legislation to modernize the claims and appeal process at the VA.
Harry W. Colmery Veterans Educational Assistance Act, providing enhanced educational benefits to veterans, service members, and their family members.
Lifted a 15-year limit on veterans’ access to their educational benefits.
Created a White House VA Hotline to help veterans and principally staffed it with veterans and direct family members of veterans.
VA employees are being held accountable for poor performance, with more than 4,000 VA employees removed, demoted, and suspended so far.
Signed the Veterans Treatment Court Improvement Act, increasing the number of VA employees that can assist justice-involved ve
DeSantis knelt and kissed the ring, saying to an interviewer that Biden was the legitimate president. He could have at least been clever like Vivek and not answered, saying that there were extreme irregularities in his election that had to be investigated.
I have no doubt that Vivek would betray us if elected – just like DeSantis.
I was informed by a gold panning buddy Vivek was attending Al Sharpton clan meetings back in the day.
Have not researched this but it would not surprise me one bit.
Beware the smooth talker that says what you want to hear.
Will we learn he mentored at the hands of a Domestic terrorist and started his political career in their living room AND has all sorts of ties to see eye aay think tanks as well?
I think Vivek is one of those guys for whom the ambition came first.
It is natural for people who want to climb the ladder of success in politics (or anything)to consort with people they see as having access to power.
On the other hand, he bears watching.
I suspect Vivek is running as a Republican just as DJT did – because they’re the more stupid cohort of voters in the US…
From 2012:
politico.com/news/stories/0411/53377_Page2.html#site-content
He is so overpolished that it immediately signals grift to me.
Perhaps I have been away from the US too long.
Jarek, I’m reasonably certain you’re correct about both, though DeSantis saddens me. That said, I’ve enjoyed watching the cunning way Vivek has walked a narrow line that has made it hard to stick the “conspiracy theorist” label on him (though they certainly persist in trying). He’s extraordinarily careful about what he says and keeps his cool no matter the provocation. I wish these qualities would attach themselves to someone we could (somewhat) trust.
I have no doubt that Vivek would betray us if elected – just like DeSantis.
I’m getting déjà vu vibes from the Swami. Like the Trumposaurus in 2016, he is clever and intuitive enough to talk a good line that resonates with alienated voters. Since I know about him almost entirely from reading news stories, I don’t know how his delivery is, but suspect his speech is liquid silk. Another tele-candidate.
Would I vote for him if he is nominated? Like many readers on this site, I question whether the country is sunk too deep in woke clampdown and corruption for any politician to make a difference. In the unlikely event he climbs to the top of the GOP’s greasy pole I’d probably make a gestural vote in his direction, if only to set the cat among the pigeons.
But the Swami has more than a year to unwin my support.
He also wants to make it a crime to criticize Jews.
Votes matter?
Give me a choice for a legitimate candidate, a choice for a strong independent executive with a deep understanding of the Constitution and a desire to uphold it. Then I might agree that my vote matters, even just a little bit.
We haven’t had that since Calvin Coolidge, so you’re fantasizing…
I always believed that Obama was the last president as we knew presidents.
What exactly do you mean by this?
@disaffected
It is instructive to contrast elections in Ecuador with the notoriously corrupt system in the US.
In Ecuador all citizens are REQUIRED to vote in national elections under penalty of a substantial fine if they fail to do so! Read that again, Americans! In your system the One Party does every thing possible to prevent blocks of voters from casting their ballots for the fake opposition, even though that team just represents a slightly different distribution of the spoils between oligarchs. If that process doesn’t produce the desired results, there are truckloads of mail-in ballots pre-sighned with the names of dead people and illegal immigrants. And this being the Computer Age, there is always Diebold to produce whatever numbers are needed. The Ruling Team has taken the game one step further for this upcoming circus event. Why do you need to manipulate the vote count when you can simply tie your opponent up in legal spider webs, haul him off and throw him in prison for life?
In Equador candidates are fond of driving through the streets on flatbed trucks with giant loud speakers as if they were advertising a rock concert. And who doesn’t love a good parade? The runoff voting systems ensures that anyone with a wealthy backer and a 2% popularity can have his moment in the sun. The pause before the inevitable runoff between the two leading candidates gives everybody time to go home and sleep off their hangovers. Once the circus is over everybody goes home and goes about building the second world infrastructure that loans from China have made possible. New modern hospitals, former goat paths in the mountains covered with smooth, pot-hole free pavement, a vibrant international tourism scene, thousands of expats hidden behind gated communities with their beloved Bluegrass lawns out front. No homeless people to be seen living in tents under bridges. And no mass shootings of school children and forced mutilation in the name of “Woke sexual freedom”.
During these decades of modernization the crime rate has been among the lowest in the hemisphere, far safer than a place like Oakland, St. Louis, or Detroit and now Portland, Seattle, and LA.. Most crime that did occur was of the pickpocket and drunk nightclub mugging variety. Unfortunately North America’s dysfunction has seeped south of the equator. Ecuador is sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the two major growers of coca for the US cocaine market. The Mexican, US and Colombian cartels that dominate that trade covet the port cities along the Ecuadorian Pacific coast for transshipment of their product and are engaged in a war for control.
Getting caught between the battle lines can be fatal for a political candidate, and unfortunately that has happened to two high profile victims and the news of their assassinations broadcast all over the world. Meanwhile the ordinary people are more than happy to go back to their cities and villages in the mountains where every day is springtime and forget about politics.
“even though that team just represents a slightly different distribution of the spoils between oligarchs.”
That’s pretty much it, isn’t it?
Amen. That phrase resonated. Good post, interesting data and insights. Thx, ThorsH.
A few other factoids about Ecuadorian politics:
—Ecuador just voted in a plebiscite to immediately expel all oil companies from a giant National Park in the Amazon basin. This in spite of having a Banker in the presidency. The Amazon rain forest is the actual lungs of the Earth, but no other nation or organization was willing to take action. This is no small sacrifice, as it represents a 10% reduction in Ecuador’s foreign exchange earnings.
—Ecuador is the only country on the planet to completely ban GMO (frankenfood) crops . Combined with exceptionally clean water and air and lack of mining and industrial pollution, it is no surprise that some locales have the longest life expectancy in the world.
“Ecuador is the only country on the planet to completely ban GMO (frankenfood) crops .”
Um, not quite the only one…
thespinoff.co.nz/science/26-06-2023/new-zealands-three-decade-ban-on-genetic-modification-explained
Your globalist friends are putting an end to that, Jello.
https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/06/11/nzs-gmo-laws-to-be-loosened-under-national-govt-luxon/
Russia is both RoundUp (glyphosate) and GMO-free.
Ukraine? Not so much.
According to Michael shellenberger; quoted at the beginning of JHK’e article today, the oft repeated canard that the Amazon is the “lungs of the world” is untrue.
See below
SHELLENBERGER: On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare
Michael Shellenberger
Jun 29th, 2020
And why would we want to mandate even more low information voters to vote?
Visited Ecuador earlier this year as it turns out.
To make purchases, shoppers provide voter confirmation I.D. at the cash register. No confirmation number, no sale. We were tourists from the States, so we could show a passport or there was a work around available, I found it a little off-putting to “show your papers” at the grocery store. The civil libertarian in me believes citizens should not be forced to vote.
That said, Ecuadorians do take voting very seriously. Though, I heard several people say, “We are required to vote, but our politicians are all terrible.”
Also, we were advised to avoid the capital in Quito on Election Day itself because of the potential for political violence.
Still, I found Ecuador to be a very beautiful country and home to kind hearted folks.
@ Mike
I stand corrected. Instead of “only” that should read “one of the few”.
That said, it pisses me off when schoolmarms prowl this site looking for errors so they can show off their superior diction. If a post contains more then a throw away phrase, comment on the major theme and offer a reasoned counter argument. Like bobfitzo3 just did.
Disaffected,
I think Jim is pointed in the right direction. The speed that we are traveling in that direction is certainly in question.
I am very curious to see another round of vaxxes taken up by, say, 10-15% of the population. At the same time, the folks that already have 1 – 5 shots and don’t get the new booster, still get to navigate another flu season/winter.
I think the next few months will be interesting.
It’s been so long with no consequences for malicious behavior that I expect it will never happen. Defunding parts of the Federal Government is the one power available to the small Republican majority. If they would target even one agency (ATF, perhaps) and defund it for crimes, it would do a lot pour encourager les autres.
But they won’t. Our best hope is defunding the whole thing. Note that the interest bill is now about $1trillion, and rising. Soon the Feds will get NO money by borrowing. There seems to be a natural tax limit at 20% of GDP. Inflation is their last source of funding, then collapse.
They’d never go after a dime of ATF money because that would be spun as “another example the Republicans are the REAL party that’s out to defund police agencies and make America less safe.” It’s bullshit, but it’s accepted by many because the “news” media tell everyone that they should believe any Democrat pronouncement over anything said by anyone else, God Almighty included.
BTW, easy with the foreign phrases, Dcotor Tom. Not everyone reads French.
Granted, I minored in French, but how can a person get through college and indeed this life as a native Anglophone without being able to at least puzzle out French?
Puzzle out French? If one never learns it, one will not puzzle it out.
No offense, but Americans have a bad habit of thinking their foreign language skills are better than they are.
Learning in a classroom is nothing like using the language in the respective country, and unless you have done that, you have no idea how much different it is than “minoring” in a language in school.
Ever heard of Google Translate?
Per Google Translate, “pour encourager les autres” = “to encourage others.”
I happen to speak French anyway, but . . .
How lazy are commenters here?
As for NO, just ignore his thing, oft repeated, and give self-help a try.
Night Owl has long decried Google Translate and anyone who is not as exact and proficient as he.
I took a couple of French classes in high school (in the sixties), so I can’t say that I know much French, but “pour encourager les autres” seems to me like a no-brainer.
Why use a translator?
Just puzzle it out.
Such nonsense. Butthurt sniping in place of logic.
NO #1:
“Puzzle out French? If one never learns it, one will not puzzle it out.
NO #2:
“Just puzzle it out. Such nonsense. Butthurt sniping in place of logic.”
I think we know in whose butt the “butthurt” has taken hold.
Finis.
It was over your head.
Nice try.
You didn’t understand the posts.
I can explain them for you, if necessary.
Please do!
I said puzzling it out is silly if one does not speak French. The poster adopted an somewhat arrogant tone, so I also commented on the tendency of many Americans to be quite poor at second languages.
I joked again about puzzling it out and then commented on your sniping. You always get so fussy when I comment on foreign language, stemming back to spat long ago.
It is time to let it go. This is getting too feminine for me, so I must depart this thread now.
I recently read the actual bill is more like $1.7 trillion.
Utter insanity as the spending spree continues to go and grow.
They. don’t. care.
there is no debt–it is an operational expense only–it will go on til it can’t–we may be close–all the whose is in DC know this–it is a clown world–there will NEVER be an attempt to pay it–you are being conned if you think the national debt is real–there is nothing real about the way gooooovermint operations are paid–it is a game,a scam and anybody who thinks, talks about the “national debt” has been conned,scammed into believing the concept is real–it is not-of course they don’t care–they are having fun playing the game but china,russia know the truth and are going to end it…soon
I’m dialed—in. More than most.
Look at what happened to Trump, when he decided to forgo trying to prosecute Hilary for her obvious crimes. Not that he could have found a willing prosector whom the Republicans would allow him to have.
Somebody talked him out of pardoning Julian Assange, and Julian is the reason we even knew about the Hillary/Obama secret server.
Beryl, we now know the reason the hapless Mr Trump did not go through with pardoning Assange and Snowden: the Republican RINO’s and others threatened him with conviction in the pending, second impeachment, which would have forestalled his present campaign for a second term, because a conviction would have constitutionally prevented that.
I don’t think we do know that. I think his minder, Mike Pompeo, talked him out of it.
Likely.
As Obama forewent prosecuting Bush the Lesser (thanks, Paula) for war crimes.
They are all neocons now.
Exactement! (;-))
Oui, tu parles si bien français, ma chère!
Next someone will tell us they don’t know what “exactement” means.
Credit goes to Arundhati Roy for that one. But, thanks.
Malheureusement.
Every now and then here I like to remind people that our expiration date – according to historical statistics – is just about here. The average republic is only good for 250 years or so, and we’ve arrived at that point of final dissolution. When I say this to friends and relatives face to face they get angry with me and change the subject.
Once the dollar is rejected for use in international trade we won’t be purchasing imported goods with dollars anymore. The rest of the world will ask for some other currency instead. We’ll be forced to change our dollars into something else before we can purchase anything overseas or from overseas. Since we’ve shipped most of our capacity for manufacturing over to Asia and other places we won’t be purchasing either new shoes or new clothing after this happens. At some point we’ll be going around dressed in rags. We won’t have much of a “health care system” left because we’ll no longer have access to imported big pharma products.
But the cherry, or rather the turd on top of this heap of woes will be lack of access to food. Then we’ll be coming out like army ants. That and only that will be the force that pulls the triggers on all of our privately owned guns. And we’ll probably be killing each other in huge numbers fighting over food. And we’ll also be killing everyone and anyone we think might have been even remotely connected to causing our woes and agonizing physical suffering.
Coyotes will eat up a lot of the dead people, and the stink and the horror of this place will be so bad that no foreign nations at first will have the slightest interest in coming over here to invade us in search of resources to steal. Our beyond chaotic civil war version 2.0 will be so brutal and ugly that foreign powers will first wait until the fires die down here before anyone attempts to profit in anyway from our calamity.
The suvivors here in the USA will rebuild the tough and hard culture we had here in the US in the 1930’s, also the hottest decade of the 20th century, the dust bowl. I heard my share of stories about this decade from people who actually lived it. We’ll be a new and tough bunch of people that know how to fight, how to use a garden hoe, know how to make their own clothing, how to heat themselves in winter with coal or wood, and above all else, know how to mind their own business. The rest of us who’d had soft lives and had completely lost all survival skills, well, none of those of us will remain here – those people by then will have all passed away.
Welcome to the long emergency. It won’t be fun but it just might be “meaningful”.
Great comment. Agriculture could be a potentially bright spot for the former USA. We had a chance to phase out industrial factory farming in favor of regenerative organic methods but chose not to. We’ll have to do it after the collapse in order to start growing food again and keep the small portion of the topsoil that hasn’t been squandered. There will be less oil inputs so that means more human and animal labor. I would think that small farm jobs should be our hope now for a way to bring jobs back. The next “recovery” certainly won’t involve building new Walmarts and millions of acres of new suburbs this time.
Honestly it is going to take full scale hydroponics rigs to feed the country.
Fairly closed systems so the water is not evaporating off and the fish feed the plants just need to figure out what to feed the fish.
benr
The system you describe is called aquaponics, not hydroponics.
Hydroponics is much more dependent upon industrial chemical inputs for success, analogous to ocean pen salmon farming that requires a constant stream of antibiotics and hormones to keep the fish alive in such crowded conditions.
Both systems at the scale to feed the entire country are extremely capital and fairly energy demanding. I worked on a proposal for native bands in Canada to use the compressor station natural gas being flared off to heat greenhouses on their tribal lands, so I’m familiar with the numbers.
Traditional Vietnam farm pond aquaponics is another matter entirely. Sun provides the energy to keep the pond warm. Pigs and cows shit in the pond which promotes a vigorous growth of Duckweed algae,which is the favorite food of tilapia fish. As long as you have the sun to provide energy and animals to import organic matter from the surrounding grass and deliver it to the pond in the form of shit the system is nearly self sustaining.
I don’t think your neighbors in the adjoining McMansion will be happy with the odor though—.
you need to read about the dust bowl days of the 1930ties to know what happened to the topsoil on millions and millions of acres–we recovered from that–oil is the greatest impact on the betterment of human existence–very few people understand that,take it for granted–all the oil haters need to stop using any products made from petroleum –they won’t–they are all maladjusted misfits with low IQ
I’d guess that every now and then our host gets labeled as an “oil hater” because he is very skeptical about the future of a civilization so dependent on automobiles and oil. For some reason people think we can make it in the US without imported petroleum. We can’t and won’t. It’s not about hating or loving oil – it’s all about asking questions as to what will happen when petroleum becomes too expensive to use the way we are using it now. People think that fracking is the new road to petronirvana and we’ll keep fracking forever. But oil companies aren’t doing very well and if and when banks can’t loan them $$ to go fracking then the drilling stops. The only frackless undeveloped and undrilled zones are offshore US coastlines where drilling is mostly forbidden. Then what? When fracking becomes unprofitable for whatever reason – companies will stop fracking and you’ll stop driving. That’s about all we are saying. It’s really simple and emotions or beliefs don’t play a role in this – it’s not about how you feel – it’s about politics and geology.
Careful, my friend.
You are summoning CFN demons.
“when petroleum becomes too expensive to use the way we are using it now.”
Maybe that should read “too expensive to waste the way we are wasting it now.” The waste will not stop until the oil stops, I have a feeling.
Specifically, I see the cartons and cartons of single-serving plastic containers of yogurt etc. hauled into the supermarket. This is a waste of oil and also becomes a waste product as soon as consumed and discarded. Requiring more energy to process into . . . what? Maybe “heat to energy”?
There seems to be no let-up in the tsunami of wasteful packaging. Don’t get me going on the gigantic vehicles Americans prefer. Not to mention the waste of war.
What happened to “Waste not, want not”?
In India, traditionally, in good crop years when rainfall was adequate, excess grain was stored in case the next year’s crop failed.
After the British took over, there was famine in drought years when harvests failed because the lords and masters sold the previous year’s excess as profit-making exports instead of storing it for the local population.
happiface,
For anyone interested in the Dust Bowl, one of the worst man-made environment disasters in history, may I recommend The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan? It is a fascinating tale, very well written, that doesn’t shy away from the bad policies, group think, and playing God with Nature that brought about the tragedy.
Here’s something I just found on facebook and I’ll paste it in here. In my opinion it gives the reader a look at what life might be like in rural areas during the long emergency. A completely different social structure and very self sufficient lifestyle without modern conveniences. A lifestyle mostly gone today but I predict will return. What’s so bad about living like this? Anybody?
“The Definition of a Holler…..
Someone from outside my area recently asked me about our Appalachian hollers, and I have been thinking of how to best describe them to those not familiar with them. The simple answer is that a holler is a lane that follows a narrow valley between the hills. But if you’re from the hills of Appalachia, then you know there’s a lot more to a holler than that.
Most hollers are just dirt roads with a little gravel spread on them every now and then. They were never intended to carry heavy traffic. A holler is generally very sparsely populated because that’s the way we like it. We guard our privacy and we’re pretty wary of strangers. Often there’s not another house in sight of your house.
But we still know our neighbors. And when one needs help, then you help. If someone is sick in the holler, then you pitch in to help until they get back on their feet. If someone has a problem, then you listen. When someone claims you as a friend, then you’re loyal. And if you make a promise, then you’d better make good on it.
There aren’t any mansions In a holler. In fact, most houses in a holler are modest ones. And almost everyone has a barn, and a couple of other outbuildings. Some have chickens and cows and goats and a couple of horses. And they all have at least one dog that runs to the road and barks at every car that passes by.
Most people in a holler have a front porch. And they actually sit on it. They shell peas and string green beans and peel apples on the porch. And people stop by and sit on the porch with you. And in the dusky evenings, they come with fiddles and flat top guitars and five-string banjos. And, good Lord in heaven…..what music they make! Sometimes the music drifts up and down the holler and it’s so pretty it just makes you want to cry! But instead of crying, you find yourself humming along.
A lot of the houses in a holler have been occupied by several generations of the same family over the years. There is comfort in living in the house where your grandpa was born, or playing in the creek where your daddy used to swim. Something stirs down deep inside of you when you know you’re walking in the steps of your forefathers. And you never really feel alone as long as you know that your people lie buried on top of the hill that holds you so closely. Never underestimate the way that the hills cradle you. They will rock you to sleep at night, and awaken you in the morning with a happy heart and a joy in your soul.
If you live in a holler, you get recognition every day. And you’re never invisible. People always wave at you when they see you on your porch or in your yard. And if they don’t see you outside, then they will blow the horn when they drive by your house….just as a way of saying “howdy”. And if a few days pass and they don’t see you, then they’ll stop by to check on you. You can count on it. And you can count on them.
If anyone invites you to have a meal at their table…accept their offer quickly. And if it’s a house where an old woman runs the kitchen, get to the table just as fast as you can. And get ready to be amazed! Because if you live to be a hundred years old, you will never have a finer meal than one served up in an Appalachian holler.
There is a certain etiquette adhered to when you drive up or down the holler. If you meet another car in an extra narrow spot, then one of you has to back up to a wide spot so the other can pass. And when you are finally able to pass each other, you stop and roll the car window down and you talk until another car comes along and you have to move on.
If your neighbor slides out of the road in the winter snow, or if he gets stuck in the mud, then you try to push him out. If you’re unable to push him out, then you get your tractor out of the barn, attach a big chain, and pull him out. Again…it’s just common courtesy.
If someone in the neighborhood dies, you get to their house quickly with huge boxes of food. You make a pot of coffee. And then you make another one. And you stay beside your neighbor for as long as you’re needed. You don’t even have to say a word, you just have to be there.
There are other unwritten rules to holler-living. If a forest fire breaks out, you become a firefighter. And not just to save your own house, but to also save all the other houses in the holler. If the creeks start rising, you don’t leave anyone behind to face the muddy waters alone. And when storms come, and they will, you will find no better friends than the ones who are going through the same challenges that you’re facing.
There’s a lot more to be said about an Appalachian holler, but if I don’t tell you another thing, you need to know that a holler is more than a narrow isolated lane that runs between the hills. A holler takes you to the place where you have always been loved and where you’ll always be welcome. A holler takes you to the place where you can find comfort and peace and a sense of belonging. It takes you to your roots and to your family and to the truth of who you are. A holler takes you home.
(Written by Roberta Stephens) — with Eddiee Brown.
Beautiful. The people are said to be implacably hostile to outsiders. One person who was foolish enough to move there said they would come and just stare at him working on his house.
One maniac used to haunt patriot sites, obsessed with people who said the Appalachians were to be a “redoubt”.
He said, Fuck you. Stay out. My family has been here before the United States and we’ll be here after it’s gone. You’re not wanted so don’t come.
The people of the Cumberland Gap are said to be more affable and open to strangers – and even those of the Ozarks as well, although they were settled by Appalachian people.
Great post Woodchuck!
Oh to be at my dad’s place in East Tennessee with many of the conditions listed here in play. He had Old Glory on display on his flagpole in the back yard with Holston Mountain as a backdrop. Depending on the time of day, that mountain could appear purple. Purple mountain’s majesty, indeed. The marine corps flag hung below Old Glory. My dad’s 27 years in the ‘corps earned him that right.
People coming the other way on the road wave to you and it’s rude not to wave back, whether or not you recognize them.
A neighbor you don’t know might stop by to let you know there is an ill-tempered wild boar in the neighborhood. The boar’s disposition may be attributed to .22 slugs he is now sporting because that’s all the neighbor had handy.
Another neighbor might breathlessly inform you about the bear he encountered when stopping by to use your hillside shooting range. He ran one way and the bear ran the other.
My dad’s elementary school teacher let her neighbor run his cattle on her land because she wasn’t using it. Mighty neighborly of her.
When my dad was sick he lamented the groundhogs possibly undermining his barn, they dug so much. The neighbor’s kid and his .22 resolved the issue for him – no charge.
The preacher hit a bear one night, totaling his car. He center punched that bear, knocking the poop out of him.
Oh carry me back home!
@Jarek I figured you wouldn’t have any enthusiasm for Appalachian life styles of the 1960’s and earlier. In some ways I think a person has to have grown up in Appalachia in order to understand it. Reading about hillbilly life won’t do. You have to have been there and seen it and experienced it first hand. The life style involves getting used to pain, discomfort, and more primitive living conditions. If an outhouse simply won’t do for you, then you are not yet really to be a hillbilly. .
The writeup mentions people actually using their porches for everything from processing food to playing music. They didn’t have air conditioning and it gets hot in the southern Appalachians. It was quite common to see groups of people on porches because it was still too damn hot inside, even though it was late afternoon. If you were canning, the kitchen was well over a hundred degrees inside and you’d be keeping an eye on water bath canners boiling away in there. But everyone else is on the porch cutting and stringing green beans. Or shucking corn. You only go in the kitchen because you gotta work in there for a little while. When you’re done you go to the porch. Often there’s a back porch as well.
The kitchen can be just as brutal a place as a field or a barn – and just as dangerous. Women were always working around or with boiling water, either for washing clothing or bodies – or in the kitchen processing food. Using wood or coal as an energy source for basic living needs like cooking, bathing, home heating etc. involves human muscle inputs or it just doesn’t work. People completely dependent on electricity might not understand this fully.
I’m having trouble imagining Jarek living a primitive lifestyle, he doesn’t seem to think it’s a good idea or even possible for him. I’m basically in the same boat right now myself, but for other reasons maybe – I’m gettin’ too old to do all the macho stuff I did when much younger. Once I get to cane and walker stage I won’t be doing much of anything aside from sitting on the porch and trying to scare people on CFN.
What are you talking about, Dil? I said it was beautiful, didn’t I? I simply said it was only for them since they hate outsiders.
If we can live like this too, well that might be a very good thing for most.
Excellent post. I agree that yes, it would take starvation to guarantee an armed uprising. In addition, we agree that in a country with more firearms than people, the government, military, and law enforcement would not be able to put down an armed citizen revolt. I think that the culture would swiftly revert to that of the 1930’s or earlier. Thieves would be summarily shot, along with a host of other lawbreakers. Corrupt politicians would likely face a similar fate. Technological reversion would be accompanied by societal reversion as well, and probably just about all the left wing nonsense that we take for granted today would swiftly cease to exist. You can’t trans your kid if you can’t feed him. . .and worrying about “the lens of equity” would be seen as insanity.
Dear woodchuck: I’ve pondered same the last 20+ years, thunderstuck — a la AC/DC or, more recently, Steve ‘n Seagulls — and can only admire Rome for their 500 +/-. No doubt, modern State Propaganda organs have hastened the demise.
But, if you and I burn in the fires of hell on earth, surely we will mix with the ether of heaven, yes?
Me, I trust in God and theoretical physics balanced against our pathetic, sapien-centric grasp of what constitutes consciousness.
And in case it’s all a misguided belief, a Big Sleep, I and my kind ure as hell won’t be fretting about sending a postcard.
I invite you to stop wasting your time commenting on blogs like this. You are 5 by 5 in your sentiments, but it’s over and out from this dude.
I wish you and yours nothing but God’s love.
Peace.
“Once the dollar is rejected for use in international trade we won’t be purchasing imported goods with dollars anymore. The rest of the world will ask for some other currency instead.”
I think that’s happening now with the BRICS nations.
tuco22,
I agree with you and I think it may be even worse that just the BRICS. Here’s a recent headline:
The BRICS group of nations has decided to invite six countries – Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – to become new members of the bloc, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Thursday.
So the BRICS could be growing beyond their traditional identity from 2010 of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
But I think your comment goes beyond even the larger footprint of BRICS. I watched an hour long interview with the prime minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, done by Tucker Carlson. It was a good interview. A lot of it was merely political. But Orban knows his country’s history. Hungary is carefully managing their financial health. And any country doing that must make decisions about deficits and debt, of course, but also holdings. And even Hungary is not holding the US instruments (dollars and bonds) that it used to. This is a purposeful act because the US has shown it is dangerous to rely on US loyalty.
I think this is spreading around the globe to varying degrees. It’s slow, the classic drip drip drip. But the effect is cumulative. And what was largely blamed on “supply chain” during the covid era, has really morphed into an impending US trade disaster.
When I’m in a big box store, I always walk the aisles, especially the aisles I don’t need to go to. I want to see what the store’s inventory situation looks like. I was in an Ace hardware last week and could not believe the sections of the store that were literally empty of stock.
It reminds me of an old story Sept. 16, 1989, when Boris Yeltsin just wanted to catch a glimpse of everyday American life on a visit to NASA. So he asked to check out a local grocery store.and was taken to a Randall’s in Clear Lake, Texas. He was said to have asked, “How do you get all the food here at the same time?”
The US is regressing.
I look forward to never buying cheap crap from China again, actually… except maybe electronics…
“how to use a garden hoe, …”
That’s actually a big problem these days. Too many willing to use garden variety hoes.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess even a ‘garden variety hoe’ wouldn’t give you a second look.
Woodchuck, you write: “But the cherry, or rather the turd on top of this heap of woes will be lack of access to food. ”
Please elaborate why and how you think this will happen. You state it as a given. why?
Much has been written in various places about coming food shortages and why. It’s a complicated topic. Industrial agriculture is a very high tech operation depending on the availablity and the operation of machinery that will break down if for any reason parts or fuel become unavailable. Industrial agriculture won’t work without a lot of chemical and fertilizer indrustries backing it all up. This system requires countless interdependent mechanisms and machines, businesses, and organizations to be working properly to get food to your table. If any of them fail, the entire system can break down. (For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of the horse the battle was lost etc.) You know the drill. Any event stopping farmers from having access to items like diesel fuel, fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, engine parts, etc. will break the system. .And even if the farmers manage to stay in production, anything breaking down our highly complex food distribution system will also result in mass starvation.
Our food supply system is extremely weak and vulnerable. Simple business failures, bank failures, fuel supply failures can all destroy this highly complex system. Back in the 50’s when I was a child a lot of the food we had was still grown locally and was being purchased and sold by local grocery stores. And it was grown in low tech fashion with small and easily fixed old Ford and Farmall tractors – or even with mules.
In the 50’s I lived in a semi-suburban area of a small hillbilly town. As children we played ball games on large vacant lots and without any adult supervision. Our favorite ball field was lost for a few years because the owner decided to grow corn on it. So we had a bit of fun playing hide and seek in a corn field instead. But the field was plowed and tilled by an old hillbilly with some mules. We talked to him and asked why he wasn’t using something else. He plowed and tilled back yard gardens as a living and said the mules were easier to work with and could get around in tight places and small yards a lot easier than a small tractor could.
Mules and horses don’t anything much aside from hay, grain, and water, and those are easy enough to obtain. High tech farm tractors are *far* more vulnerable to breakdowns and parts unavailablity – or lack of fuel. When our high tech food system fails we’ll change back to simpler methods like horses. The change backwards will involve a lot of chaos, dying, and the learning of old skills and trades that have been forgotten.
I was talking to a farmer who owns the land behind mine, and he said that those giant combines they use nowadays cost a million dollars apiece, so the farmers lease them instead of buying them.
If they break down, the corporation has to fix them, because the farmers certainly can’t.
The amount of fuel and chemicals used to produce corn or soybeans is incredible.
When that goes, corn and soybeans go. Of course, most of what is produced isn’t eaten here, or by humans.
If we had a rational government that cared about the welfare of its citizens, we would do what they did in the New Deal, pay farmers to produce actual food, pay unemployed workers to can it, pay teenagers to plant windbreaks to protect the topsoil, etc.
But we don’t have that kind of government, or the kind of citizens who think it is a good idea for the government to make sure that everyone eats, and the land is improved.
We have a mean, mean, country, all around. (h/t Dad)
Last paragraph should have started like this: “Mules and horses don’t need anything much aside from……….”
“If we had a rational government that cared about the welfare of its citizens, we would do what they did in the New Deal, pay farmers to produce actual food, pay unemployed workers to can it, pay teenagers to plant windbreaks to protect the topsoil, etc.”
Today’s unemployed white boyz are indoors on the couch watching tv, drinking beer, smoking dope, gaming, or arguing in online forums. They’d have a terrible time making the transition to work in canning operations or to perform farm stoop labor. However, I’m sure there will be plenty of hispanics and other immigrants from South and Central America who can or will step up to the plate and get this work done – and for the benefit of all. They are experienced in performing manual farm labor and have the toughness to do it all day long. Transitioning to the Long Emergency won’t be so difficult for them, it won’t be their first rodeo and they still have the skills to ride and tame that bronco without getting bucked off continually. Yeah, it hurts you physically in learning how.
Just to keep Jarek quiet, I’ll have to change a few things. Here’s a correction:
“Today’s unemployed white and black boyz are indoors on the couch watching tv………..”
Thank you, Woodchuck, for describing possible scenarios. Very helpful and makes a lot of sense. We’re so vulnerable, so matter how high the stores are heaped with fresh vegetables.
I got a little choked reading your reply, because my father was an avid gardener and worked for International Harvester which produced the Farmall tractor. He was so proud of their product line and heartbroken when the company failed.
Your comments about the farmer with the mule reminds me of Dolly Parton’s version of “Mule Skinner Blues”. Being a mule-skinner required an special knack to convince the mule to do what you want. Going back to low-tech, symbiotic solutions, like working animals, would be a step forward (assuming good animal husbandry of course)
Long “thank you”.
@sadiethecat Yeah, I’ve heard that recording of her version of mule skinner blues. She’s written an autobiography that describes in great detail how she grew up dirt poor and how her dad was a share cropper in the mountains in Sevier Co. At age 12 or so she was appearing on television (transmitted from studios in Knoxville) before her family ever had a tv set – they couldn’t afford one. So to see Dolly perform on tv her parents and siblings had to go to a neighbor’s house somewhere else to watch. Her descriptions of life growing up in rural Appalachia – in my humble opinion – are a good way of visualizing what life styles might be like again for many people during the Long Emergency. No indoor plumbing. No bathroom with a commode, tub, or sink. You had a kitchen, a small living room, two bedrooms, and that was it. That was all the house you had. An unpainted shotgun shack. Elvis grew up the same way. These two artists have had so much power and influence in the world because of how they grew up. They were poor but with very strong family ties, support, and connections. Music had always played a large role in old fashioned Southern rural culture, from playing the blues to playing bluegrass hillbilly music.
“….isn’t the country ripe for a new party….” Maybe, but more likely the country is ripe for a divorce, and that’s our best hope; not more silly and useless voting. Recall that Mark Twain once said, ‘if voting mattered, they wouldn’t let us do it.’ Most everyone with a triple digit IQ knows this, but can’t bring themselves to admit it. Why? Because when the ballot box and jury box fail, only the cartridge box is left. The miss nellie’s out there can’t face the fact that that is where we are now.
That’s why the founders gave us the 2nd amendment.
Just say it: The ladies of both sexes. Women and their male lap dogs.
Everything we have is due to violence. We took this continent by storm. Part of a real education would be studying this and not only acknowledging it, but revering the heroes who bequeathed everything to us.
The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth itself to be taken by violence. And the violent bear it away.
Christ
That’s why He gave us the church.
No, “My Kingdom is not of this world.”
How does humility and turning the other cheek square with taking the Americas by storm? Each is St Paul’s “foolishness” in the eyes of the other.
But it’s true that we would have already burned ourselves out with pure worldliness. The Christian ethos made America livable – but only when balanced out with natural xenophobia. The Church has had to learn to look the other way on things like this – tolerating the natural.
If you don’t put your own people first you’ll soon have nothing. That’s in opposition to Christian universalism.
Jarek for Heaven’s sake. Show me where it is a majority of women in any of this.
Maybe if you would do your trauma therapy you could see things through more than your narrow lens.
There’s a major men’s self-help movement going on right now.
Maybe you could find a cure for your fear and loathing of fully half of the human race.
Look at this:
7 HABITS THAT TURN BOYS INTO MEN:
1. Taking Responsibility:
Real men understand the importance of taking responsibility for their actions and decisions.
They don’t make excuses or blame others for their circumstances.
Instead, they own up to their mistakes, learn from them, and strive to do better.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1692122603861729333.html
Women bring 80% of the divorces. Oath breakers. Following their feelings. Tingle junkies.
Women never take responsibility for anything – always projecting their deficit on to men. That’s why you’re doing right now.
“If men could have abortions, abortion would be a sacrament.” Abortion is already a sacrament of Feminism, but instead of acknowledging it, she projects it.
Do you accept that essential role of violence in the founding of America? Do you revere the Male Conquerors, teach others of their deeds, and make offerings on behalf of their souls?
Do you admit that sans these Heroes, we (and that includes you) would have absolutely and precisely nothing?
It’s fine if you also remember the Women who served them, their handmaids as it were…..
Women bringing most divorces says something bad about men, not women.
My female forbears were no one’s handmaidens. Who do you think raised the men who stood up to fight for this country?
There we have it, volks!
When men do something wrong, it’s their fault.
When women do something wrong, it’s not their fault. It’s men’s fault.
Beryl has conceded my original premise so I rest my case in Victory.
On to the next point: So you accept the absolute necessity of violence in the founding of America? The Indians had to be defeated and displaced so we could take their land.
Women give birth to boys. Only men can give birth to men. Too much female influence destroys boys, preventing them from ever becoming good men.
But yes, you all helped by being good wives and mothers. We did the rest – giving your everything. Gratitude? None!
Love it.
and make offerings on behalf of their souls? – Jarek
===========
on behalf or in behalf?
and what kind of offerings? how do offerings help someone else’s soul?
Here’s what happened to poor Jarek. He’s been scared of women ever since he got stuck………
Xttps://youtu.be/uVnqSb-vrXk
You are a disgrace, Woodrow.
Jarek:
“Only men can give birth to men. ”
Ohhhhhhhh-kay . . . . . .
Islander thinks that women can give birth to men!
@ Jarek:
Men initiate close to 100% of divorces, through the usual methods: non-support, infidelity, alcoholism, domestic violence, etc. Women then initiate court cases seeking redress.
And, by the way, non-support, infidelity, alcoholism, domestic violence, etc., are oath-breaking in relation to the marriage contract.
@ Jarek:
This claim that men “gave [women] everything” is a little odd, coming from you. By your own account, you’ve never given anything to anyone. You’ve never fought to protect a loved one, let alone fought off Indians. You’ve never provided a family with a home and appear to be incapable of doing so. You’ve never raised and provided for a son or daughter.
Maybe you should give us a list of the things you’ve done for women, for which women should be grateful.
Actually, you’ve made it pretty clear that you’ve never done anything but sponge off of other for your entire life.
@ Jarek:
Your claim that “women never take responsibility for anything” is another odd one, coming from you. You have clearly never taken the smallest responsibility for anything in your life. You have no job. The roof over your head and the food you eat is provided by others. You provide for no one, and take responsibility for providing for no one–not even for yourself.
Your lack of any means of support through your own efforts indicates that you are sponging off of parents or–if they are gone–perhaps some inheritance they provided. You are probably living in your parents’ house, and probably always have–never buying your own home or renting your own apartment. You have probably spent most of your life letting your mom cook and clean for you, do your laundry, and otherwise look after you.
Now, another possibility that could account for your sustence as an unemployed person is that you are living in either Section 8 housing or your parents’ house, and drawing a disability check, which I suspect would be of the nature of a “crazy check,” the disability being mental.
If you’re squatting in your parents’ house after their death, you are cheating your siblings out of their proper share of their inheritance. (I’ve seen a couple of those cases. Siblings either can’t or won’t ‘throw the bum out,” so said bum continues to squat in the parents’ house for the rest of his/her life.)
You are a bit of a poor specimen of “men who take responsibility.” And, unfortunately for the ladies who must assume the responsibilities the men have shirked, rather typical.
Agreed 100% Beryl!
In one of those existential moments I shared with my dad while driving the backroads of southern California as a kid:
Dad, what does it mean to be a man?
Son, it means being able to admit it when you’re wrong.
I was 6 years old.
“We did the rest – giving your (sic) everything. Gratitude? None!”
We???
You expecting some kind of gratitude for something you never did is a bit like me expecting to be treated like a 25-year-old Salma Hayek because we happen to belong to the same 50% of the human species.
Mary cheers as Beryl is getting massacred – too dull to see what is happening. But the other ladies see and rush to her defense. The male lap dogs rush in too, yapping and nipping.
Jones says that being a man means always saying your sorry – even when you’re in the right. The ladies heartily agree. In their little book, men are always wrong and women are always right. Women have no agency you see, which is further than I even go. But I agree that their judgement is poor and they shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Jones needs to analyze what he is saying and if he really believes it, he will come to the same conclusion as have I.
More blather. I didn’t come to anyone’s defence, or agree or disagree with anyone except you. Beryl, in my experience, is more than able to look after herself.
And you’re still looking for gratitude for something you didn’t do and likely never will do (never say never …).
I know who I need to be grateful to and it’s not you.
I, personally hold women accountable for the woes of our society. Here’s a stark example of why that is. A few weeks ago I attended a youth group activity with in my church where hundreds of youth gathered together for nearly a week at a local college. As I was one of the adult advisors I was tasked with assisting people find their way to various check in points. As an individual who enjoys watching the habits and behaviors of other individuals in social situation I observed the modesty habits of the boys and girls as they checked in to determine if the clothing they were wearing met the established dress code. I was constantly telling the females that their shorts were too short, their shirts needed to cover their navels, that cleavage was not acceptable at a church function. Dozens of girls were told this. Do you know how many boys I had to instruct on principles of modesty? Not one. The boys were all dressed in T-shirts, jeans or comfortable knee length shorts. The girls? Pfft. They couldn’t care less.
Take the Grammys or the Emmys or the Oscars. How are the men dressed? They are always dressed in a tuxedo. Always. The women? The women outdo themselves trying to wear as little as possible without being totally naked. It is disgusting.
Women have abrogated their sacred responsibility to be the gatekeepers of morality. Yes, sacred responsibility. Men, by nature, are the more sexually aggressive of our species in order to ensure the species survives. Women, are supposed to temper this aggressiveness in men. Women historically have done this by demanding more from their suiters before hopping into the sack with them for some non-comital sex. They demanded commitment in the form of marriage and vows. They demanded men that could provide for them and their children. Today? Many women, not all, screw whatever scumbag will have them and are left holding the bag when the baby comes and the dude takes off for his next sack romp which he will easily find.
When women abrogated themselves of this moral responsibility there was nothing there to keep the sexual aggression of men in check. Young men were being born to be raised by women who have no clue how to keep young men in check. Oh sure, feminists said women don’t need men, but women sure as hell can’t handle teenage boys.
Our schools also went to great efforts to demean our young men in favor of expecting them to learn as little girls would learn.
Most of the nuttiest members of Congress are women.
Then there is matter of abortion where a woman chooses to have her own child torn from her body and murdered. Men don’t make this choice. Physicians don’t make this choice. Women make this choice and they make it of their own free will and accord. Women will and are facing the wrath of God because of their wickedness, immorality, immodesty and filth. How many millions of would be mothers are now condemned as murderers.
Disclaimer: Not all women are whackos. I’m married to a strong conservative lady who enjoys her womanhood, loves her children and supports her man. There are many good women out there.
However, women by and large in our western society have lost their minds, lost their virtues and are totally lost in regards to their biological purposes among the human species. Hence the reason so many of our little girls are now pretending their boys and some of them are even having their breasts cut off and their uteruses removed.
Men didn’t do this, Beryl. Women did. Women have permitted this to happen and it happened when women no longer were able to simply say “no” to the man when he asked.
“Women give birth to boys. Only men can give birth to men. Too much female influence destroys boys, preventing them from ever becoming good men.”
Jarek, I usually find your posts and arguments to be somewhat odd but interesting. In this case, you are dead on right.
I watched a documentary a while back about a herd of elephants. In this herd there were young females, older females, young males and older males. The researchers removed the older males from the herd and observed what happened. Almost immediately upon removal of the older males the younger males became very aggressive towards the females and even violent. When the older male elephants were again returned to the herd the aggressive behavior of the younger males ceased simply because the older, alpha males were present.
This is the point that feminists don’t understand. The very presence of the older males elephants tempered the aggression of the younger males and in turn protected the females from the violence and aggression of the younger males. Elephants are mammals, which we humans are also considered. Young men need Fathers to temper that aggression and show them, by example, how a man should behave. Women cannot do it. Period. They do not have that ability because they are not males. Period. They can talk themselves into it, they can read all the self help and parenting books they possibly can but in the end, young men need alpha males to emulate and follow. This is another lie that women have foisted upon themselves.
Women continue to make babies with men who are not committed to family or to the woman herself. Then they are left to raise a young man. She, being feminine, cannot project upon or teach the young man masculinity. The young man bullies and abuses his women and ultimately turns to gang activity for the male structure and authority he cannot find at home.
Women have brought this upon themselves by their constant demonization of manhood and fatherhood.
Even in my own Church Bishops bash the men while complimenting the women on being beautiful. Churches don’t even get it.
Well said, Jarek, I’m going to use that quote if you don’t mind.
@ Jarek – You wrote “Jones says that being a man means always saying your sorry – even when you’re in the right.”
What I said is there for anyone to read and reading my post and then reading yours proves you to be a liar.
I never said a word about apologizing.
My dad was a Colonel in the United States Marine Corps and he was one hell of a man. He raised his son to be a man, too.
“Dad, what does it mean to be a man?
Son, it means being able to admit it when you’re wrong.”
Where does that mention apologizing?
I’ve agreed with a lot of your posts but for you to blatantly twist what I said makes you wrong. Are you man enough to admit it?
When my wife initiated our divorce, I told her she was wrong and asked her not to do it. She insisted. The judge ruled that she pay me six figures. I am not some pantywaist who self-subjugates to a woman – not to ANY woman. I accepted the money and put it to good use.
Get yourself a clue, Jarek. Look at my name. Now remove the punctuation and the spaces. What do you see? COJONES.
Pretty dumb of you to discredit yourself by lying about what I wrote when the people you are lying to can read it for themselves. Ya pissed me off, little boy. I’ll get over it.
Ok Jones, well said. But it is strange you inserted yourself into the thread, supporting the feminist side. What was I supposed to think? One of the female attack dogs even went after me when I responded to you – as if she was you.
A man should admit he was wrong, what about a woman?
Or why not just say person if you didn’t want to take sides? See the confusion?
Canc, yes use it by all means. I didn’t come up with it btw. But I too recognized its poignant truth when I heard it.
Some boys became thugs without a male model. Others model themselves after their mothers and teachers, sissies in other words.
If women want men to be really good – as in not staring at them with lust – then they have to help men be really good by dressing modestly. This was traditionally understood by many cultures, including ours. Of course the Muslims take it too far, becoming enraged at women who dress provocatively and saying, they deserve what they get. Some Western men have such sentiments as well. I don’t agree with that at all. In any case, social harmony and beauty would increase if they dressed more and better.
Of course I enjoy seeing a bit of skin now and then, but again, does she want me looking? Or only the guy who is six feet tall and makes six figures? I try to be a gentleman and not look, but my instincts sometimes get the better of me.
Isn’t anybody else getting bored with this little debate? Ladies, can’t you see that Jarek is just tweaking your noses so he can have the fun of spinning out outrageous propositions? Loaded with just enough truisms to keep the steam coming out of your ears?
Beryl,
It’s a great article! My only addition is that these all seem to be noble habits for any responsible adult, ie. male or female. These are traits any good parent hopes to inspire in their children.
Thanks for sharing.
As befits his name, Thor shies away from difficult subjects and wants others to do the same. Many people, especially women, feel the same.
I mean why use this forum as a place to have real conversations? Why not use it like it was just another place in real life where you can’t talk about much of anything?
Math.
The great equalizer.
Jarek, in the sense that the kingdom is taken by violence, but the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church. Not the “church” of Sunday morning denominations, either.
I’d say that quote is very uncertain as to its meaning. (“The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.”) No telling what that means.
Yep…unfortunately, the Republicans are not on our side, so the money printing and government bloat will continue….
“It would do a lot pour encouragement les autres (for the encouragement of {or to encourage} the others.”
About Mitch, I’m sure it’s been said, but his episodes look like petit mal seizures–the sudden cessation of speech and movement, the frozen face, the staring into space and not responding to people, and then the coming-to and post-event confusion. God help us all.
Mitch McConnell, Feinstein, Pelosi, Fetterman, Biden, et al. “Leadership” in decline and senility leading a nation in the same condition. How ironic, how fitting, how sad.
Having to spend their last days covering for crimes so monstrous, they had no chance to learn to enjoy life while they still had it.
Yes, how fitting.
Satan always gives you what you ask for. He just doesn’t tell you what it costs.
And now the bill is coming due.
god never gives you what you want–god gives you what you need–and nobody ever understands what it is what they need,nobody and i mean nobody
hmuller …
Brings to mind Kosygin, Andropov, Brezhnev, Chernenko, all those doddering alcoholic mummies propped up and waving as MayDay passes by, goose-stepping.
Not a mover & shaker among them.
Adults don’t develope petit mal seizures – those a childrens’ seizures. He’s having transient cerebral ischemic attacks in Broca’s area, on the left side if he’s right handed.
Petit mal seizures (also called absence seizures, drapunir) are more common by far in children, but adults can have them. I’d have to read up on TIAs in Broca’s area. I thought damage to Broca’s mainly caused aphasia.
Neurodoc, can you weigh in?
I saw a YouTube video about that yesterday, by someone claiming to be a doctor. After the usual disclaimers, he called them absence seizures, perhaps due to McConnell’s fall, though he considered that unlikely, as it was about six months ago. Really, what does it matter? There is no way he will ever gracefully withdraw himself. I expect they will be wheeling the corpse of Dianne Feinstein into the senate long after she’s a corpse. Perhaps a psychic medium can can consult with her and do the voting. I’m frankly surprised that Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not still in her seat on the Supreme Court. Meghan Markle has volunteered to fill Feinstein’s seat, but Newsom has allegedly blocked her phone calls. She’s been quite importunate. I can’t see why they hesitate–she’d be perfect for their purpose, if it weren’t for her notoriously loose lips. Perhaps even the Democrats can’t abide her.
Me Gain has begun her long expected destruction of Prince Harry. They’re “living separate lives” now. Harry is frantic about fixing the marriage. Megan probably just wants to end looking like the good guy.
He failed to make her Queen. He is of no further use to her.
I read a story awhile ago predicting that their marriage would not survive. The author’s prediction at the time was based on Harry’s body language during an interview with her that told him that Harry already wasn’t happy.
No matter what you think of Trump, he nailed this awhile ago. “He married down and ruined his life.”
Donald Trump is a yuge gossip. I find that charming, in a way.
This to me is not so much “gossip” as an “Oh, stop playing games. We’re grown-upos” kind of comment.
Kind of like Joan Rivers throwing out, in an offhand comment, “Everyone knows Obama’s gay.”
A study in the multitudes that all of us contain. This was the noble, handsome young man who could have had anyone – the young commander who wanted to be with his men despite the risk. No risk – then it’s not real so who cares. That was his attitude.
This same man married Megan. She probably convinced him that she was another Lady Di. Lust is a drug. And while under the influence, people are susceptible to hypnotic suggestion.
Under her influence, he became a fame hound, writing the whiny autobiography, “Spare”, complaining about all of his family, the Monarchy, Racism, everything.
Think of the Sid Worley character in An Officer And A Gentleman.
His girlfriend is attracted to him because he is fulfilling his family obligation to become a Navy aviation officer or something. Then when he goes against his family, she finds he doesn’t have quite the same luster.
Meghan grossly overestimated her own personal appeal, and it didn’t improve anything when she turned a popular prince into an embarrassing sap.
Perhaps not as noble as all that. There have been unpleasant rumors about him since his youth. He is known to have killed a pregnant mare during a polo match, though the grooms asked him to choose another mount. His mother was reputed to have instructed her staff that Harry was never to be left alone in a room with a small animal. What he is purported to have done with his male friends on private weekends might give a matrimonial candidate pause. He apparently suffers from violent rages, and there are appalling whispers of young women beaten half to death during sexual encounters. Not terribly bright, Markle, herself no slouch in such behavior, apparently found him sufficiently weak and maleable to suit her purposes.
She’s the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers. She scored hugely with Prince Harry. But she wants to keep climbing. He can’t take her any higher. And she has to move fast before she loses her looks.
She is a very sexy woman – far superior to the woman in that movie. The poor guy couldn’t take the low pressure of altitude or something so he bombed out of flight school – becoming just another Okie from Muscocky.
What woman loves a man for himself alone? What man loves a woman for herself alone? To do is to be after all in the male case. And to look fair is to be fair in the female case. Soul with soul? Maybe later – but only after they get thru the other stuff. Eros isn’t a direct path to that. Philia or brotherly love is more direct. Eros just gets in the way, alas. And the highest love, Agape? It doesn’t even care about the other as an individual. The Great Sun is pretty cold in that regard…..
Ah, Draupnir, say it isn’t so. It would be convenient to blame everything on the loathsome Me Gain. But I won’t say it isn’t so. I don’t know. Many have a bright exterior and a much darker interior.
I’d have to see some kind of evidence of any of that.
Beryl, look at the uncle, the entire royal family is in with the pederasts.
Of course Harry hasn’t escaped that.
What woman loves a man for himself alone? What man loves a woman for herself alone?
‘NEVER shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’
‘But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’
‘I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’
W.B. Yeats, For
Anne Gregory
Emily Dickinson called her blonde sister, “avalanche of sun”.
Draupnir:
Maybe, just maybe, the rumors of Harry’s actually paternity are true (they certainly look extremely plausible), and he has been driven nuts by living a lie his whole life.
Just a thought . . .
Islander, he wouldn’t be the first cuckoo deposited in the royal nest. When the remains of Richard III were found in that parking lot, genetic testing revealed that he had no familial relationship to the current Royal Family (who claim descent from the first Tudor king, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, the daughter of Edward IV). Nearly 600-year-old rumors that Edward IV was actually the product of an affair between Cecily Neville and an archer in her husband, the Duke of York’s, employ (her dates don’t match up with her husband’s presence unless she suffered from an 11-month pregnancy) are given more credence with that discovery.
The true King of England, now deceased, turned out to be an Australian emigre, who give up his title and settled down in a small town with a nice Australian girl, worked as a mechanic or something similar and raised a family there. His daughters were considerably amused to discover they were actually princesses and spent a day dressed in old bridesmaids gowns with paper crowns on their heads, calling each other ‘your royal highness.’ Their husbands were indulgent until dinner time rolled around when they required that the princesses gather up their royal offspring and return home to cook the evening meal. That good gentleman’s first born son inherited his father’s claim to the throne..
When Diana was “chosen” to be Charles’s consort, many commented that she had better English royal bloodlines than any of the Saxe-Coburgs, a.k.a. Windsors.
I am not aware that any of the latter can claim a direct line of descent from any English monarch except maybe the Queen mother—a stretch.
William and Mary were of the house of Orange. The Georges were Hanoverians. Victoria came from a long line of Germans, married German, her eldest daughter married German and became the mother of Wilhelm II, emperor of Germany.
Well, I feel sorry for Harry, the official number 2.
First, the paternity rumors.
Then, bossy older brother/king in waiting.
Then, the “perfect” little super-climber Kate Middleton, pushing out heirs for the public to drool over .
Who (I mean Kate) IMO is not aging any better than William. She looks hard.
Of course Harry made a dumb choice with Megan. It is really better to stick with your own kind.
But Harry never really had a chance, with the bossy brother and the AWOL fake dad.
I hope he manages to ditch Megan and find a nice English woman to marry.
“any English monarch”
I mean, native English monarchs, not imports.
Islander, all of those people were related to the royal family, though not always through the male line. They were judged the most appropriate, in terms of religious leaning and politics and were thus invited to accede to the throne. Charles II had no ligitimate heirs. His brother, James succeeded him as James II, but he was quickly deposed because he had converted to Catholicism and had a Catholic wife, and the country was so over that. William, Prince of Orange was invited to take the throne with his wife, Mary, as he was the son of Mary, the daughter of King Charles I (the one they beheaded). His wife, Mary was the oldest daughter of James II by his first wife (they’re all related in sometimes surprising ways, you know–at least they weren’t Hapsburgs).
When Queen Anne died childless George I was invited to serve, being the most senior protestant descendent (a great grandson) of James I. It’s all been kept in the family. There are at least 100 people in the line of succession, you know.
Once a heartless gold digger, always a heartless gold digger…she just moved up in class…
He had the sex and now he gets the crazy.
A poor choice, but at least he lived and loved.
Some never do, and they end up with a house full of animals and the Internet.
😀
“He failed to make her Queen. He is of no further use to her.”
Barring the sudden demise of the current heir to the throne and his entire family, how was he ever going to make her Queen?
(Can’t stand either of them, btw, so no dog in the fight.)
Jarek is prone to hyperbole when discussing wimminz.
Well yes, Alba. Some skullduggery might need to have been done. But she’s Black and England is no longer White. Isn’t that enough? Me Gain represents the real England – the future! Surely Kate and Wills would abdicate in favor of this.
Alba, I believe she hoped to get her claws into William, and Harry was her means of getting close to him. He turned out to be disappointingly impervious to her shopworn charms, no matter how many adoring, dewey, cow’s eyes she flung his way. Vindictive as she is. it is widely suspected that she started the rumors regarding William and Rose Hanbury to cause a little mischief
“But she’s Black and England is no longer White. Isn’t that enough?”
About as black as Charles, the ‘black boy’ king, I suppose. I don’t recall his ‘blackness’ having any effect on anything more than the names of some pubs, but what would I know?
Not that she’s anything other than an add-on anyway.
Aren’t the Windsors/Saxe-Coburg-Gothas Black Guelphs anyway? Different kind of black, but worse …
I hadn’t heard that side of it, draupnir! But yes, she’s beyond awful, and Harry is a tool.
I have never been interested in the British Royal Family, but I admit, Draup’s post leaves me wanting more.
“He failed to make her Queen. He is of no further use to her.”
Short-term Meghan, expecting to reach the climax in one season…
“Aye Willie, dis is ‘Arry. ‘Fraid Megs ‘n’ me won’t make it to Jesuses birfday dis ye-ah. But oy ‘ope you awl ‘ave a blast! Hehe…”
“Da King is dead. Long live King Fuckin’ ‘Arry!”
Meghan on The View, April, 2025: “King Harry and I are having – Oh My God! – the best sex ever!”
We’ll be ruled by holograms of the dead, just like those AI-generated jazz standard songs where Frank Sinatra — in the words of some reviewer — lurches between key changes, and the production sounds like it’s coming from the bottom of a swimming pool.
That said, I can’t imagine anyone getting excited over Mitch McConnell’s greatest hits.
I thought it looked like he was downloading the latest programming.
A screamer. You got it.
and the fucking Republicans continue to uphold him as their “leader” when they could easily remove him and put someone competent as the minority leader in the Senate.
If it weren’t my country where this is happening I’d think I was watching some kind of a comedy show or satire. The fact that this is in real time is stunning.
The Republican primary in my home state has 3 candidates. All of them over 70 and wealthy. What is it with wealthy geriatrics wanting to get into political office. Go spend time with your grand children. Get old gracefully and then die. As is the natural order of things.
I won’t vote for Federal offices anymore. Our votes are meaningless. I tore up my mail in ballot.
“I believe the reason “Joe Biden” was installed in the White House was to allow Barack Obama to run the executive branch and all its agencies in secret from his headquarters across town in the DC Kalorama district, and the reason he is allowed to do this is because the Democratic Party has committed so many crimes against the country that a tremendous effort had to be made to cover them up, or else scores of figures in high places could have been subject to investigation and prosecution, including Mr. Obama”
I agree, and I recall Obama himself stating once in an interview that his dream would be to run a shadow third term while lounging around in his at home in his “sweats.”
Or paddle boarding with his boyfriends.
Or getting in a lovers’ tiff and boyfriend ends up underwater.
I was gonna mention that …
Right, but why install dummies like Biden and Harris who were surely going to flub bigtime and bring national scrutiny to their incompetence, criminality, and dishonesty? They invite a spotlight, they’re so awful. Also does that mean that Obama aligns w the neocons and pushed for the Ukrainain proxy war? I doubt it. He correctly avoided getting involved in Ukraine when he was Pres. If Obama is the invisible hand, he’s making a pig’s ear of his ‘3rd term”.
Obama avoided getting involved in Ukraine?
Except for overthrowing their elected government and putting in open Nazis in the post-coup government?
And encouraging the Kiev regime to attack the people of Donbass who refused to be ruled by Nazis?
And arming and training an entire new military, after so many units defected to Donbass, instead of killing the people?
Good ol’ Obama. Such a model of restraint.
Why on Earth would the Republicans want to stop this insanity? They’re complicit in it. For example, Cocaine Mitch McConnell is compromised because his wife’s family operates a huge shipping company at the pleasure of Chairman Xi. Bucking China means her family takes it in the shorts, which means Mitch loses access to hundreds of millions of dollars. Also, the Trump witchhunt promises to tie him up so that he’ll lose to Slow Joe, which the GOP Establishment is fine with because they expect the Democrats to leave them alone– much as French and Russian nobles foolishly thought would happen during those countries’ revolution. Of course, they’d really like to grab hold of the existing system to punish their enemies — maybe some Democrats, but more likely people like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, who are thorns in the side of the Establishment for expressing support for the Constitution. Of course, what would we expect from a party that fought a war between the states in order to disembowel the Tenth Amendment so that New England bankers and factory owners wouldn’t lose their asses if the Confederacy actually got away free (ironically, 50 years after New England threatened to secede en masse). The result of the war compelled everyone to have fealty to Washington, DC, but the victors called it a war to “save the Union” and “free the slaves.” Southern Freedmen were abandoned to the mercies of the KKK as part of the deal that gave the GOP the win in the 1876 election. In far more recent times, the great genius, George W. Bush, announced he destroyed capitalism in order to save it. John “Songbird” McCain hamstrung his own campaign in 2008, supposedly to help fix an unfixable financial crisis while his opponent kept campaigning. Then, Trump ascended to the White House by giving actual hope to the average American, and largely succeeded in advancing his agenda despite both parties in Congress working against him because he threatens their status by empowering the little guy. (Yes, I know: he’s a prevarication carnival barker, a know-nothing, arrogant dolt, and an unconvinced criminal. I’m reminded of this every time I read the Wall Street Journal, where I regularly offend the editorial board and other readers by reminding them that Trump’s appeal is that he reminds the downtrodden that they have value, while also skewering the elites over their stupidity. This isn’t the message we’re supposed to support, you see. Instead, we need to keep pushing tax cuts, foreign intervention, and “a stronger America,” whatever the hell that means.)
Prevaricating, not prevarication.
Fall not into paroxysms of fear upon committing a typographical error.
“The great genius, George W. Bush”.
You are giving Mr. Kunstler a run for the money today, Bob.
If you will permit me one eensy constructive criticism- you could have used a paragraph or two.
We seniors have trouble with bocks of dense text.
People are still trying to blame the liberal side of the Deep State for the autocracy that has developed. They are the leaders of the Left drive. The GOP in DC though is RINO now, they are in the Deep State just as much. The average Deep Stater has a priority list that is headed up by an allegiance to all things Deep State, before party. Before their constituency. This is the Achille’s heel of the Constitution, when the power of money overcomes the power of the vote. The first thing that happens with a new electee in DC is the intimidation by the good ol’ boys club. The second is the approach by all the influence groups to let him/her know how much he/her needs them for re-election. Newbies never stand a chance. The last thing that is mentioned is the people who elected them.
You opening call and response nailed it.
They are complicit in it, but they would rather hide that shameful aspect, so we get the, “going through the motions” response.
The government’s censorship of social communications is nearly complete. The heavy lifting is already done. You/We cannot organize into a cohesive ‘force’ because ALL of your efforts to communicate and come together as a unit will be intercepted and squashed. Infiltrated and adulterated, then diluted to nothing.
The long march through the institutions was completed and they rode the horse of conservative complacency to the finish line. The good fight was lost long ago when conservatives stopped filling the seats on school boards, township committees and other locally oriented government jobs.
Then they used your morality to stop your hand from striking back.
“I just want to go home and see my wife,” was broadcast to a nation of would be opponents, and that sealed the deal.
At this point, what would fighting back look like? Sacrifice is the only thing left – seems to me the opposition is facing the same set of circumstances that suicide bombers of the middle east face when they strap that rig on in their pointless attempt to be heard.
And then again, what would the fight be for? The soul of the nation? The greater good? What is that? The greater good is in you, the greater achievement is the afterlife. The life of this world is worth less than the carcass of a dead goat in the eyes of God. Let them have it, LOT walked away from it so can we.
Whoever they are, they can have the world and all the dirt that is in it. I will stand my ground and defend my soul, the nation can put it’s faith in “the Science,” or the uni-party, or the WEF.
Jesus and Muhammad BOTH said (I paraphrase), be passers by, be in the world but not of the world. Teach that to your children and you won’t have to worry so much about what this world is coming to.
Great post! Well, if you wish to be religious about it, what if the following events happen? The West disintegrates into something resembling Haiti (including the voodoo and witchcraft). Russia becomes a prosperous Christian nation with a state supported church. Russia being set up that way has crossed a line we don’t allow in the USA – we’re a secular nation with no state supported churches allowed – EVER!. So along with the rise of Russia as a global leader we’ll also see the rise of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Eastern Church has always been unified and it never shattered into thousands of different contentious pieces like the Western Church has. The Eastern Church has been persecuted by Western temporal and ecclesiastical powers for around a thousand years. This war of NATO vs Russia will go down in history as the very end of the Eastern Church’s suffering from persecution and her rise to global dominance. This war in Ukraine is the very last Crusade against those eeeeeeevil Russians. Both Russia and the Eastern Church will rise simultaneously. At some point the Vatican will be demolished due to general disinterest in it. Maybe a small museum wil be left at the site. Western Christianity will fail and fade away right alongside Western Civilization. The dreams of having a fun and comfy life used to materialize here in the USA But before long, that lifestyle will only be possible if you pack up and move East to Russia. Good luck getting in – they’ll be picky about who becomes a citizen.
Well, I think the West already has devolved into voodoo and witchcraft – mRNA?
The funny thing about the “separation of church and state,” being sacrosanct among the non-believers is; in practice this simply forces the believers to live in accordance with the non-believers desires. While defending against the religious “forcing” their beliefs on others, the non-believers “force” their beliefs on us.
Faith is whatever you believe guides you. If one believes in nothing then that is THEIR religion, and they are guided by nothing – which is apparent. That has been forced upon this nation for a long, long time, and the result is the complacency I mentioned in my original post. A separate nation has always been maintained between the believers and the non-believers. The believers are simply outnumbered.
As to the Eastern Church – I didn’t know of such a split with mainstream Christianity. I’ll need to read up on that. Thanks.
Russia – whodathunk?
“The funny thing about the “separation of church and state,” being sacrosanct among the non-believers is; in practice this simply forces the believers to live in accordance with the non-believers desires. While defending against the religious “forcing” their beliefs on others, the non-believers “force” their beliefs on us.”
They say this is a necessary outcome of “majority rules,” since they are in the majority.
It’s called “The Great Schism” and happened roughly a 1000 years ago. The Bishop of Rome didn’t like playing second fiddle all the time regarding relations with the Eastern Roman Empire. The capitol of the Roman Empire had moved to Byzantium or Constantinople during the reign of Emperor Constantine. After the final collapse of Rome the bishops of Rome were sorta left stranded, there was no empire giving them support anymore. The empire was now far away and the Eastern Emperor was still involved in Church affairs. The Eastern Orthodox Church had no pope, instead decisions were made via councils of archbishops. The archbishop of Rome – or the pope – was just another bishop in Eastern eyes, and the pope also needed approval of some things coming from the Eastern Emperor. The popes decided to have their own Western Emperor and to set up a system that involved no councils. Instead the pope was the chieftain on top of the pyramid and it was the pope who crowned Western emperors. That emperor bowed before the pope while accepting the crown. So the Holy Roman Empire was born and the Eastern powers had none of it and saw through the entire scheme. The West wished to go its own way. Squabbles arose and each church excommunicated the other. The fellowship had ended and it was going to be war for a thousand years. The Western Church during the centuries has fractured into denomimations too numerous to count. The Eastern Church is still there, and has been all this time. They never experienced a Reformation and never split up into pieces that no longer communicated., The west is very fearful of a monolithic state supported church. But that can’t be helped. It is what it is. At the moment Russian Orthodox Christians are being severely persecuted in Ukraine and their churches are being destroyed or stolen.
“The separation of church and state” would be a non-issue if the state had very little power; i.e., if our government were limited to performing only its Constitutionally authorized functions. Government is not supposed to be involved in education or medicine, for example. Another good example is gay marriage. In former times, government had no involvement in marriage at all. Marriages were religious ceremonies, recorded by the parish church (or presumably the local Protestant church). Marriage records were church records only. There was no such thing as a civil ceremony, and there were no government records of marriages. People who delve into geneologies can tell you all about this.
Thus, government had no decision-making power as to who could and couldn’t get married. Individual churches decided this. Back in the sixties, there were some churches who would marry a gay couple, even though the couple could not have a “legal” marriage.
I have read that the main purpose for establishing marriage as something to be government-authorized and government-regulated/recorded was to make inter-racial marriage illegal.
Government simply should not be involved in social or religious matters AT ALL.
By the way, I want to apologize for the use of caps where I should be using italics. For some unknown reason, my browser won’t do italics or diacritical marks on this site–which normally I can do as a copy-and-paste. So I have to use caps instead.
“t some point the Vatican will be demolished due to general disinterest in it. Maybe a small museum wil be left at the site.”
Do you think that they might sell the hat and the hakenkreus? Great Ebay items….
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/saints-on-high–9781324175716579/
There’s very little voodoo per se among American Blacks outside of the immigrant community. Yet they still have massive crime and poverty.
Of course one could argue that they turn Christianity into something else in any case, even if not voodoo per se. The same could be said for American Whites of course.
As George Bernard Shaw said, The conversion of savages to Christianity, is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
Some of the worst “Christian” savagery happened during the course of the Albigensian Crusade and the persecution of the Cathars in Southern France. The Cathars made their last stand at a remote castle/fortress that was under seige for many months until until the Cathars gave up and were captured. It happened,at castle Montsegur. The captives all choose to be burned alive as a group rather than recant their religious beliefs and admit they’d been wrong. Legend has it that a few people made it down the cliffs at night and escaped, carrying with them historic documents and items. Maybe even the Holy Grail. That’s how legends get born. Anyhow…………..
Death to heretics!!!! Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out!
Snowden got his Russian citizenship. How come that surprised me?
Good for Snowden!
Best post in entire thread.
I would prefer to fight against the incredible grifters and liars that comprise the democrat party. For destroying the best thing the world has ever seen, the USA. The USA has done more to help other countries, than all other countries combined.
It is probably wiser to evangelize, than to fight for what millions of our ancestors died for, freedom!
“The good fight was lost long ago when conservatives stopped filling the seats on school boards, township committees and other locally oriented government jobs.”
Actually, that is now happening in many jurisdictions. Conservatives wresting back power on school boards especially, and getting support from the national party. .
Black gangs roamed the land burning, robbing, and raping – even as they showboated in the halls of power, lording it over the disarmed Southern Whites. When the Whites asked for justice for from the occupying government, they were laughed to scorn.
So the rose up in the Moonlight. They were defeated when they fought like gentlemen* but triumphed as masked vigilantes. With the aid of decent men in the North, a viable solution was attained.
*The Southern army was full of men who could live off the land. It was proposed to General Lee that a force of such men be unleashed upon the North, spreading terror into Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. Bobby Lee said, We fight as Gentlemen since our cause is just.
My understanding is that these were the origins of the KKK. Southerners could not get justice through the judicial system, so they resorted to vigilantism, in the form of the KKK. The same is said about the origins of the Mafia.
The tickerguy has said that one of the reasons the South lost the war was because they didn’t inflict pain and damage on the North’s non-combatants–take the war to them. To me, this sounds like a failure to commit to an offensive war, as opposed to a defensive war, but I’m not all that familiar with the Civil War, so I don’t know.
I think that one of the South’s biggest failures – probably the main one – is that its West point educated generals attempted to fight a Northern-style industrial war, something the South, with its agricultural economy, was unprepared to do.
Jarek’s nonsense about the KKK and black gangs roaming the land just about pegged my bullshit meter. Poor white southern rednecks in the 1860’s and 70’s were more than capable of defending themselves against any “black gangs”. They didn’t need any help from a bunch of hooded pussies. And the war wasn’t about slavery. People in the south were *very* poor and hungry after the civil war, both blacks and whites were more focused on survival and other issues. Running about burning and raping are activities that take time and money. Former slaves didn’t have that, instead they were out in earnest looking for work and for opportunities.
So why did the Klan arise and have so much popular support?
Your sickening liberalism is showing, Dil.
Living within our means. What a concept.
When the US collapses, we’ll have to live within our resource means, to boot.
Personally, I already have taken to heart John Michael Greer’s advice, collapse now and avoid the rush.
Living within our means?
Will there be any left after the government steals it?
Yes! I’ve been preaching this concept for many years. It’s much easier to lose everything on our own terms rather than losing it all on someone else’s. Judging by the amount of 27′ campers being towed by great big shiny new pickups I’ve seen barreling through town this year, I’d say there’s going to be a whole lot of hurt coming to a huge percentage of this country. Most people still just don’t get it.
I think more than a few of those people are securing tomorrow’s housing for themselves.
It’s cheaper to live in your camper than your house.
Spoken by someone who obviously does not know the costs involved. For someone who owns a home outright the financial hit is reasonable. RVs, if located in a park, pay quite a lot for rent, much more than one pays for taxes, upkeep, etc., on a typical house.
Also, some of those vehicles might just be tow vehicles used to tow the camper to a site.
I hope they spent as much on the land as they did on the camper.
Most municipalities do not allow RVs to be permanently situated on a piece of land. Here, in rural Maine where I live, there is a time limit of 90 days that an RV can be lived in on one’s own land.
Private debt in this Country is somewhere between, from what I have read, $36 and $72 trillion dollars.
And they bitch and moan about the public debt?
This is why I say most people are living fake lives. Few there be that actually own their homes and land. Few there that own the cars they drive. Few there be that actually own anything.
Yet they all drive around acting like wealthy kings in ownership of great material goods. When in reality they are lower than the dogs, in debt for the rest of their lives. Without true wealth. Slaves to their monthly payments.
Pathetic. That, my friends, is the American dream.
I’m not wealthy but I have no debt. I drive 15 year old cars but I own them. I have a 1200 square foot home with a two car garage on a quarter acre lot, but I own them.
The only thing that can take away my property is the Government in the form of immoral property taxes.
Conspicuous consumption impresses shallow people. Better to look poorer than you are, otherwise envy enters the picture.
R4,
Brings to mind something that I always thought odd. A man works all his life, becomes successful, obtains wealth and then retires….Then buys a one million dollar pusher motor home.
And spends his remaining years as a goddamned bus driver spending nights, for a fee, in paved parking lots…. WHAT is wrong with this picture?
I know so many people in my generation who grew up that way–or who lived that way much more recently.
One of my friends grew up without running water. She recently showed me the house where she grew up. It’s still there, in a tiny town with about twelve houses. It is about 20’X20′ and probably built around 1900. The town still doesn’t have city water, which means the residents haul water to fill their cisterns. My friend said they had a cistern, so I guess people there do not have wells.
In more recent years, I’ve heard similar tales of “doing without” from local farm wives–because it was do without or lose the farm.
Back when I first moved to my little house in the country, about 22 years ago, the cistern needed to be cleaned and repaired, so I filled gallon jugs with water at Casey’s, for household use. Once I apologized to the lady running the register, and she said, “Oh, I understand. I do the same thing. But my husbands says we can afford to put in a cistern this spring.”
I’ve known people my age who grew up taking the Saturday-night bath in a zinc tub, with the water heated on the wood stove, in water shared by the whole family, and with a bedsheet hung up for privacy.
I don’t think any of this is a terrible fate–though running water (preferably hot and cold) is perhaps the best of all good things.
I worked with a woman who grew up with a cistern. They conserved water, so they only bathed on Saturdays.
She told me that when she was a teenager, and her hair got greasy, she used to wish it were Saturday so she could wash it.
It never occurred to her to wish she had running water, just that it was Saturday.
You don’t miss what you never had, but you sure do miss what you did have.
I grew up on a farm with a pump in the valley below (a swampy area where the water could be pumped up to the surface via a pipe), whence it was pumped up to a cistern on the hill above our house.
The water flowed down to the house, gravity creating enough water pressure for it to come out of the faucets.
But not in a dry summer, of course. Nada.
No water was wasted. Especially not hot water.
It took all day for the copper water tank to fill with hot water (fed through a copper spiral of some kind that was installed in converted [from wood] kerosene stove that was on all the time), so the water was heated as it flowed through the stove. there must have been some kind of pump to keep the water flowing through the stove and into the tank, which was right behind the stove.
It held almost enough for one hot bath. My mother would feel the tank before drawing the bath to see if it was hot all the way to the top. Once a week, all four of us got into the tub and my mother poured in boiling water from two large kettles that lived on the kerosene stove to boost the temp.
We children assumed that water was tasteless, but guests always asked for a glass of water and commented on the “sweetness” of the water from our well.
I assume that anyone whose water came/comes from a private well had/has some kind of similar arrangement but maybe minus the cistern.
Hot water expands and rises on its own. That’s why it took all day to fill up the copper tank. Those systems are still in use. I’m going to rig my sailboat with the same for wood, propane, and diesel heating systems, so no matter if I run out of one….
Btw, making those coils is a matter of filling the tubing with either sand, or water that you allow to freeze. Either prevents the tubing from collapsing when you bend it around a pipe that is the same diameter as the stovepipe being used.
That reminds me—water’s properties. It expands both when getting hot (while turning into a gas) and does the same when getting cold and turning into a solid. Hot stuff! Cool stuff!
One thing about having a cistern is, you know EXACTLY how much water your family uses in a week. We were careful about water use, but there was always enough for everyone to take daily showers. I discouraged taking long showers, though.
If our cistern got low, I would either call one of our local water-haulers or haul a load or two of water, myself. There were several years when I hauled my own water, though I later figured out that paying someone to haul it would have been cheaper than buying a truck and tank.
There are two big concerns with having a cistern. One is that the roads are sometimes impassible in winter, so if your cistern is low, nobody can get in to refill it.
The other concern is your pump. There is not a single minute of the day or night when you aren’t thinking about your pump, at some level of consciousness. Is it cycling on and off too rapidly? That means you could have a leak. Is it not cycling at all? Maybe your lines are frozen.
I didn’t realize how stressful it was to be continually aware of the pump until after we got city water.
Anthea—I wanted to thank you for your info about your cataract surgery last week. I am so-afflicted in both eyes and being of Scandinavian descent as well. Gave me something to think about, you did. Tusen takk!
Their cistern was filled from roof run-off though. That is why they had to be so careful.
Oh, and since we’re thanking you, Anthea, thank you for the tip about chiggers.
I had no idea you could wash them off. I thought they were like ticks.
Now I wash my legs and feet (with my abundant city-supplied running water) as soon as I come inside.
I still am ate up, but not as bad as before, so thank you.
Jimbo, hard at work on Labor Day. Fly the flag proudly, Amerika. It may soon be obsolete.
I have mine out. I used to fly it the whole weekend, I’ve changed a lot of things this year.
Many people, myself included, have changed a lot of things.
TC
Which flag?
Multiple choice
Stars and Stripes
Stars and Bars
Rainbow
Ukraine
Don’t Tread on Me
Mexican
Good one John.
Battle flag of Northern Virgina
Michael Schellenberger forgot the most outrageous one- malinformation.
That’s when you tell the truth, but it goes against the Establishment narrative, so you need to be censored anyway.
Good point.
Bobby Kennedy said this word was used to try silencing him.
See house hearing on censorship with hm as witness for what he said, while they were trying to censor him during the hearing
From the earliest days of the 70 year experiment in creating the “New Man” known as the Soviet Union, the country was conceived as a penal colony with a flag, as Solzhenitsyn has documented. In the 20s, the three-man boards of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs appeared, empowered to sentence “socially dangerous” persons without trial and one of the categories of offense that could get an unfortunate sent to the Gulag was “Counter-Revolutionary Thought”, another was being designated as a “Socially Dangerous Element”. In other words, stating an uncomfortable truth that undermined the socialist bullshit peddled by the Marxist vermin, for instance that the serfs led an objectively better existence than the zeks.
What is malinformation but the rebranding and repackaging of this Marxist horseshit by the Progressive vermin, the wannabe Berias and Dzerzhinskys?
Watching the Republicans try to stand up to the Democrats these days is like watching Mitch McConnell fighting Muhammad Ali.
Mitch might do okay these days, since the Louisville Lip is no longer with us.
Duh! Thanks for THAT out, Captain Obvious.
Sorry to go off topic so early.
@ elysianfield
In an attempt to bring closure on a correction/opinion expressed yesterday by me on the prior thread…
here is what google has to say about in behalf of vs on behalf of:
“In behalf of” means “for the benefit of” or “in the interest of.” “On behalf of” means “in place of” or “as the agent of.” So I might give a donation, “on behalf of” my gardening club, to be used “in behalf of” tree restoration in the park.
Maybe it’s a regional thing but to my mind’s ear on
behalf of always sounds best.
IDK, Q, could that be one of those things they modernized to go with the way people started saying things?
Q,
Are you suggesting that your efforts were not in my behalf?
Have your good works another, more pedestrian motive than my edification? What? A sense of intellectual superiority? A feeling of power? Perhaps your corrections engender a vague stirring of…god help us…tumescence?
Again, I feel the need to cleanse myself….
So I guess somebody around here is exciting people to venery.
“to be used “in behalf of” tree restoration in the park.”
Sounds dumb.
Better:
“to be used for tree restoration.”
Keep it simple.
Google’s pernicious influence must be addressed in any conversation that seeks to rectify our election problems. And quite a few more. The scope of its influence must be seen and heard to be believed. What we have here in this interview with psychologist Dr Robert Epstein, who has been studying Google’s outsize influence since 2012, most resembles treading a now well-worn path, one we’ve just been down, although this one with much better track covering by the snooping class.
Kim Iversen is doing some excellent work, as she did with our previous and ongoing “koff-koff” maleficent malady.
“Google Is Threatening Our Democracy And Threatening His Life For Exposing It | A Conversation With Dr. Robert Epstein”
httpx://rumble.com/v3dzcrq-september-1-2023.html
Think of Facebook.
AI has been grooming the conversations on Facebook for a generation.
The end results is the indoctrination of those million readers to the philosophy of the editors at Facebook.
Like small town newspapers, they control the minds of the people. Newspapers and now social media have changed from government critique, their Constitutional function, to a rubber stamp for the progressive wing of the Deep State.
1984. Pravda, at its worst time.
“…is Threatening our democracy.”
Yeah. Acknowledged, Amman. That was how it was written for the public at large, the unwashed in the Light. (Because it hurts their eyes.) Like it doesn’t hurt ours?
I have gotten through the first half hour of the video.
Wow, I had no idea Google was so pernicious.
Let’s not forget Christopher Heinz, Devon Archer, and Hunter Biden had a 4th partner in the Burisma Caper, as well as other nefarious money making schemes in Moscow, Beijing & Kazakhstan that traded on close family relationships to those in positions of power, and that would none none other than Boston gangster Whitey Bulger’s nephew, Jimmy Bulger. What, you’re surprised these grifters are involved with organized crime? It be more surprising if they weren’t.
Paul Pelosi, Jr. One at least of Mitt Romney’s clone-like squeaky clean scions too.
(Word in capitol in 2014: “It’ll be just like Russia in the 90s, a friggin’ gold rush!)
I suspect a replay of 90s Russia is what they have in mind for the US.
They’d also like a do-over in Russia, but that isn’t working out.
Speaking of Pelosi, I have read that Nancy comes from a mob-connected family in Baltimore.
Speaking of misinformation, there is something very misleading about the term “Democratic Party” these days. As outlined in the pithy article, their activities are anything but democratic. Perhaps the Republicans (not much better) may come to life and actually do something about it, though there are many compromised actors in that cohort too. It all just keeps getting worse, as the nation rapidly approaches a figurative stone wall. The wheels are already coming off the Juggernaut. Can we pull over before the ugly chaos of a complete wreck? Buckle up.
It needs about three our four large bulletin board with pins and strings
and photos by now.
My reply was meant for BRH.
https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/92084495/Charlie-Conspiracy-Always-Sunny-in-Philidelphia
Yeah, something like that.
Izzy
Democracy says that the people, the individuals make community decisions. We are a republic, where the decision makers are elected by the people.
Two negatives can upset the republic apple cart.
A majority of the people become lodged on one side of the political spectrum.
The vote can be manipulated under control of one party, or a uniparty.
Both have happened in the US. Elections have become worthless at the national level.
BTW, the Democrats have shaped the electorate spectrum, think college and immigration to the point the Opposition fears them. Hence the Deep State uniparty.
A demonstration is apparent in the polls this morning.
With GOP voters, Trump is just getting more powerful, 59% to Desantis’ 13%. The Dems are going to love this as they believe they have control of the Trump threat.
In the general election, Biden and Trump are tied at 40% each. WTF? Are Americans so damn stupid that they can support the can of worms that is in the White House mob right now?
Yep!
AZ: Remember that the average IQ is 100, and, thus, 50% of people, by definition are below that. An IQ of 100 is pretty dull.
Americans love underdogs, and the PTB have made Trump the underdog.
BTW, does anyone remember that cartoon?
Speed of lightning, power of thunder….
youtube.com/watch?v=mUlATLDqT3I&list=PLbbVPoyb3g1smIEaF_ZJ0UL606cVPRl9F&index=10
Yes, Americans are that damn stupid.
Funny, how they insult Republicans as the dumber voters in a post earlier. But they use Americans instead of Democrats when they are the true ignorant and brainwashed idiots.
Clarksonfarms,
I’ve heard a number of disparaging things said about Americans over the years, and Republicans and Democrats.
I think people are generally ignorant and this is the result of a lack of intellectual curiosity. There is far too little reading and far too much Dancing with the Stars, video games, porn, social media, etc, etc, etc.
The author as well as the commenters of this blog are extremely well read, in my view.
Sure they can! Why wouldn’t they? At least 50% of the country gets what they want from the white house. Why wouldn’t they want that to continue? Remember, Joe told the black community that Trump would put them all back in chains. I think he told the gay community that Trump would stuff them back in the closet. That’s the sentiment out there, that a Trump presidency would take us back to pre-civil war slavery days.
Yes, that’s a big problem in Wisconsin. The student vote. They come here from out of state and vote in our elections, and then skedaddle back home when school is out.
Magnificent piece today. All the way through.
I feel bad, Mr. Kunstler obviously labored over this essay to bring it to perfection, on a weekend we aren’t supposed to have to work so hard.
Pure hopium.
Nice fantasy though.
I didn’t see hopium. I thought it was a sober and succinct accounting of where we stand.
We have a uniparty, the Republicans and the Democrats have stood for the same things for a long time. Trump actually is an agent of change, but he is just one man. Republicans lie about being conservative to win elections, and then promptly announce that they need to “reach across the aisle and get things done” meaning surrender their entire agenda to the Democrats. I remember when Newt Gingrich campaigned for change, with his “Contract with America”. He loudly, and repeatedly promised that, if elected, he and his fellow Republicans would fight for Term Limits for the House and Senate, a Balanced Budget Amendment, and a Line-Item Veto for the annual federal budget. He was elected, and did nothing to pass any of those things, of course. The entire “Contract with America” was one big lie. Sadly, Americans have become used to being lied to by politicians of all stripes, and they’re not going to do anything about it. When will real change come? The way it always does. Things will have to get really, really bad. . .hyperinflation, mass unemployment, people literally starving, their power going out for weeks on end, that sort of thing. When people get desperate and decide they have nothing to lose, they revolt (see, e.g., the French Revolution, the overthrow of the Czars in Russia, et al). We are light years away from that. Expensive gasoline, rising inflation, being told to get shots (which are optional for most). . . no one is going to risk their job, their family, and their life over high gas prices. Thing will have to get a LOT worse in the US before an revolution becomes probable. For now, folks will focus on the NFL and myriad other distractions.
including another fake pandemic (“oh, I’ve got to get a vax!”) and maybe even a UFO spectacle (though I’m guessing that will be held off until right before elections next year so they can call Continuity of Gov’t and no elections.
I just don’t have any faith that Americans will revolt no matter how bad things get. I would have thought there would be some push-back against what we’ve suffered so far. I mean, in other countries, their people are out in the streets. Here? Yawn.
Most Americans are still fat and happy. McDonalds is still pumping out their affordable garbage disguised as food, there’s plenty of beer, cannabis and mind numbing pharmaceuticals, sports are still worshipped, and there’s still the illusion of a safety net here. Add to that that Americans have never seen what a war on our soil looks like and just can’t recognize that war is here because it’s mostly psychological, where many other countries still have people alive who remember what war looks like, including the psyop part of war. I’m not sure what it will take to shake Americans from their slumber. Maybe we never will be awoken. But, there are lots of us who don’t take to the streets but protest by saying NO to everything and withdrawing our consent from our task masters. This, IMHO, is a much more effective way of protesting anyway. But how do we get others to realize it? That’s the question that baffles me.
Well said. I believe that all of the plentiful abundance that you so aptly described will cease one day. Then Westerners will be out in the streets like a hemispheric Burning Man.
Speaking of which, there are now rumors of an ebola outbreak at the festival, and that’s why they are locking people in.
Ebola is spread by bodily fluids, not mud. It is also not a respiratory virus, although that one whistle-blower said that she was working on making it so, under Dr. Fauci.
We have to quit falling for bullshit narratives.
Having an African disease (which is under control in Africa now) suddenly pop up in the desert in California makes NO sense.
It is every bit as stupid as believing that some dude in China was infected by a ferret-bat-pangolin-human virus at a wet market and the next month it showed up at a nursing home in Washington, USA.
No, it did not happen.
If Ebola was spread at the Burning Man festival, it means that it was spread by the Deep State, on purpose.
But there is an incubation period. I don’t know how long it is, and I don’t know how long the festival has lasted, but it would be very suspicious for them to tell us that people were not just spontaneously infected, but immediately infected and symptomatic.
That’s just not a thing. Think! You have years of experience as a human on planet Earth, catching and incubating various viruses.
Why believe total nonsense now?
There are rumors. That doesn’t mean anybody believes them.
Supposedly someone vomited blood.
Well, Beryl, I have seen that claim all over the internet. Someone is falling for it.
It reminds me of 3 years ago, when I spent endless amounts of keystrokes trying to remind people of what a respiratory virus was and how it spread, so I get testy when I think it’s starting up again.
So, either this is a grassroots panic, or it’s being spread by the Deep State.
Either way, we shouldn’t participate in the spreading of the rumor.
Unless we point out how very stupid it is, that is.
Precisely. Fat, happy, distracted Americans are not going to take to the streets in protest of our government. Things will have to get a lot worse before anything like that happens.
rdswysd4,
I think Americans are fat and happy. But I think you nailed it when you mentioned the illusion of safety. The cracks in the dam are forming and have been forming at an accelerating rate over the last five years. The electrical grid has been aging for decades, but the political frailty of the dollar has been accelerating of late, and the integrity of American institutions is just evaporating away.
Most Americans, I read, cannot handle a $600 emergency. This tells me that that very large group probably hasn’t done much to prepare for more social unrest, supply disruptions, rampant inflation, power outages, government shutdowns, government lockdowns, etc, etc. It only takes one event to knock things over when a person is already living close to the edge.
Americans will wake up from the illusion when they are HUNGRY.
When the BRICS+ system forces the US$ into parity with the Yuan (~85% deval) things will get really bad. Everything we import (inc. energy) will increase in price by many multiples and many families will starve. That when the SHTF.
I believe that BRICS will position themselves perfectly and then pull the pin on the US$ one day.
It’s that quietly edging for the door at the New Years’ Eve party as soon as you figure out its out of hand.
Bill Clinton and Newt had a deal worked out to make Social Security diminish and disappear within a decade. We were saved from that fate to date by a most unlikely interloper. Her name was and is Monica Lewinsky.
They did however succeed in changing the components of the CPI (e.g. rent vs. mortgage, burger vs. steak, and taking out all energy costs) to drastically underestimate real inflation. Thus, the inflation indexing of social security is drastically understated, and people get far less than they should.
This is true.
I think a lot of people have forgotten that.
Yes indeed. And thanks for that reminder. They get away with it again and again and again.
One day they say we are all doomed by our high debt. The next they say we have to make the debt even higher or we will all be doomed. Which is it?
Oh, you noticed that little contradiction? Shhh.
Speaking of high debt, Senator Marjorie Green says:
“Either impeach Pie-den or I will shut down the Government.”
Go, Marjie, Go, Margie!!
She’s just a good cop.
You want all government services shut down?
OK then.
Salve Regina.
Not sure he got it.
I didn’t at 1st.
Gov.shutdown means Total instant anarchy.
BOR
The high debt is a joke, snickered at by all the Deep State.
For it to be an issue, like any debt, creditors need to ask for their money.
Just study how much of the world’s debt is involved with US Treasuries. Scary.
The debt must be served by paying interest payments. Countries going broke lose this ability.
To understand what the debt is doing, check out what that minimum interest payment is comprised of and what the Deep State is doing to us to continue payments.
Watch China, they own a significant amount of Treasuries. They have switched from buying to slowly selling off their treasuries. How come?
Wonder where the Deep State is getting their required liquidity?
Look south, young man.
Several reputable analysts are saying that the chinese are selling off massive amounts of their Tbonds each month to the tune of ~8% per month (and using Tbonds to buy GOLD). So are other BRICS+ countries according to these sources.
Good thing we have massive gold holdings in Ft. Knox!!! 🙂
Several reputable analysts are saying that the chinese are selling off massive amounts of their Tbonds each month – neurodoc
===========
to whom?
who is losing money on these bond sales, the buyers or the sellers?
Both. It’s a reverse Ponzi scheme where the last one holding the hot potato gets nothing.
neurodoc,
I’ve read similar writings regarding China liquidating their treasury portfolio, slowly, patiently; they don’t want to cause a panic which will tank the prices.
Let us also consider the issue of future purchases. China is not purchasing treasuries at the rate they were before either. They can’t quit buying cold turkey, again they don’t want to cause a panic.
But slowly over time they are systematically reducing their exposure to American fiscal responsibility. And they aren’t alone.
Both. Like in 1984, it’s necessary to hold two contradictory positions in one’s mind at the same time.
Consider this: Someone is pro-White and someone is pro-Black.
In general, it that contradictory?
I’m sure you get me.
“One day they say we are all doomed by our high debt. The next they say we have to make the debt even higher or we will all be doomed. Which is it?”
…Either, or,
Neither, nor,
The quandary of the hour.
The Hobson;s pic?
It don’t mean “dick”
The economy’s still sour….
It’s the proverbial: You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.
There are still people believing that Donald Trump is going to bring down the fire this time.
Sorry, no.
He still has people like Lindsay Graham by his side.
What he is going to do is once again try to make nice with the Republican establishment, or why is Kevin McCarthy Speaker right now.
Same with RFK Jr. He was full of righteous wrath, but by now he’s kissing up to the administration.
Compromising principles is the first order of the day for anyone who seriously wants to get elected and then actually enact a particular agenda. It’s the primary “feature” of the entire federal system. Change can only come gradually and slowly unless an overwhelming majority support it.
At least Trump isn’t capable of getting with the “in” crowd even if he wanted to (and I think he’d jump at the chance, but it will never come).
He’s an accidental wrench in the gears, with a realistic chance at winning. Am I going to have to actually vote again next year? For a schlub, no less? (Ugh.)
Trump has been neutralized with lawfare and the media will have all the poison ink it needs to put him out of his misery as convictions pile up for no real crimes.
If he were to miraculously pull out a win in ’24 he would at least know who his enemies are, but he would still be the same guy who thinks first in terms of deals for short term gains.
Presidents succeed or fail by the efforts of the people in the cabinet and in powerful administrative positions. Trump did not know enough capable people to begin and we wound up with holdovers like Fauci, RINOs like Barr and neocons like Pompeo. I do not see reasons for expecting improvement in this regard.
That thinking first of deals for short term gains would explain Lindsay Graham.
Could be an example of a useful idiot
Gee … I sure cannot imagine blackmailers having any dirt on Lindsay.
Yes, well, unfortunate about your ‘lack of imagination’ LOL!
Until party number 3 is created with the Deep State in its crosshairs, nothing will change.
And don’t forget the Clintons! They are in this up to their necks as well. I can see Obama escaping to Kenya where he will be treated (and perhaps established) as a king. At least we’ll be finally certain about his birth certificate! Also, in regard to the money thing, Gen. MacGregor on Tucker pointed out that the average Social Security collected by an American retiree is about $1400, whereas a new immigrant who walks across our border and presents himself to the authorities automatically gets a stipend of $2200. What’s wrong with THAT picture?!
Nothing to the Deep State. To them, their capital pool is infinite.
They say that’s just a one-time payment, as if that makes it okay.
It gets worse- they also claim it isn’t happening, but with mass chain migration you have new arrivals immediately bringing in their elderly parents who never paid a dollar into the system, but somehow qualify for benefits.
The Republicans tell Americans that we didn’t earn our own Social Security.
Yeah, just like the second black president told millions of business owners in the country that they didn’t build their businesses.
By way of explanation, Toni Morrison said that Bill Clinton was the first black president, so that makes Obama the second.
If not for Social Security, a lot of people would grow old believing that tooth fairies would provide for them in their old age, but as an investment it was not a great deal for me. I checked the amounts that I and my employers have contributed to SS over the years and found that almost any other reasonable investment of the money would have done better.
It was never meant to be an “investment”.
It was meant to be insurance that the elderly in the USA would not end up destitute.
It is a compact between the generations, the young helping the old, with the understanding that they would in turn be helped.
It has taken decades for our ruling overlords to drum up hatred between the generations, and to convince the gullible that the stock market would have done them better personally.
My father said in the 80s, “This is getting to be a mean, mean country.”
You got that right, Dad!
So you must be familiar with the term “America the Beautiful?”
Ollie: You and George Bush (joke).
What would have happened to your “investments” when the stock market crashed, as in 1999 and at other times.
A lot of pensions went poof! at that time. Just as a lot of other pension funds are currently on the verge of going poof.
SS is not an “investment.” It is insurance for which all have paid premiums during their working lives. It is a major crime against the American people that the govt has tapped the SS fund for various purposes. Nevertheless, others smarter than I (such as the Ticker-Guy) say that the SS program is basically fiscally healthy—unlike Medicare.
You are free to open your own IRA, SEP IRA, or Roth IRA and manage your pension money yourself. Trades are free at Charles Schwab and others.
Or he could just invest. Why don’t these people who have been brainwashed to think they could do better on their own ever think of that?
Take some money each paycheck and invest it “wisely”, in one of those great stocks that pay massive dividends they think they know all about.
Nothing is stopping them from doing that. But it never seems to occur to them to do so. Odd, that, for people who claim such great divining and investing skills.
“. What’s wrong with THAT picture?!”
The good Colonel will be happy that he has been promoted. MacGregor, on (the) Ukraine, I can listen to. When he begins pontificating outside his area of expertise, such as on the economy and bitcoin, he becomes just another talking head.
Sorry
The MacGregor interview is worth watching.
He covers a lot of ground. Tucker asks a question, sits back and lets him give a complete response
Jim mentioned Biden’s Super Tuesday miracle. He apparently made a deal with Clyburn, the black congressman from SC. “Joe Biden” won SC. He also won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. All those states’ elections stopped after midnight then an unbelievable number of Biden votes came in amid scullduggery documented on video or otherwise. All those cities are run by the African Americans in city Hall and their machines. Now look at the charges in GA. Besides the suitcases of ballots that came out after the “water main break” after the Republican poll watchers went home, there was an anomaly in Coffee County that predisposed Trump ballots to be rejected. The machines stopped counting. The county election officials noticed this, gave the ballot counting machine vendor hours to fix it, and “son of a bitch”, it got fixed. Check it out on Rumble.
Now we find the county official who reported on the anomaly in Coffee County is a codefendants with Trump. Fanny Willis is killing the messengers. So I’m pretty sure the Dems have succeeded in irreversibly corrupting our elections. Any state can be turned blue via inner city shenanigans and anyone who blows the whistle will be prosecuted. All that leaves us is non-statewide offices like the House. We may be stuck with the banana republic.
Think that the source of illicit votes may have nameless illegals as their source with store bought ssns and drivers licenses. Document mills have existed in LA for decades.
Note that when the Dems are losing, the cities always come up with the required votes to squeak by. In the required districts.
That happens a lot in Wisconsin elections, I’ve noticed. The republican candidate leads for awhile, and then just before poll closing time, the democrat gets a boatload of votes that takes him/her over the top.
Wisconsin is light in African Americans, except for places like Beloit and Milwaukee (I live here). But yeah, I agree with your assessment.
My son and I spent a day in Milwaukee in 2017. River walk, brats & beer lunch, art gallery and then Blue Jays @ Brewers. It seemed to be a fine city.
Oh ya … the Bronze Fonz!
Glad you liked it!
Crudge: You just eloquently described by CW2 is inevitable and possibly imminent.
Another excellent essay, Jim, thank you.
IMHO, if the government limits its services, it won’t be the DOJ or the DHS or FEMA, it’ll be the programs that keep the poor alive. At least that’s my guess. It would be awesome if the programs that feed indoctrination to school children were shut off, but that’s not likely to happen.
I do agree that at some point something has to happen. At least half of the country does not agree with the way things are run, but too many of that percentage still believe that the Republican party are the answer. As you point out – nope. They are the “good cop” side of the uniparty. Both parties have accepted unbridled globalist totalitarianism and are pushing to implement it across the western world and beyond.
And the only “third parties” we have are The Clown Party (Green) and a bunch of independents like me who are a mishmash of all sorts of political positions, none of which are represented by the ghouls in charge. But we are not organized, and, at present, all we can do is react.
I do believe that flux, waves, tipping points, and cathartic episodes are inevitable all throughout the lifetime of systems, however. Nothing stays stagnant forever, including monsters holding the world in their insane satanic grip, using all sorts of tricks which weren’t so readily available before our present state of technology made it so easy for them.
One side of me is disgusted at the mind-blowing putrescence of the global freaks in charge, and another side of me finds it endlessly fascinating to watch the lack of backlash by regular folks and their excuses for and idolization of the people who are crushing them underfoot.
When the totalitarian nutjobs among us show you who they are this winter – by accepting/pushing masks and more jabs, and shunning or attacking those of us who refuse to comply – you will know who is truly evil. Good people have figured out they were bamboozled.
50% of the public see through the DS bullshit.
50% are now gimme lemmings waiting for the government to give them money and tell them what to do.
Even the Deep State is looking to the WEF for funds and instructions.
The 50-50% split is what is allowing voter cheating so easy and undetectable. We ARE turning into that third world country where the public is like the boiled frog, too dumb to realize they are being screwed. Too ambivalent to care as long as that wannabe UBI check shows up.
“Stimmy” it was nicknamed during the COVIDs.
AZ: 50% is a large amount of people. I’ve read that only 3% actually fought in the Revolutionary War, and 10-15% supported them indirectly. A majority was neutral or disinterested and a smaller group were tories (soon to be tarred and feathered). Your numbers, I find hopeful for CW2.
“…and another side of me finds it endlessly fascinating to watch the lack of backlash by regular folks and their excuses for and idolization of the people who are crushing them underfoot.”
I’ve come to the conclusion that the American public’s “lack of backlash” is largely due to the conditioning and indoctrination they’ve received in the public school system. Yuri Bezmenov said that no amount of facts could penetrate the indoctrination (Joe inadvertently admitted to this when he said “We choose truth over facts”). They’re conditioned to respond to certain stimuli and not to others. Hence, the selective outrage.
And the apathy in the face of other outrages.
I’m in agreement tuco22. We have been indoctrinated, hypnotized, bamboozled, gaslit, you name it.
For decades.
What about Mom and dad? What were they teaching or telling their kids?
Yes, not allowing elderly veterans to tour outdoor monuments and so forth.
Threatening no paychecks for government workers and no SE for widows. As if that money isn’t already allocated.
Obama always threatened the elderly with social security.
I thought that was one of the more despicable attributes about him.
He’s a sick fuck.
News to me. Threaten?
Who are you replying to?
Take the 40 to 45% of the electorate that is Trump’s base
Fold them into new party.
Convince 10% 0f the independents that Biden was the worst vote they ever cast. Same with 5% of disgruntled Dems.
2024 becomes a blowout for the 3rd party.
As long as Trump et al think the GOP is the way to go, we are screwed.
AZ: Good idea. BUT, I suspect that the leadership of an emerging 3rd party would succumb to fatal ‘accidents’ per the DS.
Well, they’d need spiritual protection for sure.
The Republicans are the stupid party. The Democrats are the evil party.
Nailed it! How else to explain McConnell as Repub head in the Senate?
Alternative explanation: The White Hats are in control and they are now displaying the truly ridiculousness of the Black Hats and their ways and means as they slowly awaken the masses for the pending linchpin moment.
I went gold panning yesterday and as a guilty treat to power my three mile walk into the brush I decided to get #2 egg and sausage mcmuffin meal with a large coffee and two hashbrowns from the golden arches.
Last week Saturday in fact this delight was $12.91 up from 12.81 the previous month.
Yesterday this treat was a grand total of 13.56!
This is what a full blown DENNY’S breakfast cost in 2008 which is now hovering around $20.
Anyone else noticing huge jumps in pricing?
Jo Jo regime keeps telling us the inflation has come to almost a dead stop.
Do not eat McDonalds’ sausages. That is not a treat. That is disgusting. It is, reportedly, cannibalism. Truly.
Why? What are they made of?
bitchuteDOTcom/video/xwVzbr9lJLTX/
Ben are you finding any gold? I forget if you’re in the San Diego or the LA area? I’ve been reading a Wyatt Earp bio, he spent the last years of his life in LA but had a claim he worked about 60 miles east of LA. In the days before Social Security he was able to provide for himself and his wife with gold from that claim.
I’d be interested in reading about your gold panning activity, the equipment you use, methods, locations, staking a claim etc. A few years back you posted about a trip you took to ‘Slab City’ which was pretty interesting.
@BRH
Yes, I am finding gold at two claims, one is mine and one is a club claim.
The club claim is located right off the eight freeway and has a full-time caretaker who digs out the creek bed daily so it is just a pull up and churn through as much already classified material as you can stand.
Classified means taking out the bigger rocks and pebbles and breaking up the clay and dirt clods before running it through the sluice or powered high banker.
Both claims have what is called flour gold very fine and rather hard to separate from the concentrates (black sands).
I have two sluice boxes with the new Dream mat system in place but in order to use them a pretty serious amount of water needs to be run through them and during the dry months they just sit.
\\\\\https://www.goldrushtradingpost.com/sluice_boxes
The clubs claim is a low water flow claim to begin with and sits along the mountain range where a large quartz vein runs all the way from southern California to Sacramento.
My hike yesterday was to get on the other side of the mountain ridge as I was told they have larger flakes of gold instead of powder.
\\\\\\https://thediggings.com/mines/camc305329
I also have a collection of pans plastic because they work better and a Millers table (black magic) and a blue bowl.
\\\\\\https://www.goldrushtradingpost.com/blue_bowl_concentrator
\\\\\https://www.goldrushtradingpost.com/inc/sdetail/black_magic_mini_kit___no_bucket/17005/62094
If I am at spot I can drive up to then I use my self-contained high banker which uses a dc current (battery) to drive various powered water suction devices to run water over the miners moss or carpet in what amounts to two sluice angled at 15 degrees and one at about 6 degrees.
Packing in water is a no go and the dry washers are very dusty and lose a fair amount of gold to the process.
\\\\https://www.goldrushtradingpost.com/inc/sdetail/mini_highbanker_and_pump_/18419/22665
\\\\\\\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZDMq5y0-I8&ab_channel=DanHurd
I was having trouble getting down far enough to get at the gold at my claims since the sand and gravels are about six feet deep before you hit bedrock where most of the gold lands. My claim sits directly below a mine that went back four hundred feet into the mountains and is probably still full of gold but was shut down for safety reasons.
So I joined a prospecting club in San Diego and have been using one of their mining claims instead of my own.
I found out my mining claim was a major party spot during the cooler months when the water is flowing and people went up there to party and run around naked.
It was annoying because I was carting out several large bags of trash every time I went in there.
In fact several times I spent more time cleaning up after these pigs than actual gold searching.
This is more about getting out and doing something than turning a profit the fact is even small scale mining is expensive.
I have dropped about $3,000 on my claim and various equipment and another $50,000 on a vehicle to get me to some of the out of the way spots minus the ugly swoosh stripe on the side.
\\\\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxpxLi_b1NM&ab_channel=Allcarnews
Took me three tries to post this due to links.
Amazing how digging holes and wandering around looking for gold gets you into shape.
I just trade out the s for an x and it works fine. Someone else said just get rid of the https, but when I did it it autofilled the letters back in (on Firefox) and didn’t post, as I found out later.
I too am into prospecting, lots of untouched ground around these parts, lots of brown bears too, lol.
Where you at Dave?
Looking to get out of Progressive hell aka Southern California.
Had enough of crazy people and liberal idiots oh guess I said crazy twice.
Southcentral Alaska on the northernmost point of the Gulf of Alaska, benr. Little fishing village of Cordova.
Nice would LOVE to make it up there just after the spring melts slow down a bit!
Not a huge fan of bears especially the hungry or cranky ones.
What do you pack to deal with the ones that won’t take go away as an answer?
Thanks Ben, well written and very interesting.
Your post was solid gold.
Hey, benr: A 12-piece meal from KFC, $40.
Ouch.
Chinese food used to be one of the cheapest ways to eat, and now even that’s expensive. And as for grilling today, well, $36 for two rib eyes.
CPI at 4.7% as of June-July. The predicted path I first saw over a year ago has us experiencing waves of inflation into the immediate future along with it being a tossup as to whether we get a deflation-driven recession or hyperinflation in the longer term.
I really don’t see us getting out of this one with obesity remaining a significant issue in our national health issues. Rather, I see both a bad moon rising and a flock of black swans coming in from all points of the compass.
Oh. And those CPI numbers are cooked with the new way of looking at inflation as revised / devised by the wizards of the BLS. As with the new definition of recession, just like the new definition of vaccination.
CPI numbers are full of shit. In reality, the true inflation number would vary from individual to individual, depending on their own lifestyle. Just list your typical purchases, keep track of their prices every month, and you will get your own real inflation increase.
I’ve read that it’s really at around 17%.
But I think shadowstats has it at 25%.
John Williams’ “ShadowStats” site is all over the manipulation of CPI and other fake govmint numbers. Worth taking a look at it.
beantownbill,
I’ve mentioned to several people, in response to their talking about inflation, that I think it’s at 15%. They look at me funny.
I see tuco22 has commented also about 17% and 25%. S/he could be right. But the CPI numbers are complete fiction.
Well, beantown, I paid $4/pound for beans the other day, and about had a heart attck.
Beans! You are supposed to be able to live cheaply on them.
My favorite CPI fun fact is the “Hedonic Quality Adjustment” put in place by the resident hedonist Bill Clinton.
Yeah again. I was going to mention Shadowstats.
And btw, this is behind the paywall on ZeroHedge today:
“The Real Shocker In Friday’s Jobs Report: 1.2 Million Native-Born Workers Lost Their Jobs, And Were Replaced With 668K Foreign-Born Workers”
We didn’t hear THAT from Joe’s latest and greatest speech about how well we’re doing under his presidency.
And how does that work for social security?
Things that we don’t normally buy- curtain hardware, for instance.
Low quality, high prices.
Yeah. In my post just above, I forgot, two important things: container shrinkage and cheaper parts. Every once in a while I like to buy a pint of Haagen Dasc ice cream. Now the “pint” container has 14 ounces of ice cream. There’s many other examples. A better way to measure inflation is to compare price per unit (for example, the true price increase of the 14 ounce “pint” is 2/16 or 12.5%).
A lot of devices or objects use adequate but inferior components. Their usage increases costs by shortening their lifespans, so more replacement is needed, thus increasing inflation. For example, I bought a GE Profile dishwasher. After only 5 years, a simple plastic piece on the top of the dishwasher broke off. I called everywhere, but the least expensive repair would cost $200. Since I paid a 5-years ago price new of $500 or so, this very tiny piece of plastic would cost me 40% of my original purchase price. Instead it was more effective to just buy a new dishwasher. The increase in obsolescence is another inflation cost.
“They got you by the balllllzzz!” ~ St George
Shrinkflation and build more junk back better!
Yeah, our brand new dishwasher (got it about 2 months ago) has already quit. I suspect it’s the mother board. Debating about whether to replace it or just do dishes by hand from now on.
I noticed shrinkage awhile ago in canned salmon. I used to be able to get six patties (or croquettes for those of you who are more sophisticated) out of a can of salmon, and for some time, now, have only been able to get four, even though the amount stays the same on the can.
“(or croquettes for those of you who are more sophisticated) out of a can of salmon”
Tuco,
Absolutely. However, a niggling point;
…Those of us who are more sophisticated don’t eat goddamn salmon patties out of a can….:
Oh, I’d say that salmon croquettes can really hit the spot, at times.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that it seems to me that the different grades of canned tuna have changed. Now, if you buy “chunk light tuna,” you get a very low grade of tuna. It used to be decent quality. Now you have to buy the top grade (albacore) to get acceptable-quality tuna.
If you make tuna salad using tuna that is low-quality, it tastes “off,” or almost stinky.
I don’t know about the very lowest grade of tuna, as I’m afraid to try it. I used to buy it for my cat during the last year of his life, along with other fancy stuff, because a very high-protein diet seemed to improve his health.
I’m eating my home-jarred salmon (Copper River sockeye) as we speak. I put up 20 or so fish every year in pint jars, smoke up a bunch too.. When I get my sailboat shipshape, my brother and I are going out to the thermocline off Vancouver Island to slay some fresh albacore. Damn that stuff is good by the steak!
@dave
What about them Halibut!
Nothing like hooking into a barn door and accidently pulling its head out of the water and a 300 pound fish goes crazy.
Spent summer solstice in Anchorage on year.
Uncle Sam’s Canoe club took me up that way after we towed a decomming boomer to Bremerton.
Loved Alaska even the crazy Aleut Indians were interesting even learned they are not especially kind to people who call them Eskimos.
Just saw one senator is warning that inflation is “just around the corner.” As if it hasn’t been happening for the past 5.
Where has that senator been?
And it’s a cinch that he/she does not do their own grocery shopping.
I noticed from 2008 on it has been a slow steady rate of everything getter more expensive it slowed briefly during the Donald years and has exploded under the weekend at bernies Biden.
“Just saw one senator is warning that inflation is “just around the corner.””
Mary,
Hope you don’t need diesel to get to the corner. This Am, the price of diesel, cash, was $5.15 per. in my blue heaven….
Gold panning? I had to reboot on that one. LOL.
We need to get rid of all the regulations now in place to prevent third party participation. The League of Women Voters, in charge of who even gets to debate, third parties are not allowed, or are so restricted it equates to the same thing.
“We’d have better luck playing Pickup Sticks with our butt cheeks.”
– Del Griffith (John Candy) in Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Women are always against the exercise of Free Speech by and large. Knowing their passion for the status quo, put them in charge of choosing who gets to talk. Brilliant move.
Psst Jarek your hangups are showing.
Your illogic is showing. Women vote far more liberally than men. And at this late date, “liberal” means being against free speech.
The same people who say voting doesn’t matter are frequently the ones making broad pronouncements about how women vote.
Have you registered your disapproval with JHK for banning folks yet, Jar?
Only trolls should be banned; lurkers who exact a toll on every would be traveler. Not champions of truth!
Berries: I seldom if ever voice that sentiment. I don’t think women should be voting because they vote so poorly as a group.
So you and Zonkers are trolls then.
Thanks for confirming.
LOL.
“Your illogic is showing. Women vote far more liberally than men. And at this late date, “liberal” means being against free speech.”
You are taking the particular and extrapolating to the general, but without justification. ‘Liberal’ is about more than free speech.
My parents voted the same way all their married life – my father voted Labour and my mother Conservative. She couldn’t understand how anyone could vote Labour because Labour Councils (or Corporations, as Glasgow was) were run into the ground and full of corruption. He couldn’t understand how anyone working class could vote for the Tories. But their disagreement was good-natured.
Some sociologists, in the 60s, attributed women’s more conservative voting preferences to the fact that they were, in many cases, at home and not in contact with the conditions working men often had to put up with from exploitative employers.
Nothing to do with free speech. Now, women (a) have more contact with the exploitative world of work and (b) heve benefited from the family welfare system as well. So, whatever their views on free speech (and I’m sure they don’t always agree with each other), you can’t equate voting ‘liberal’ simply with ‘being against free speech’, as it is about a whole lot of things.
Liberals are, for the most part, government employees/retirees, or are indirectly on the government payroll, whether they are male of female.
Women will tend to favor “social safety-net” spending, so they may lean liberal for that reason. Some of the most conservative women I know have told me that they are in favor of various “social safety-net” programs, and they identify the Democrats as advocates for such things.
One of my most conservative women friends has said that she thinks the government should pay single moms enough to stay home with their kids. It’s rough on kids to have a working single mom–who may well be working two jobs. There’s a young woman (friend of the family) that I’m planning to help out with groceries, now that she’s moved out of the homeless shelter and into a Section 8 apartment. She has one pre-school child and three jobs.
The reason for women’s concerns about the need to ensure well-being of women and children through government spending is that the men are nowhere to be found. You guys start supporting your families, and women will not turn to the government for support.
Psst his eyes are up don’t look at the shriveled hangers.
He’s really in a tizzy this week, isn’t he?
Women are always against the exercise of Free Speech by and large. – Jarek
==========
Oh for God’s sake Jar, is it always or is it by and large?
It’s neither AND both.
There is no content but only form for Q, most of the time.
He makes a desert and calls it grammar.
‘Always’ or ‘by and large’ are entirely about content and nothing to do with grammar.
@ GreenAlba:
Jarek learned a new word–or perhaps two of them: “form” and “content.” He will wear them out for awhile, without understanding their meaning, and then go back to throwing “anent” around.
Gary Johnson raised money to fight this after 2016 where he was again banned from the debate stage.
The lawsuit did nothing, the system already being captured.
You’re a bit behind the times, Nigel. The League of Women Voters hasn’t sponsored the debates since 1986. The Dems and Reps got mad when they let John Anderson debate with the Uniparty candidates.
The Uniparty now holds the debates, and yes, they are very restrictive.
Ballot access laws are so onerous that it is almost impossible in some states for a third party to get on the ballot.
People who casually wave their hands and say “Why not just run as an independent?” don’t know what they’re talking about.
.latimes.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/story/2022-01-20/bring-back-league-of-women-voters-presidential-debates
You beat me to it.
When the League of Women Voters was hosting the debates, they were decent. After they stopped, “debates” became the game show you see now.
Go ahead, lawyer.
“As if to tell the people you have no power. No agency. You are meaningless. You are worthless.” – Peter De Vries, D. LETTERS, Amsterdam
When it comes to politics, I have a very simple criterion: Anyone who wants to run for national office is a scumbag or is crazy. Period! That’s why my choice in voting is to not vote.
Political parties are an anathema. Remember what George Washington said about them. No party, whether Democrat, Republican or some as yet to be named 3rd one will change anything for the better (whatever that means).
The only effective change possible is for the people to gain power, not a political party.
For one thing, I’d severely limit political donations of any kind. What kind of fool doesn’t understand that people or organizations don’t give away money unless they expect a payback?
For another thing, term limits ought to be instituted. A significant period of time should pass after one’s last allowable term runs out before the ex-politician can work for any organization affiliated with the government (e.g., working with a military contractor).
I wouldn’t vote for anyone running for office unless they are pushed screaming into reluctantly doing so.
John McCain tried for spending limits for a long time. One of the few good things he did.
He was stuffed by the Deep State over and over.
Term limits have been a campaign promise for decades. Again, stuffed over and over.
The real problem is that the items limiting government over and over are stifled by the government, who is in control.
A third party with an anti Deep State agenda, smaller government,, frozen spending, debt limits that slow down the rise in spending, send cabinets outside DC (a Trump idea), limit the spending increases per department, rein in MIC, eliminate Department of Education, repeal war powers act, make the Attorney general position an elected office and separate from the cabinet, make impeachment non political, maybe the judicial process not involving Congress, make it so the AG cannot interfere with impeachments.
A third party gives a choice to the people, which the two party system does not. A real choice, Constitution Party vs. Uniparty.
Right now, a third party is actually a legit second party.
1856!!
In my opinion terms limits are nothing more than a diversion.
The full time staff run the day-to-day operation and this includes constituent services.
The name at the top is a brand. Without dealing with the people behind the brand, term limits go nowhere.
When Ted Kennedy died, there was a solid line of people out of Hyannis on Route 6, then all the way up Route 3 to Boston. Forget the fences to keep people off the highways, the crowd was on the road shoulder and all overpasses all the way along the route of the motorcade carrying his remains.
That’s a powerful visual of effective constituent services.
Covid 19 is proof that half the people are crazy or mindless.
…And I’m being nice.
Noticed today the appearance of AI-generated fluff pieces about how voters are happy and excited, waiting for the nomination of Michelle Obama as POTUS. (sure)
Also noticed numerous “news” stories in the legacy media about how the Biden Admin is going to claw back billions of dollars from Covid fraud cases and how they are going to gut Social Security.
Meanwhile, they want to push people in wheelchairs over the cliff. Granny must get out there on the loading dock with her aluminum walker and start lumping freight if she wants to eat. Congress will continue to send another $3 trillion blank check to Ukraine while the calliope music grinds in the background.
Yep.
And they’ll vote for them again in 2024.
The money does not go to Ukraine. The money just goes across the Potomac to the MIC.
Anybody gutting social Security will push us into the end of the US as an engine of wealth.
Why? A huge chunk of the consumer base of the US is over 65. What will happen if the demand for goods and services goes down by 30%?
Guess!
Also, if Social Security is cut back, the over 65 crowd will go to their pensions and savings to fill in for lost income.
Guess where those savings are in
US treasuries and the stock market.
Bye, bye economy. Hello, debt desolation.
An ugly trans dude might be just what we deserve as the last president.
Will he run against Mrs. Pant Suit in the primaries?
I enjoyed AXIS OF AWESOME songs on utube..now the fat guy went trans..a hideous fake woman.
CFN’rs…a postscript;
Just reported that the death of Jimmy Buffett was the result of…skin cancer.
…Apparently, it WAS his own damn fault….
Not necessarily. Some skin cancers are very aggressive and can be deadly if not removed early.
If the people of Irish ethnicity had done better in the sun, we might not ever have had slavery in the American South.
Buffet was English and stuff, but same diff.
Ask an Australian, everybody Down Under gets skin cancer.
Did you know you could get it in your eye? Yikes!
Beryl
Scary facts.
Australia is no. 1, Arizona is no. 2.
Northern European skin, fair freckled skin are most susceptible. However, dark skin can be cancerous too and more undetectable. Areas on hands, under nails are pale.
I have had two melanomas, both on my back. I get checked by an ophthalmologist annually for melanoma on the retina.
Melanoma (burrow) into your skin, eventually reaching circulation, then send out Mets, immediate stage 4. Deadly unless caught early.
I heard something interesting recently: That Blacks had a higher tendency to get melanoma. They seemed to be saying it was related to excessive sun exposure – despite being far more protected than we are and far less likely to get the more common forms of skin cancer.
I only saw it one place so I’m not sure about the veracity. But if true, even they should be using sun block at least at times.
They do not catch it. Melanomas hide in their dark skin.
Blacks are particularly susceptible to lower levels of VitD when moving North of the 25th parallel because they need more sun exposure, relative to pasty people, to maintain those levels.
“pasty” – self hatred detected. Please do an update and delete this from your files.
“Pasty” is a good-natured descriptor, nothing to do with a put-down. Stop being so sensitive.
So why is it used as a put down by those who hate us?
Start being more sensitive to words.
Arizona: The highest rate of road rage in the nation.
You would be pissed too with temperatures hovering around 110.
I also think that the driving habits of diverse people do not integrate well. Arizona is too diverse.
I think that was a take on one of his songs (my husband is a Buffet fan).
I posted this link and analysis late last night to Happenings Await CFN. I post it once again as it seems too critical to me for it to slip through the cracks.
***
IT JUST GOT WORSE. ”NAPALM-LIKE INJURIES” THE MAUI MASSACRE
bitchuteDOTcom/video/tm0OUqgCnbrh/
Start at 0:00 if you want to see a man who is really upset at Oprah & The Rock. [For the true host of the video] Start at 1:08 for this distressing quote:
“The news will not be able to show you the real survivors or the real victims. It’s very WW2 flamethrowers and Vietnam napalm like. That is not an exaggeration.”
– Michael Havoc Thomas
Keep watching to hear of the wildfire preparedness table-top exercise that they ran months before the fire just like they did with the COVIDs in 2019.
[And that “Joe Biden” appointed a FEMA response chief who was there, on the ground, since before the fire!]
***
15 missing school buses. Celine Dion needs her adren0chr0me fix badly, after all.
***
Using Occam’s Razor, it seems most likely that hiding this reported napalm-like damage to American citizens on American soil in Lahaina‘s kill-zone is the motive for the 5+ miles of black-out/blind fencing.
Right?
***
Amman replied: “Can’t stand the host.” but I am unsure if he is referring to the super-annoying guy in the first minute or the true host who starts at 1:08. I suspect the former.
Regardless of talking head likability, are any of you finding it odd how Lahaina stinks to high heaven and nobody gives a sh!t?
I don’t think it’s odd at all, Dr. Zonk. See my earlier post about apathy on the part of the public.
Yes, t22, you are one of the very few open-minded people here on CFN. I have not yet seen your upthread comment but I will search for it now.
Most here truly don’t give a turd about Lahaina. Sad but true.
I’ve been following it very closely. It’s too reminiscent of 9/11. The proof will be what happens to Maui, and specifically, the Lahaina area, when all is said and done. The smart money says they won’t allow people to rebuild on that land. Well, the hoi polloi, anyway.
1. Get your own blog
2. PFO
Some people here at CFN wouldn’t recognize a black swan if one flew right into their head. Truly.
Most people here, nearly all, are Americans.
My guess is they don’t want to talk about it or they don’t want to talk about it with you.
Whatever their reasons.
Anywayz, this is how you do it.
Xhttps://youtu.be/Bs3o3z0G8tw
The ‘true’ host.
How I Became A Socialist
(1905), Jack London
It is quite fair to say that I became a Socialist in a fashion somewhat similar to the way in which the Teutonic pagans became Christians–it was hammered into me. Not only was I not looking for Socialism at the time of my conversion, but I was fighting it. I was very young and callow, did not know much of anything, and though I had never even heard of a school called “Individualism,” I sang the paean of the strong with all my heart.
This was because I was strong myself. By strong I mean that I had good health and hard muscles, both of which possessions are easily accounted for. I had lived my childhood on California ranches, my boyhood hustling newspapers on the streets of a healthy Western city, and my youth on the ozone-laden waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. I loved life in the open, and I toiled in the open, at the hardest kinds of work. Learning no trade, but drifting along from job to job, I looked on the world and called it good, every bit of it. Let me repeat, this optimism was because I was healthy and strong, bothered with neither aches nor weaknesses, never turned down by the boss because I did not look fit, able always to get a job at shovelling coal, sailorizing, or manual labor of some sort.
And because of all this, exulting in my young life, able to hold my own at work or fight, I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I was a winner. Wherefore I called the game, as I saw it played, or thought I saw it played, a very proper game for MEN. To be a MAN was to write man in large capitals on my heart. To adventure like a man, and fight like a man, and do a man’s work (even for a boy’s pay)–these were things that reached right in and gripped hold of me as no other thing could. And I looked ahead into long vistas of a hazy and interminable future, into which, playing what I conceived to be MAN’S game, I should continue to travel with unfailing health, without accidents, and with muscles ever vigorous. As I say, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond-beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.
As for the unfortunates, the sick, and ailing, and old, and maimed, I must confess I hardly thought of them at all, save that I vaguely felt that they, barring accidents, could be as good as I if they wanted to real hard, and could work just as well. Accidents? Well, they represented FATE, also spelled out in capitals, and there was no getting around FATE. Napoleon had had an accident at Waterloo, but that did not dampen my desire to be another and later Napoleon. Further, the optimism bred of a stomach which could digest scrap iron and a body which flourished on hardships did not permit me to consider accidents as even remotely related to my glorious personality.
I hope I have made it clear that I was proud to be one of Nature’s strong-armed noblemen. The dignity of labor was to me the most impressive thing in the world. Without having read Carlyle, or Kipling, I formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade. Work was everything. It was sanctification and salvation. The pride I took in a hard day’s work well done would be inconceivable to you. It is almost inconceivable to me as I look back upon it. I was as faithful a wage slave as ever capitalist exploited. To shirk or malinger on the man who paid me my wages was a sin, first, against myself, and second, against him. I considered it a crime second only to treason and just about as bad.
In short, my joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics. I read the bourgeois papers, listened to the bourgeois preachers, and shouted at the sonorous platitudes of the bourgeois politicians. And I doubt not, if other events had not changed my career, that I should have evolved into a professional strike-breaker, (one of President Eliot’s American heroes), and had my head and my earning power irrevocably smashed by a club in the hands of some militant trades-unionist.
Just about this time, returning from a seven months’ voyage before the mast, and just turned eighteen, I took it into my head to go tramping. On rods and blind baggages I fought my way from the open West where men bucked big and the job hunted the man, to the congested labor centres of the East, where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth. And on this new blond-beast adventure I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different angle. I had dropped down from the proletariat into what sociologists love to call the “submerged tenth,” and I was startled to discover the way in which that submerged tenth was recruited.
I found there all sorts of men, many of whom had once been as good as myself and just as blond-beast; sailor-men, soldier-men, labor-men, all wrenched and distorted and twisted out of shape by toil and hardship and accident, and cast adrift by their masters like so many old horses. I battered on the drag and slammed back gates with them, or shivered with them in box cars and city parks, listening the while to life-histories which began under auspices as fair as mine, with digestions and bodies equal to and better than mine, and which ended there before my eyes in the shambles at the bottom of the Social Pit.
And as I listened my brain began to work. The woman of the streets and the man of the gutter drew very close to me. I saw the picture of the Social Pit as vividly as though it were a concrete thing, and at the bottom of the Pit I saw them, myself above them, not far, and hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat. And I confess a terror seized me. What when my strength failed? when I should be unable to work shoulder to shoulder with the strong men who were as yet babes unborn? And there and then I swore a great oath. It ran something like this: All my days I have worked hard with my body, and according to the number of days I have worked, by just that much am I nearer the bottom of the Pit. I shall climb out of the Pit, but not by the muscles of my body shall I climb out. I shall do no more hard work, and may God strike me dead if I do another day’s hard work with my body more than I absolutely have to do. And I have been busy ever since running away from hard work.
Incidentally, while tramping some ten thousand miles through the United States and Canada, I strayed into Niagara Falls, was nabbed by a fee-hunting constable, denied the right to plead guilty or not guilty, sentenced out of hand to thirty days’ imprisonment for having no fixed abode and no visible means of support, handcuffed and chained to a bunch of men similarly circumstanced, carted down country to Buffalo, registered at the Erie County Penitentiary, had my head clipped and my budding mustache shaved, was dressed in convict stripes, compulsorily vaccinated by a medical student who practised on such as we, made to march the lock-step, and put to work under the eyes of guards armed with Winchester rifles–all for adventuring in blond-beastly fashion. Concerning further details deponent sayeth not, though he may hint that some of his plethoric national patriotism simmered down and leaked out of the bottom of his soul somewhere–at least, since that experience he finds that he cares more for men and women and little children than for imaginary geographical lines.
* * * * * * *
To return to my conversion. I think it is apparent that my rampant individualism was pretty effectively hammered out of me, and something else as effectively hammered in. But, just as I had been an individualist without knowing it, I was now a Socialist without knowing it, withal, an unscientific one. I had been reborn, but not renamed, and I was running around to find out what manner of thing I was. I ran back to California and opened the books. I do not remember which ones I opened first. It is an unimportant detail anyway. I was already It, whatever It was, and by aid of the books I discovered that It was a Socialist. Since that day I have opened many books, but no economic argument, no lucid demonstration of the logic and inevitableness of Socialism affects me as profoundly and convincingly as I was affected on the day when I first saw the walls of the Social Pit rise around me and felt myself slipping down, down, into the shambles at the bottom.
THE END.
Jarek: “Hard work never hurt anybody” – one of the biggest lies ever told. It doesn’t hurt you if you can stop when you need to and recover from it. You know, like animals do after a long hunt? But to do exactly the same every day, well you will become less and less. At the stores I regularly go to, I’ve watched the light go out of young workers eyes as they get worn down.
London himself once signed on to a factory that promised to bring him up thru the ranks if he did a good job. So he shoveled coal for 10 hours a day, proudly doing the work of two men. He noted the resentment of other workers – his inferiors! Then one of them told him: They did the same to another young guy. Once you start to slow down, they’ll get rid of you and get another one. He realized his error and quit. The managerial class is scum, seeing people as things or means to an end. The owner class which employs such de facto slave masters is no better.
First we had to serve the machines. Now the machines are replacing us. No one cared when they replaced menial laborers – or offshored their jobs overseas; or insourced coolies to undercut them. No one will care now that AI is coming for the white collar workers. Indeed, independent blue collar guys are going to survive at least for awhile. Robotics is lagging far behind IT at this point. Women are a gonna get hit hard in particular. Mary jokes about how thrilled her colleagues are about AI even as it will soon replace them.
“Mary jokes about how thrilled her colleagues are about AI even as it will soon replace them.”
Well, what can you say?
Stupid is as stupid does?
🙂
ChatGPT writes a lot better than all of the writers at NY Slimes, WSJ, etc. And with the same biases.
I’d say lots of those might lose their jobs first.
That to me is pretty funny.
Chat GPT does NOT “write better”. (Define that, and be specific.)
NYT Times is shit because they’re bought and paid for, but at least they can compose an English sentence.
Nope.
You probably don’t read many of their opinion pieces.
Grammatical garbage.
They hire 20-somethings that know nothing. Because those writers are merely propaganda messengers.
Jarek
You and I go round and round about socialism.
You hate the corporate world, and think that the government exists to control them.
I consider that government is a focus of evil in a society. I believe that the shenanigans of the corporate word are a result of the evil of government with all its taxation and regulation on the business world. The real irony is that a well balanced economy with lots of small, medium and large companies is totally distorted by the government.
Even our Constitution does not protect us from the evil that is focused in DC.
Chicken and the egg? Does bad government create bad economies and consequent incorporations, or do bad corporations load up evil government.
Or both? A positive feedback situation, a snowball rolling down hill?
Fallen human nature is the enemy in both cases. IF you are Christian, you know that we can be better if we try, fortified by sound doctrine and succored by God’s grace.
I am the Vine and you are the branch. Without me you can do nothing.
Christ
Blaming it on government is a wrong tangent. Unsound doctrine. Blame yourself and others. Fallen human nature.
You mean SIN.
It is more something you are than something you do. The separative self will always be missing the mark because it is a miss in and of itself.
ask alexa etc to mock white people.
then ask it to mock black people.
You seem not to believe in human greed.
Jack London was the type of Socialist who leveraged his books & magazine articles for as much money as he could get, bought himself a nice yacht, and built a mansion in the Hills outside Oakland (which burned down the moment he finished it).
London lived only until the age of 40. It would have been interesting to see what his life’s course would have been had he lived longer. For example, novelist John Dos Passos started out as a Socialist and in the 1920s joined the Communist party. By the time the 1960s rolled around Dos Passos had transformed into a reactionary Republican who supported Barry Goldwater. I suspect Jack London was more of a National Socialist, not the type of Socialist who would have supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1922, but would have supported the Nazis in Germany in 1933.
Both the Fuhrer & Jack London felt a special affinity for Wolves. Hitler’s code name was Wolf, and Jack London actually considered himself a wolf in Human form, gobbling up raw duck for his main meal. (Which might have led to his early death.)
I, too, have a special affinity for wolves.
What does this mean?
It means that you are Zilch Nada. We all know that.
Owl, the Wolf seems to be a symbol for prowess & virility. I had a neighbor who owned what he said was a wolf, but to me it looked like a German Sheperd.
Heckler,
When we had a shepherd, I learned that it is not entirely uncommon for them to have a decent amount of wolf blood in them–particularly if they are of East German stock.
Wolves and Sheperds are both noble animals.
It means you have an independent streak.
Early death from duck? How so?
He was tormented by the loss of the vigor of his youth. Sometimes people who had the most lose it early – or just become like everyone else.
We don’t have to guess. The Internationale asked him for clarification and said they didn’t like his viewpoints. So he withdrew. His own White race come first before the coolies of the world.
He engaged in some petty slaving in the Pacific – pretty despicable, as if he was trying to make a point or something.
His National Socialism wasn’t mature is what I’m trying to say. But yes, a nascent American National Socialist.
His oldest daughter, however, was a committed Communist, living for a long time in Moscow and involved in organizing activities in the Bay Area for many years.
Ah, so.
“Jarek: “Hard work never hurt anybody” – one of the biggest lies ever told. It doesn’t hurt you if you can stop when you need to and recover from it. You know, like animals do after a long hunt? But to do exactly the same every day, well you will become less and less. At the stores I regularly go to, I’ve watched the light go out of young workers eyes as they get worn down.”
It seems that the trick is to figure out how to derive an existence by hoeing your own row.
According to his account, Jack’s downfall started when he got lost in the “noise”.
You’re not as good as a machine and you never will be – in the eyes of the management class. If you take their view that work is the be all and end all, then you may be in denial about your worth relative to machines.
They were meant to serve man, not replace him. But they never tire, don’t go on strike, etc – so they are a dream come true for management. For us, a nightmare that we will never awaken from.
Hence, a UBI and pigeon hole apartment for the “You will own nothing and be happy” crowd?
How about the misfits? Will there be a row to hoe for us, or will it be off to Uyghur Ville?
How about those that think that they deserve to be a part of the management class? Will they have a “you crossed the line, Jake” moment?
How about a situation where Pelosi and Xi don’t see eye to eye?
If this plays-out as you imply, won’t the management class ultimately bastardize themselves?
Jarek, your philosophy pertaining to this issue, and the linked post by MA have struck a nerve.
As you say, This is “a nightmare that we will never awaken from.”.
Can Trump Run for President From Prison?
armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/rule-of-law/can-trump-run-for-president-from-prison/
[They admitted that Debs merely spoke against war and what he believed; he thought he was right. Not that he supported the Germans; he opposed the war.
Debs’ speech did move the nation, but not the judge nor Woodrow Wilson:
Your honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the form of our present government, that I am opposed to the social system in which we live, that I believe in the change of both but by perfectly peaceable and orderly means. …
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and factories; I am thinking of the women who, for a paltry wage, are compelled to work out their lives; of the little children who, in this system, are robbed of their childhood, and in their early, tender years, are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon, and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the machines while they themselves are being starved body and soul. …
Your honor, I ask no mercy, I plead for no immunity. I realize that finally the right must prevail. I never more fully comprehended than now the great struggle between the powers of greed on the one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of freedom. I can see the dawn of a better day of humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own.
Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison on September 18th, 1918, and was also disenfranchised for life, meaning he was stripped of his right to ever vote in the future, constructively transforming the United States into a ruthless dictatorship with no democratic human right whatsoever. Debs presented what has been called his best-remembered statement at his sentencing hearing:
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.]
Seems that the UN 2030 agenda anticipates and has a solution for the unemployed masses.
Part of the reason there is no discussion about the 2030 agenda is that to acknowledge the various issues, everyone would have to sacrifice.
Most positions are based on “truths”. Cutting my Social Security payment is non-negotiable, because I have earned it. I read that in the near future Social Security is unfunded. The youth don’t want to contribute because they can see that it is a flawed set-up, and payout will not likely be there for them.
If the masses want to have a say in the outcome, there needs to be a discussion about the 2030 agenda. This discussion is not in the interest of the management class, because it would be determined in short order that the proposed solutions are self-serving.
Equitable means that one should accept either side of the solution.
Implementation of the 2030 agenda is also an acknowledgement that the existing format for life is nothing more than a flawed game, and as such, why should anyone get to start the new game with any more than anyone else?
The solution: The side that wins the war, gets to determine what is “true”.
YEA! If the they won’t do it, we will. The Empiricate Party openly endorses all actual US government policies. Our Platform:
1) expand NATO to Global Atlantic Treaty Organization (GATO)
2) declare war on all non-GATO or GATO aligned countries
3) arrest and torture all critics of GATO policy
4) ban on Afghan wedding parties
5) assassinate Julian Assange
6) implement regressive tax code
7) extend right to vote to international party members and their pets
8) forfeiture of such rights by non-party members
9) designation of all property as a National Park
We do solemnly swear to implement these policies to the best of our abilities once elected;)
Hmmm… UN/WHO/WEF policies backed up by GATO on the ground (and in the air). What’s not to like?
Mind you, Global Atlantic is a bit of an oxymoron, so maybe it should be GTO, which, handily, also stands for Grand Theft Operation.
“If you are shocked and bewildered that totalitarianism creeps through our country without opposition, the reason is there is no official opposition.”
Somehow, it seems appropriate then, that it finally comes down to all of us.
If that really ends up being the case, a key impediment to any unofficial collective response may be the tone of arrogance often expressed by many commentators here towards their fellow citizens (too stupid, too brainwashed, too disinterested) to do anything about our present situation.
But isn’t such hubris the foundation for the very type of elitism we are forever condemning in the present managerial class?
It seems we may now be faced with not simply imagining a new and quite different political movement or waiting for social collapse, but actually creating what our present elites fear the most, genuine grass-roots resistance to their rule based on, an, as yet, unarticulated organizational sophistication.
The problem with our republic isn’t the character of who we elect but the character of the people who we allow to vote. People who make poor decisions in their personal lives will make poor choices when casting ballots. People without natural progeny won’t vote with an eye on the future. Felons didn’t make good personal choices, neither did people who divorce. People who don’t pay income tax don’t care to husband your hard earned tax dollars. Everyone knows that on average people who raise children in homes without both biological parents present will produce substandard adults. If you restrict voters to 1 vote per taxpaying non-criminal, married couple with children- maybe allow natural widows and widowers too- we’ll end up with better quality representatives. This scheme would exclude myself too. I made some poor choices when I was young.
I respectfully disagree with part of your statement. It IS the character of those for whom we vote, but at the last, they are just a reflection of ourselves.
“On average people who raise children in homes without both biological parents present will produce substandard adults.”
Actually we don’t know that for a fact at all.
Huh? There are mountains of sociological research to back that up (unfortunate wording notwithstanding).
True. They do need role models and love, guidance, and support however.
Those without kids cannot really understand how important the above are.
Sadly, two biological parents do not always provide those things.
@ Beryl of Oyl:
Yes, I’d say that statistics about this–as with everything else–are easily cooked. For example, what do the stats look like when you separate out black families versus white families? Also, how do you define “substandard adults”? It could be that their criteria for evaluating the quality of the adults includes things like whether they went to college. If the criteria include long-term financial success, home ownership, and financial security during retirement, it seems to me that the studies that came up with such findings would have to span many, many years. Like 70 or 80 years. I don’t think any such studies have been done.
There are also huge variations in two-parent households. Is the wife a stay-at-home mom? Do they home school? What is the household’s level of affluence? I.e., do their kids go to private schools or ghetto schools? It could be that the entire statistical advantage (if it exists) of two-parent households is among those where there is a stay-at-home mom, and the kids are either home-schooled or attend private schools. There are also huge variations in single-parent households. For starters, single moms are much more likely to live in poverty.
In short, there are just too many factors involved. The devil is in the details.
Wow…. Does it suck to be you then?
“If you are shocked and bewildered that totalitarian tyranny creeps through our country without opposition, the reason is simple… The capture of government looks nearly complete… This fall season will be a dreadful time of testing whether the country can endure any more of this.”
Being ‘shocked and bewildered’… or ‘Dazed & Confused’ if you get off on old Classic Rock… has become our new normal – or abnormal – depending on how you look at it.
But living in that kind of state of mind has taught us a valuable lesson: We are all surrounded by and swimming in a Sea of Dark State-Peddled Bull-leavings.
Most everything we hear is a lie driven by some dark agenda that is not in our best interest. And this can be a kind of positive new-normal for us in knowing that most everything you hear is crap and not to be trusted under any circumstances. The Dark State does not like when We the People adopt that kind of discerning and empowering point of view. The Darksters want us to fall over and swallow all Their crap that They – and their dutiful hacks and whores and lackeys – State Media – shower upon us 24/7.
The best way for us not to stink is to get away from Their sewer-shower of Dark State Stink… aka… Their misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, manipulations, and assorted drivel and nonsense. You’d be surprised how good you begin to smell when you stop washing yourself daily with that sewage.
Do yourself a favor. Just learn to laugh at everything you hear. Because most everything you are hearing is a just sick joke directed at us at Our expense.
Maybe today, ‘Dazed’ should sound like…
‘Been dazed and confused for so long it’s not true
Wanted the Truth, never bargained for Poo
Lots of people talk but few of them know
The Soul of the Dark was created Down Low
You hurt and abuse telling me all your lies
Stay back little devils, Lord, how they hypnotize
Sweet little demons, don’t know where you’ve been
Gonna laugh at you now – ha! ha! once again…’
Great song! Will hear it with different ears from now on.
stolen from an unknown..bass line, title, angst.
bitchuteDOTcom/video/aKSZFcy0rzZB/
Dazed and Confused starts at 15:55.
“…When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for…
There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking…
And it’s whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter…” ~ Stairway To Heaven, by Led Zeppelin
Stairway starts at 14:25:
bitchuteDOTcom/video/HdUlqKQ6QUta/
From now ’till the end of 2024 might be the ‘mother of all’ years to quote the late Saddam Hussein.
Get your popcorn, soda and a few antacid tablets. You have a front-row seat in bed propped up with a few pillows against the headboard with your laptop on your lap.
“As I suggest previously, it’s about evolution and what who wants to achieve.
Human evolutionary forks are going to function differently.”
Zaz,
Thank you for your considered responses last thread. If your above quote suggests that human nature must change for your premise to be successful, we are in accord.
Oh, and permit me…the “quote” of Saddam is actually a paraphrase?
Thanks again.
Lil’E
elysianfield, forks can happen immediately if changes have already occurred in some people. The changes don’t necessarily have to be broad, fast or obvious, etc., and are arguably happening already anyway.
As I suggested in that regard in the previous threads, and under the coincidentally-somewhat-appropriate article, Happenings Await, the protobirds didn’t care that their bloated cousins were about to get smashed by an asteroid.
It’s the same idea with people who are working towards something that others nay-say about. BackRowHeckler, for example, can be left behind and remain, appropriately perhaps, in the back row. That’s kind of ok. Or they can adapt in different ways that see others left behind and go extinct. Hard calls are par for the course of course.
As for Hussein, sure-sure, I was again shooting from the hip. I feel at this point like I’ve paid my dues in that/some regards, so don’t always feel like I have to take the gun completely up.
If you get the gist, then I’ve hit the target, if not a bullseye. Sometimes the gist is what’s important and not spending too much time on bullseyes, at least all the time…
In fact, it’s a bit like reading a good summary of a good recommended book, rather than reading it in its entirety when there may be enough good and recommended books out there for a few lifetimes.
Sociopolitical Lock-In & The Planet As A State Park
As an important addendum, and to repeat, the State is a monoculture of sorts, in terms of human organization, that has, save for some small pockets, captured/enclosed the planet and human activities and, as such, will be subject to the potentially heavier-hitting devices of nature if it is not less able or willing to change/adapt/evolve, such as to manage the impacts and ‘perfect storms’ that get thrown at it.
Often, as you may well know and understand, it is environmental pressures that can drive evolution and diversity, such as in social organization.
We grew up as a species in relatively-anarchistic bands and tribes, have hardly changed since and, as such, are in fundamental cognitive dissonance with the large-scale centralized nation-State structure.
So even there, we already inherently have a momentum or ‘gradient contour’ that suggests that I’ll get my relative anarchy one way or another, either in structural change that’s less monocultural or in structural collapse.
—-
“The state has moved into many new areas as they become significant, such as… promoting nuclear power. This expanding role of the state helps prevent the rise of any significant competing forms of social organisation…
The obvious point is that most social activists look constantly to the state for solutions to social problems. This point bears labouring, because the orientation of most social action groups tends to reinforce state power. This applies to most antiwar action too. Many of the goals and methods of peace movements have been oriented around action by the state, such as appealing to state elites and advocating neutralism and unilateralism. Indeed, peace movements spend a lot of effort debating which demand to make on the state: nuclear freeze, unilateral or multilateral disarmament, nuclear-free zones, or removal of military bases. By appealing to the state, activists indirectly strengthen the roots of many social problems, the problem of war in particular…” ~ Brian Martin, ‘Uprooting War’
I’ll second that E.
Zaz is a Gentleman, and a pretty smart guy. It’s been a pleasure engaging him on this board.
Gentleman don’t attack women.
Gentlewomen don’t attack men.
Yeah, there is absolutely nothing gentlemanly about O.G.
“That sounds like it would make for a premise for a Steely Dan song, Zarelle.” ~ Uncle Bob September 1, 2023 at 9:39 pm
—-
Oh ya? Any that might stand out for you in that regard?
Well every once and awhile a tune or tu of theirs do pop into my mind…
youtu.be/vptlTsgu9p0?si=CWH5mvVO-SyzI5N6
—-
As a related aside, someone recently stole my very first acorn squash I ever grew. Not enough to shoot him if I ever found out who, and I’m unsure what I’d do. Maybe suck it up buttercup, since, if they’re doing that, they probably need it more than I. My garden’s more of a school for the time being than a matter of survival and I have other acorns on the way.
In any case, my recently retransplanted (into proper soil from a compost mix) lemon verbena clippings I pinched from a State garden nearby are doing fine. I also have the community garden maintenance guy interested in one of them and maybe keeping an extra eye out for our gardens.
;P
Lemon Verbena Sherbet Serendipity
…We were chatting among the gardens and, coincidentally, he told me about this fantastic sherbet they used to make with lemon verbena.
It is a school, Zaz. The most important lesson (or nut-to-crack): How can me & mine eat what I have grown?
***
As for Steely Dan, here’re a couple of my fave albums:
Steely Dan ~ Aja [1977]
bitchuteDOTcom/video/GyQDhCXw9qEW
Steely Dan ~ Gaucho [1980]
bitchuteDOTcom/video/r9sXdKl4PgfV/
Coincidentally again, I proposed to our garden maintenance guy the idea of guerrilla gardening; gardening anywhere and then making notes of where with GPS geolocations that we could then plot on a map for the group. Theft will always happen, but less noticeable/problematic if its outstripped by bountiful surplus and other things like random decentralization.
Apparently a little like the strategy of those 17-year cicadas that, while still being eaten by predators, nevertheless overwhelm their abilities to eat enough, so some get through to live again.
According to some cosmologists, new/alternate universes/realities might split off from each from the different decisions we can make in the infinite forks along our paths.
I imagine some of us might find it fun to go back in time to occupy our previous selves’ minds to see how we as we are now could change and experience the resulting outcomes.
That’s heavy, man.
“I proposed to our garden maintenance guy the idea of guerrilla gardening”
Maybe try some seed bombs around town.
httpx://askgardening.com/how-to-plant-seed-bomb/
Yes, I’ve heard of those and good idea, thanks.
The Man They Call Zazelle: “‘That sounds like it would make for a premise for a Steely Dan song, Zarelle.” ~ Uncle Bob September 1, 2023 at 9:39 pm”
Did someone say… Steely Dan? How ’bout this…
‘When Dark Friday comes
Gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna stay down in it
And be just like a mole…
Gonna let The Dark pass by me
No one to sanctify me
And if That Dark won’t go
I’m gonna let it roll
They never gonna get my soul…’
What, buttercup? It was a perfect opening for butternut.
I believe that a necessary first step is to turn off the “Foreign Aid” tap.
Very little of it gets to the people most in need, after being siphoned-off by the top .000001%
Hence the flood of immigrants from South and Central America. They’ve got nuttin’, so they’ve got nuttin’ to lose. When you’ve got nuttin’, what’s a thousand mile hike?
The USA sends billions to those sad, wretched places only to have it purchase Mansions, Maseratis and murdered opposition.
Follow the money. Most of it never leaves the States while those mansions and Maseratis are purchased with the table scraps. The very scumbags that siphon the money are the same scumbags that keep approving the foreign aid in the first place. Tough cycle to break.
So greedy its disgusting.
No self-respecting man buys a Maserati.
Must be a Canadian thing.
Mucho soy.