JHK’s Three-Act Play
Clusterfuck Nation
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The cable news announced the other day that Covid-19 patients placed in critical care may have to be on ventilators for 21 days. Only a few years ago, I went in for an ordinary hip replacement. A month or so later, I got the hospital billing statement. One of the line-items went like this: Room and board: 36 hours…$23,482.79. I am not jiving you. That was just for the hospital bed and maybe four lousy hospital meals, not the surgery or the meds or anything else. All that was billed extra. Say, what…?
Now imagine you have the stupendous good fortune to survive a Covid-19 infection after 21 days on a ventilator and go home. What is that billing statement going to look like? Will the survivors wish they’d never made out of the hospital alive?
Right now, we’re in the heroic phase of the battle against a modern age plague. The doctors, nurses, and their helpers are like the trembling soldiers in an amphibious landing craft churning toward the Normandy beach where the enemy is dug in and waiting for them, with sweaty fingers on their machine guns and a stink in the pillbox. Some of the doctors and nurses will go down in the battle. The fabled fog-of-war will conceal what is happening to the health care system itself, while the battle rages. After that, what?
One thing will be pretty clear: That the folks in charge of things gave trillions of dollars to Wall Street while tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 survivors got wiped out financially with gargantuan medical bills. Do you think the Chargemaster part of the hospital routine will just stop doing its thing during this emergency? The billings will continue – just as the proverbial beatings will continue until morale improves! In the aftermath, I can’t even imagine the ‘splainin’ that will entail. The rage may be too intense to even get to that. For some, it may be time to lubricate the guillotines?
Meantime, of course, the global economy has shut down which suggests to me, anyway, that any prior frame of reference you may have had about money and business and social normality goes out the window. The world is still here. We’re just going to have to learn to live in it differently. The American portion of the world is in need of a severe retrofit and reprogramming. We waited too long to face this in a spell of tragic complacency and the virus has forced the issue. Here are the main things we have to attend to:
Reconsider how we inhabit the landscape. Do you think $20-a-barrel oil is a boon to the Happy Motoring way-of-life? It’s going to at least bankrupt most of the companies producing shale oil, and that’s where way-more than half of our production came from in recent years. How many ordinary Americans will be able to finance car payments now? To say suburbia will not be functioning too well mere months from now is a merciful way to put it.
The big cities will not recover from the trauma and stigma of the virus, but that is only the beginning their problems. What, exactly, will the suffering poor of the ghettos do, under orders to remain cooped-up until the end of April? These are people who are unlikely to have laid in supplies ahead of time, and a month from now they are sure to be very hungry. How will the big cities be able to manage their infrastructures with municipal bonds massively failing? How will they provide social services when tax revenues are down to a trickle? The answer is, they won’t manage any of this. They grew too big and too complex. Now they have to get smaller, and the process will not be pretty.
What will the business of America be after Covid-19? If we’re lucky, it will be growing food and working at many of the activities that support it: moving it, storing it, selling it, making an order of smaller-scaled farm machinery, including machines that can be used with horses and oxen, breeding the animals. I’m not kidding. Growing food happens in the countryside, where the fields and pastures are. There are towns there, too, associated with the farming, where much of the business of farming and the activities that support it transact. I believe we’ll see impressive demographic movements of people to these places. There are opportunities in all that, a plausible future. The scale of agriculture will have to change downward, too. AgriBiz, with its giant “inputs” of chemicals and borrowed money, is not going to make it. Farms have to get smaller too, and more people will have to work on them. Farewell to the age of the taco chip!
If we want to get around this big country of ours, and move food from one place to another, we better think about fixing the railroads. Try to imagine what six trillion dollars might have done for that crucial venture. And I’m not talking about high-speed and high-tech; I mean the railroads that were already here. Where I live, the tracks are still in place, rusting in the rain. How did we let that happen?
Then there is the question of how do we behave? You may not think that matters so much, but we’ve become so profoundly dishonest that it’s impeding our relationship with reality. On top of that we’re surly, impolite, clownish, blustering, greedy, and improvident. Believe me, that is going to change. Hardship is a great attitude-adjuster. When Americans awake from the corona coma like millions of Rip Van Winkles, it will matter again to be upright and to act in good faith. This will be a different country.
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You raise an interesting point about the massive hospital bills that the poor unfortunates will be hit with should they survive Jim, but not to worry, the Federal Reserve will simply print and dump magic money out of thin air. Surely this can be done forever without any ill effect, har, har, har.
For us ordinary folks? Not very likely Walt. That would be the dreaded socialized medicine, and we’ve already heard the verdict on that.
You can’t have socialized medicine and 1% globalist greed in the same country.
Look what happened to Italy.
They were operating under globalism.
They’ve finally had enough, though, it looks like.
Totally agree. But we Americans’ got us some really hard craniums. We seem to love the drama.
Ah yes, Ellipsis, how we do so adore drama here in the US of A. How much we love the funhouse at the amusement park. Alas, now the funhouse is reality. That monster that scares you is now real.
“People Get Ready!”
The horse is out of the barn.
The Four Horsemen are out of the barn…
What are you specifically blaming the Italian situation on, Beryl?
Italy and Spain are countries where generations live in closer proximity than in some other European countries (e.g. Germany). Here in the UK younger people are being advised not to visit their older and more vulnerable relatives. That’s hard to do if Grandma lives with you because you’re a much more traditional, family-oriented society.
Germany is a richer country and started out with (a) more ventilators per head than any other European country and (b) more nurses per head too. Are you claiming Germany isn’t globalist? That would be bizarre after all the clobbering of the EU and Merkel for being just that.
So, German globalism (not that I’m defending globalism per se) seems to be entirely compatible with an excellent ‘socialised’ healthcare system. Not as ‘socialised’ as the UK but way more efficient and sane than what pertains in the US.
JHK gave an example of a 36-hour stay in hospital. My husband read me a post on one of his medics’ blogs a while ago from an American colleague who went to see a doctor in the US for a sore throat. After visits and recommended lab tests (in the US all sorts of clinically unnecessary things are ‘recommended’ because ker-ching) she came away with a total bill of US$28,000. Sane people scrape their jaws off the floor with difficulty after hearing such stories.
I could choose to eschew the NHS and see a private GP for a sore throat – uninsured if I so chose (not that I’d ever go to a GP with a sore throat unless it was a real outlier – I have a perfectly good supply of hot tea and paracetamol). It would cost me about £150 for half an hour of the good doctor’s time, and maybe another £30 or whatever if s/he gave me a private prescription for antibiotics, should they be considered appropriate.
We just don’t get what goes on over your way.
A lot of the superfluous testing stems from fear of malpractice. The lawyers have to get piece of the pie. Litigation explains a lot of the increased price of health care here. Why can’t they fix the situation? Because we are run by lawyers here.
Nurses make good salaries, the risk return ratio is high. Again litigation! Each patient has 24 hour care at $40/hr for the RN, plus all the other folks and tests. All insured against malpractice as well as the hospital itself.
Remember the Golden Rule. He who has the gold, makes the rules. Here King Midas is the legal profession.
Italy has a very old population. The globalists wanted cheap labor and a made in Italy label both, for some of their fancy designer bags and such.
They imported entire sweatshops, workers and all, to produce these items.
The Chinese workers understandably go home en masse at times, to a country that is a frequent incubator for disease.
Italy has a socialized medical system.
A lot of elderly people got sick, all at once.
I’m not blaming anything, except to say that the open borders and policies that contributed to the “inequality” we have been seeing, haven’t done so much for the people in the middle.
How much of that big money floating around at the top went to keeping Italy’s medical system up to date?
The first two cases in Italy were Chinese tourists visiting Rome. Chinese tourists visit everywhere, regardless of globalism (unless you count international travel as globalism, in which case it was the Victorians who really got it started).
Germany is part of the ‘globalist’ economy and seems to be doing fine, with a medical system that most Americans would consider fairly ‘socialised’ even though it’s not free to all, like the NHS (which isn’t free to visitors and migrant workers either).
A socialised system can be as good as you make it. Americans keep saying they ‘can’t afford’ Medicare for all, yet they already pay infinitely more overall as a percentage of GDP for their healthcare system than any other comparable country. And for health outcomes that are worse than in countries that pay a lot less.
Almost a third of what Americans pay for healthcare doesn’t go to healthcare at all, but to maintaining a parasitic bureaucracy around it. Think of the healthcare that third could pay for!
Obviously you get what you have: in Somalia, neither private nor public medicine is going to be good because they aren’t very developed people, though Ms Ali says they have some have great heroic music about warriors, etc.
Germany, with its incredible development and high level of trust (the we feeling) is going to be a winner both privately and publicly while we try to stint on the public aspect because of our greed.
The we feeling has expanded too much, now to alien peoples who don’t reciprocate and who aren’t nearly as developed. Even Sweden is beginning to stint its own people in favor of the aliens – which is simply mind boggling.
Despite Alba’s proud boasts, Britain lets its elderly freeze to death in favor of Muslim immigrants. But I must admit: she has the general right of this argument and clueless Americans the wrong.
Italy and Spain are countries where generations live in closer proximity than in some other European countries (e.g. Germany). Here in the UK younger people are being advised not to visit their older and more vulnerable relatives.
All this mental masturbation about living in close proximity. It got to Italy first. End of story BECAUSE this tool sez:
https://www.datacat.cc/covid/
The rate of increase is higher in the US than anywhere else though real third world countries will take that distinction away. In India you can’t do social distancing. People are already closer together than six feet. Whatcha gonna do?
“Despite Alba’s proud boasts, Britain lets its elderly freeze to death in favor of Muslim immigrants. ”
Give it a rest with the demented urban myths, Janos. Energy poverty really is a problem, along with poverty in general.Why do you always pick ‘the elderly’? Lots of the ‘elderly’ are doing very well, thank you very much. A number of the luckier ones older than me got golden retirements. While lots of young families with earners in low-security jobs are reduced to using foodbanks. They will be in energy poverty too. That Muslim immigrants somehow get favours is a figment of your fevered imagination.
And I have no proud boasts. I just see things for what they are, whether it’s here or in the US. The healthcare system that we have meant that I had timely, state-of-the-art cancer treatment at no upfront cost. But it also means that the UK is about fourth from the bottom within Europe in terms of the numbers of ventilators per head that we’ve all started off with.
The political failing added to that is that Boris Johnson didn’t get off his arse back in January to start ordering extra ones. But you can’t just hang people on ventilators and expect the oxygen fairy to do the job. They need constant monitoring and we’re short of staff (although a lot of retired staff have come back to help out, which, given the risks, is heroic). One in four doctors in the UK is currently self-isolating with Covid symptoms. Two highly experiences ones (at least one having come back voluntarily from retirement) have died, and we’re hardly started.
There’s been a deliberate effort on the part of TBTB (not confined to the Tories) to deprive the NHS of adequate funding, while forcing it to bleed its money into the private sector through infamous PFI schemes. Also, ordinary people can be a bit too faced – they can claim to a polling researcher that they’re happy to fork out another penny in income tax to fund a better NHS, but when it comes to the crunch they vote Tory.
Germany’s system sounds pretty good. And they’ve been testing like mad, which is why their death rate looks good (in addition to having more capacity than anywhere else in Europe).
Bed occupancy used to be about 75% in the NHS, which is where it should be. But over the last 30 or 40 years, following the imposition of non-clinical managers on the NHS by politicians (doctors tend to know what they’re doing) that percentage has gradually crept up to about 95%. Which is bad news for mega-bugs like MRSA as well as pandemics, since cleaned beds need time between patients, regardless of the degree of cleaning, to avoid such things.
The problem with a totally free healthcare system is the total lack of realism on the part of patients in terms of what things actually cost. I don’t think it would be a bad thing at all if charges were introduced for some things just to stop people thinking high-quality medical care falls off trees. But you will ALWAYS have poor citizens (not necessarily feckless ones) who will require to be subsidised. And a society is rightly judged by how it treats its most vulnerable.
“A lot of the superfluous testing stems from fear of malpractice.”
Totally agree, JohnAZ. Good business but bad medicine!
BTW, Janos, the two British doctors who’ve already given their lives to Covid19 (and the NHS) were British Asians. One ENT consultant and one heart surgeon. The heart surgeon’s kids serve the British people in the NHS too.
They’re British.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52064450
http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/clinical/clinical-specialties/respiratory-/nhs-confirms-first-death-of-a-uk-doctor-due-to-coronavirus/20040479.article
To you these amazing people are just ‘immigrants off boats’.
They knew a whole lot more about humanity than you ever risk learning.
“The rate of increase is higher in the US than anywhere else though real third world countries will take that distinction away. In India you can’t do social distancing. People are already closer together than six feet. Whatcha gonna do?”
Agreed, K-Dog (although the impossibility of isolating Grandma is still a thing, if she lives with a working family).
What’s going on in India is horrendous, with penniless people trying to walk 100 miles back to their villages. Ventilators??? What’s a ventilator if you live in a village at the arse-end of nowhere?
I fail to see what globalism and “socialized” medicine have to do with one another.
The German medical system is mixed offering a private and public option. It has been this way for decades.
Furthermore, I would not use Germany as a champion of globalism, as there are still a lot of protections on industry here, because Germany (still) largely protects its workforce in critical domestic industries rather than outsource it.
The battle for Germany rages on, and many want Merkel out.
“I fail to see what globalism and “socialized” medicine have to do with one another.”
Me neither. And the German healthcare system sounds pretty sane. I could live with that. I don’t understand how the US system doesn’t have people marching in the streets with outrage.
“Furthermore, I would not use Germany as a champion of globalism, as there are still a lot of protections on industry here, because Germany (still) largely protects its workforce in critical domestic industries rather than outsource it.”
Exactly. But it’s part of the EU, and those who see the EU as entirely bad because it’s ‘globalist’ aren’t willing to see that e.g. post-Brexit Britain could be entirely as globalist as pre-Brexit Britain. It depends entirely on policies. But there are some things you can’t do within the EU to protect domestic industry, e.g. state subsidies, which remove the level playing field.
That was a problem for anyone wanting to go back to the halcyon days of British Steel. So now British steel plants are bought by Indian or Chinese operators. And Brexit or not-Brexit is an irrelevance.
“After visits and recommended lab tests (in the US all sorts of clinically unnecessary things are ‘recommended’ because ker-ching) she came away with a total bill of US$28,000.”
$28,000 for visits and lab tests is pure BS.
That’s what the American doctor who got the bill thought.
Pure BS. Glad we agree.
I believe this may be what triggers Medicare for all as this is what will “partially” pay for the drama and trauma.
You all talk like you think there is still going to be a functioning government by the time those of us who have survived the virus, the shortages, the riots and the subsequent disintegration of everything we’ve ever depended on, crawl, hungry, out of our dens. I thought we bought the farm with SARS, but we had a lucky, temporary escape.
@draupnir Martial law is a functioning government.
Martial law with what?
Starting to wish we still lived in a homogeneous White Nation, a la 1960, with the ten percent of minorities overwhelmingly in the rural South?
Wisdom has arisen in you at last.
“You can’t have socialized medicine and 1% globalist greed in the same country”
Britain, Germany, France, Belgium, Canada…..on and on. The common denominator that makes that combo work especially well is the central control.
I give thanks every day that I live in Canada where we have “the dreaded socialized medicine”. I recently had surgery on my hand that involved a several appointments with a plastic surgeon, a day-surgery at the hospital and a number of physiotherapy sessions at the hospital. I never saw a bill for any of it. Yes, there are some areas of our health care system that could be improved, but at least I don’t have to declare bankruptcy because I can’t pay the bill. I don’t understand why Americans put up with their government spending a trillion dollars a year on “defense” (which really means senseless imperialist wars) but can’t provide healthcare for all its citizens.
And our healthcare spending per capita is about half what it is in the US.
I am an expat Canadian (because I can hardly survive on my pension there) but chose to retire to a country with a similar health care system.
As an expat in Portugal you have the right as a temporary resident (for permanent status or citizenship you have to pass a language test, which I intend to take) to participate in the Social Security system. As a pensioner I pay nothing.
I had total knee replacement in Canada which cost me nothing, (except of our monthly cost for the plan of 120$/family) and my wife had hers done here locally for the usual fee you pay for each hospital visit of 5€.
You can access the Centro de Saude, and get a GP assigned, but appointments except for critical cases might take up to a month wait.
Or you can pay 75€ for a private GP, with follow up appointments at 35€.
The after op care is excellent, with nurses for bandage replacement even doing house visits if you are elderly or do not have a vehicle. Physio sessions will set you back 5€ each at the hospital (free in Canada). or 15€ at the private clinic.
At the onset of lockdown here we received phone calls from the Centro if we need any help with mobility or purchasing food and a call from the Seguranca Social if we are aware of the measures that have to be taken and if we have any symptoms.
I could not agree more I had cataract surgery and made several trips to the doctor for measurements and eye tests got the surgery the surgery was covered but I had to pay 250 dollars for the lens and I get to write off the mileage to and from the doctor and meals on my taxes. When we lived in the US we had good corporate health insurance and still a visit to the hospital for any reason was a couple thousand dollars in copays minimum . the lawyers insurance companies billing departments are all parasitic to the cost of medical care I cannot understand why people can not see that.
I get to write off the mileage to and from the doctor and meals on my taxes. – lasttwo
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Keep in mind, you can only deduct medical expenses in excess of 10% of adjusted gross income.
Walt, can you comment on JHK’s thoughts on local taxation and bonding?
It becomes obvious that this event is going to collapse heavily-indebted organizations like NY’s MTA. The MTA is losing revenue from tolls, fares, and sales taxes while expenses remain the same or have gone higher. They simply will not be able to pay their bond holders, especially when you consider the second-order effects of this: many people will want to continue working from home, for fear of the city, and that will collapse the demand for office space, which will collapse the commercial value of the buildings, which will collapse the tax revenues dependent on those buildings.
If we do not fully reopen by Easter, we will never fully reopen again, not unless there is a wholesale debt repudiation.
Dr Tom
The government just made a down payment on trying to fill in all the money being lost by business and folks being shut in. The MTA is a perfect example, as are restaurants, stores, amusement parks, things that are not necessary items during a lock down. Costs do not stop because of shutdown.
As this progresses, the outlay from the government is just going to grow, probably on the exponential curve. The government cannot print enough money to keep everyone afloat, so we will see attrition in the service economy. Everywhere. In the World.
MTA was a hot mess before this crisis.
This is but one of numerous articles Larry Littlefield has written on the subject:
https://larrylittlefield.wordpress.com/2018/08/15/an-open-secret-mta-capital-costs-have-soared-to-pay-for-underfunded-metro-new-york-construction-union-pensions/
Yep, John. The debt is going away, either through your hyperinflation, repudiation, or a severe haircut. The assets of places like NYC will still be present and worth something but only if the economy isn’t frozen long enough to allow them to deteriorate.
The shutdown and resulting economic damage from it was an event horizon. We cannot cross back to that world. We can try to continue to make the financial arrangements of that world work, when we know they don’t. Or we can soberly look at what we have.
JHK isn’t far off in thinking that the end result will be his world made by hand, if the high-order-complexity world ceases, as I think it has.
Jubilee for the TBTF banks,
Jubilee for Wall Street,
Jubilee for the Big Corporates,
Well, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Jubilee for the 90% sounds fair to me.
I don’t see another way. The debt is unpayable by individuals.
Well, the MTA probably won’t be able to pay their motormen $35 per hour anymore, with 6 weeks paid vaca and full retirement after 20 years.
The money isn’t there for salaries, let alone capital projects. At least we built the 2nd Avenue subway a few blocks at $2bln a mile.
I think this is every local government now, and at a time of increased demand for local government services.
That’s why I asked Walt what the sense in his small burg was. Do they think “this sucker could go down?”
The money isn’t there for salaries, let alone capital projects. At least we built the 2nd Avenue subway a few blocks at $2bln a mile.
Why not increase fares by 20% – there are no viable alternatives for the vast majority of passengers, so demand won’t be affected, much.
Fully reopening by Easter would be mass suicide, in the opinion of my wife, who is a “real” doctor.
Does she happen to have death numbers for Italy? The death rate there is 10.7/1000, so you’d expect 55000 people to die in any month, SM. Last I saw, only 11,000 had died from Covid in iTaly, and that basically in March.
Here’s a page listing ACTUAL death stats from the EU:
http://www.euromomo.eu/
“European mortality bulletin week 12, 2020
Link to printable version
Pooled estimates of all-cause mortality show, overall, normal expected levels in the participating countries; however, increased excess mortality is notable in Italy.”
Here’s the all-ages z-score graph for Europe, where more people have died of COVId than any other country:
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_pooled.html
See if you can tell me which year was more deadly in terms of excess deaths for the elderly, 2017, or 2020? For 18-64, deaths have been BELOW THE AVERAGE for this winter.
Suicide? Hardly, except for those over 65, whom we must protect in their own quarantine.
Love the handle. I so miss the late 90s to mid- 2000s. We couldn’t all be millionaires of course, but any American with a dream in their heart and a flaming keyboard could be a Cyrano de Bergerac. Twitter, SJWs, hipsters, and cancel culture killed snark, once an art form. They’ve made everything so crude and brutish yo could just cry.
p.s. Pass on all our thanks to The Wife (and yourself as her emotional support animal). We stand in awe of what she is about to go through.
Snark,
Why did you use scare quotes on the word real? What does it mean?
I disagree by the way. The world shut down is so massively strange and incomprehensible to me that I might just start to stutter if I try to express it. It is so very odd that I keep thinking, there must be something going on that I don’t see.
Either something new and different is about to ensue, or we have a world of hurt coming which will be far more deaths than covid could every have arranged, plus much other morbidity short of death.
Ask him if his “real” doctor wife has the credentials of the individuals advising Trump on managing the problem.
I suspect he will respond with more snark, rather than anything of substance.
Why did you use scare quotes on the word real? What does it mean?
As opposed to the “pretend”doctor in the DrTomSchmidt moniker. I also think it would have been health (and therefore economic) suicide to relax restrictions by Easter Sunday. Full pews then full cemeteries.
Clearly Dr Fauci and a few other realists have some say and some sway in the White House. But there again, Trump only backed off because Fox News told him it was bad politically.
Yes I can Doc. I received the following non-confidential email on 13 Mar 20:
“Please be advised that there has been substantial volatility in the bond market today. Municipal officials are urged to immediately contact their financial advisors, bond counsel and banks to determine what impact this may have on bond anticipation notes or bond sales scheduled over the next few weeks and whether any action is necessary or advisable to ensure that debt service obligations and adequate cash flow are maintained.”
When I read this I immediately called our bond counsel and was told that one of the major banks (Goldman Sacks if my memory serves me correctly) declared New Jersey municipal debt to be junk bond status and that they were no longer going to loan money in this market. This was followed by many other institutions and the result was an increase in BAN interest rates, but more importantly, an increase in the number of “no-bids” at the bonds sales.
Do you think that the Mightiest Magic Money Printer of Them All is going to ride in to the rescue? You will have to guess because that bit IS confidential. One mayor at two local mayors phone conferences asked how long would it be before it took a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. No one answered his inquiry nor will anyone address the danger in limitless money printing. Apparently there is no downside, har, har, har. I’m thinking the Fall will occur this Fall.
Thanks, Walt. For a brief period, rates on triple-tax-free NY State debt went to about 3.5%. Federal Money Market is far below that. Now I understand the spike.
NYC and NYS are not going to be able to meet requirements. Your mention from GS shows they know that too.
Invest accordingly.
PM’s and mattresses my friend, and plenty of pB as well to protect them.
A pet peeve of mine is the way people on public forums use abbreviations and acronyms to those who will not know what in hell it means.
So ask and then you will know as well.
But its stupid to make your post hard to comprehend. It interrupts the flow. Not everyone knows the same acronyms. Just stop using them and type it out.
Not everyone knows the same acronyms. – sophia
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They’re pretty easy to learn. Let’s do lesson #1 starting with some well known ones:
LOL = Laugh Out Loud
And then there are offshoots from LOL
LMAO = Laughed My Ass Off
LMFAO = Laughed My Fuckin’ Ass Off
BTW = By the Way
TPTB = The Powers That Be
You can also put your cursor on the acronym, double click and you will usually get a definition.
@sophia
Some of them you will learn simply by lurking long enough and are site specific like ggg Golden Golem (Gollum) of greatness aka Trump
If we do not fully reopen by Easter, we will never fully reopen again, not unless there is a wholesale debt repudiation.
Do you have some evidence for this? I think there is nothing mystical about Easter (in every sense), and there is a lot of resilience in the system, and lock-downs can continue for quite a lot longer without shutting off any possibility of bounce-back and recovery.
A friend of mine works for MTA, in a non-frontline position … she has been doing bits and pieces from home, but basically has been stood down. There are some cost savings possible.
Well, take a read here:
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/shocking-9-million-americans-have-now-filed-unemployment-benefits-lockdowns-began
We never recovered the position of employment before 2008. The recent employed percentage of the population barely made it above 60%, and never got back to the 65% range of before 2008. Ignore the unemployment rate.
The longer we go, the worse the collapse gets. Our predatory managerial class, which cared so little about jobs that it sent the supply chain to China, will do everything it can to preserve “profits,” and that means cost-cutting (not the stock options of the financial “engineers” of course) A three- or four-week mandatory furlough would have taken 8% of the annual income of the affected population. Severe, but perhaps manageable for the rest of us to bail out.
Meanwhile, the debt just grows in relative and absolute terms. You asked about the MTA raising fares. Since the fare box covers only about 50% of costs, raising fares 20% won’t come close to making up the difference. If ridership drops 20%, you need a 25% increase to remain level. Ridership has dropped 90%, while the bond holders demand their interest payments. I hoe that’s clearer.
My brother works for the MTA as well. Hopefully his pension is well secured, since I think he’s going to be collecting it soon, at a very early age.
Fair enough – some good points, and detail.
Trump said Cigna and Humana are waiving copays for coronavirus treatment in his daily dog and pony show yesterday. So not to worry, Trump has you covered. Die beste aller möglichen Welten.
Burn that bridge when you come to it.
97% of Italian deaths involved pre-existing conditions. Diabetes, obesity, or respiratory / coronary conditions. Also 85% of infected never even get tested, meaning the true death rate is under 1/2 of 1% of those who have the virus. Media has absolutely no sense of proportion whatsoever.
As you say “Hardship is a great attitude-adjuster.”
We’re not going back to normal because normal was the problem!
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/03/27/covid-19-we-wont-go-back-to-normal-because-normal-was-the-problem/
Thanks for posting that. I only just scanned it, I can barely handle Mr. Kunstler’s big words before noon.
I like that bit about not dismissing intact institutions as authoritarian.
One problem I have been observing, even before the crisis du jour, was that we (in New York anyway) have been experiencing the authoritarianism from the grossly incompetent , the very people who have been working hard to politicize, undercut, and understaff our formerly functional institutions.
Andrew Cuomo is a glaring example.
I mentioned below the people in the billing department in my local hospital being stupid. A lot of these stupid people staffing medical facilities enjoy flaunting their authority over the customers on a good day. Try to straighten out a bill for a sick person sometime, you’ll see what I mean.
Andrew Cuomo is drawing a loyal crowd around himself by one thing, he is assuming responsibility for the debacle , and doing something about it. His pressers are mostly apolitical and get this, he tells the truth.
A lot of the “fat of the land” that supports growth of Liberalism is going to be destroyed by the virus if it lasts long enough. This country, all countries are going to change politically a lot. A silver lining may be the demise of globalism, as we go more local. The international finance community will hopefully disappear.
Where was he when New Yorkers were getting upset over the closing of so many hospitals?
Probably meeting with Trump as Trump reduced the pandemic office on the national security office in the WH.
Government is always going to cannibalize things they think are unnecessary due to not being used to full capacity.
Andrew has been governor a lot longer than Donald has been president.
People have been complaining about the hospital closings since Spitzer.
I heard the president just streamlined and consolidated things for more efficiency, but whatever.
Eliot Spitzer?
You mean Love Client #9?
LoL!
Ask him why Cuomo was hiding thousands of ventilators.
Watching him get caught in his own lie on TV was amusing, in a sad way, ofc.
I’d say the 30% asset haircut has destroyed much fat of the land, John.
We will not have time for whiny word games in the future, at least. Time to return to work.
The bonfire of the vanities.
New York Times headline:
WORLD AS WE KNOW IT ENDING
Women and Minorities hardest hit
1619 project will continue
I said before, use the newsprint they were going to put ink on for toilet paper.
I heard from someone working in NYC that the situation at the hospitals is not as dire as the Times said it was.
There should be some sort of penalty for deliberately trying to scare people during a pandemic.
The doctor featured in the article should be in very hot water for having traipsed throughout a functioning ER with her IPhone recording video. HIPPA and all that jazz.
Then I read that this doctor Sally What’s Her Name has a specialty as a doctor who directs “simulations”.
And of course there is the CNN video of Mike Pompeo saying, “This is a live exercise”.
Re-heal-lee-hay??!!
Well, I have been playing along like a good girl for over three weeks now. Can’t complain. I have been gardening and cooking and coloring with the kids and watching some great old movies on TCM but it there is some big global thang going on that is profoundly changing our lives, I for one would appreciate being told the freakin’ truth about it.
I read yesterday that the Pentagon is squirreling away “essential personnel” down in the bowels of Cheyenne mountain, and their building in Washington is about 80% empty. What’s that about? Surely COVID-19 will be hitching a ride with one or more of those “essential personnel,” and their support staff, and they know it. Why would they retreat to a bunker deep underground and safe from a nuclear device? How dangerous, really, is this virus, or what other, as yet undisclosed unknown, is actually coming at us.
One solution to COVID in NYC is a nuke. Waiting for the first brainiac to propose that.
Speculating. Looking at the last few years domestically and globally.
1. Radical anti-gov movement centered in Wuhan (?) / Hong Kong protests.
2. Trade war between USA / China. Bio-weapon via China/Globalists?
3.UkraineGate failed. The Dem’s were down again. Plummet Trump / Nationalists governments through “pandemic” they are definitely not prepared for. Wait for Nationalists to horrify their citizens/world?
4.The global economy is done and the virus was released to distract and lock down the world?
drapnuir,
They aren’t bunkering against the virus.
BTKP,
4. They needed a bailout without popular opposition. Best way to get that is to make sure people are mandatorily unemployed BEFORE asking for the money, so the unemployed DEMAND the bailout.
They learned from 2008. We did not.
Abby,
You want the truth? WE CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
…even if we knew it…
…and we probably don’t
My concern is: how long will we be contending with mass denial? From my experience, 99% of those with good land, water and equipment in the southwest, don’t want to share or think others are trying to take advantage of them. Not many wanting to pitch-in and help either because of their previous investment. Our community hauls away its wood chipped mulch to the landfill instead of building soil. Our local leaders are looking to business as usual. Can organizations be formed to tackle this head on?
With such great business they are doing during the crisis, maybe the private hospitals will give 5% discount on the air sucked out of the ventilators. It would be a Christian thing to do.
I do remember our president signing something or other about ‘transparent’ billing in hospitals.
Not a panacea, but a worthy step.
Some better emergency billing plan could be come up with, I’m sure.
Maybe a flat rate for COVID-19 cases, something like that.
A government that can order fast-food workers to be paid at a much higher wage than those doing similar work can surely order around billing departments.
The billing department at my local hospital is staffed by stupid people, we need to leave them out of it.
If anyone makes any extra money out of this, it should be the doctors and nurses, who are under considerable strain not just to do their jobs under difficult conditions, but to make sure they themselves do not fall ill, because then they cannot work.
Whenever people who don’t like Kunstler have that said he’s a Chicken Little who always gets it wrong, I always fired back that aside from being a good writer, he only has to be right about the things he talks about once. Looks like “once” may have finally come. Yes, it will hurt, but whatever and whoever comes out the other side (maybe not me, since I’m disabled from one of our Sandbox fiascos), it will be better than what we have going right now. Good luck to those of you still invested in this thing called life; I’m jaded enough to take it or leave it.
Take it.
Try reading between the lines of “The Geography of Nowhere”, looks to me that he is always “right”, whatever that means. Like everything worthwhile in life Kunstler requires effort and you get out no more than you are prepared to put in. It is really that simple.
His forecasts and his diagnoses are not the same thing. I like the guy quite a bit, but you’re talking about him as if he’s the kabbalah rather than a social commentator.
He is a prophet, making projection based on data he has access to. We, represented by our government, are supposed to be the problem solvers.
Ha, what a joke. Thinking of the Deep State as problem solvers.
Selfish businessmen will not be tolerated during the Long Emergency. Simple as that.
You didn’t build that – not all by yourself you didn’t. And you only keep what you can hold.
That’s right, Janos. The elites think that they will maintain control of the state, and that the state will continue to enforce their property “rights.” Maybe in some places. But as more and more people become immiserated, the state faces collapse.
It already cannot afford the current arrangement. It’s about to run out of chewing gum and bailing wire.
Whatever happens people will adapt. Challenge stimulates creative response and brings out the best in us. Since the essence of the creative experience is identical with a genuine religious experience, challenge will also reconnect us to our Source
Now that’s some positive thinking! Not sure how true it will turn out to be, but positive thinking’s a good thing for now.
Positive thinking is the only way forward my friend…
It might just be, for a while at least.
That’s not really true. The “creative experience”, the art-induced high, whatever your methods and media is not ‘identical” to the religious experience. Not in my own experience anyway. Not even close.
They are very in-line with the generalized spiritual thing popular today. But what I would define as “religion”, not.
Personally, I spent decades, a lifetime almost, immersed in ‘art’. With a parent as a professional, i grew up not imagining anything else for myself. went to far-away places to study and become “the best” yada yada. I busted my ass. Words do not describe. I also wrote. I certainly experienced (I think) pretty much every intense and mild state the pursuit of Art can offer.
Went Born-Again (for like a month till the sheer assholery of all that was unbearable) Then Buddhist for years. Then, a real change occurred, un-asked for. it was unlike all cultural descriptions.There is no “high”. Zero. It’s not a drug, or coping mechanism, it doesn’t make life or people more beautiful, I do not have a song in my heart.
There is enormous gravitas, tragedy, awareness of supreme ugliness and waste. The futility of most human behaviors and projects. THE. ARROGANCE. The evil, everywhere. And yet, the words of the Bible and reasons behind “traditional” religion does (suddenly) make sense when before it seemed often old and lame. Patterns in the world, politics, humans, it makes sense now as an over-arching theme, where previously it was confusing. Shit simplified itself. By itself, I didn’t ask for a thing. Clarity, not emotion.
The best way to describe it is like when you’re struggling in school with algebra or geometry or some other heinous shit, and suddenly, you get it. That never actually happened for me with math, but you see what I mean. And, once you get it, you can’t UN-get it. it just IS.
To be clear, the reason I say that is a Religious, rather than Spiritual/Emotional (wishful, needy/yearning/human-created) experience, is that it is NOT in any conflict with ancient, timeless realities. You don’t need to get rid of the “patriarchy” for it to be “kind” etc. If you think that’s necessary, then you have been misled, or are misreading. The Eternal is eternal, human fashion and failure and falsehoods have no impact.
With a real experience you will know why we are here and why bad things happen, to good people. You won’t theorize or guess, you will know with certainty, and simplicity. And none of that will make you nicer or more at peace. it is not a High. In fact, that’s an insulting concept.
I apologize for enraging everyone here. I’m sure I just did.I guess I’ll consider my contribution to today’s chat complete.
Be careful out there.
Beautiful. So well put.
“There is enormous gravitas, tragedy, awareness of supreme ugliness and waste. The futility of most human behaviors and projects. THE. ARROGANCE. The evil, everywhere. And yet, the words of the Bible and reasons behind “traditional” religion does (suddenly) make sense when before it seemed often old and lame. Patterns in the world, politics, humans, it makes sense now as an over-arching theme, where previously it was confusing.”
Thank you, wayfarer.
I notice Nancy Pelosi is attempting once again to use this crisis to political advantage.
I probably shouldn’t say once again, because she has never really stopped.
She now wants an investigation of the president’s handling of this public health emergency. Maybe she can find something wrong with something the president thought about doing. That would be grounds for another impeachment.
If we had an AG, some of these people would be locked up by now where they couldn’t do any more harm, at least for the duration.
She never really stopped, because she keeps going back to the bar.
Well, let us have the senate have an investigation of why Pelosi held up the relief bill with all her stupid Dem BS.
The GOP needs to get a lot tougher to stop these Dem gangsters in the Congress.
Try and put me in the pound and I’ll bite.
She should start working on having Sleepy Joe removed (should he beat Trump in November. Polls have him 25 points ahead of Trump now in swing states).
Biden has clearly lost his shit. If Pelosi ever needed to bust out the 25th Amendment for impeachment it will be the day Biden is inaugurated.
Does he have shit to lose?
I have heard about these polls, how is that even possible?
Because they are fake.
How is this even a quesiton at this juncture?
Re Nancy Pelosi and her ilk: I am predicting that something will happen or somebody will say something publicly to reflect how utterly sick we are as a country of this endless posturing.
“Now imagine you have the stupendous good fortune to survive a Covid-19 infection after 21 days on a ventilator and go home. What is that billing statement going to look like?”
Assuming rates similar to your hospital: $328,762
And thanks in large part to the efforts of Creepy Joe Biden you won’t be able to declare bankruptcy either. Good work Joe!
What? Did the bankruptcy laws change?
That estimate is low. ICU stay can easily click along at $10k-$20k/day. That’s without all the extras. Anyone on a ventilator that long needs lots of stuff: respiratory therapy treatments, pulmonology consults and bronchoscopies, multiple line placements, frequent serum chemistries and blood counts, arterial blood gas measurements, possibly dialysis, skin care to prevent/treat decubitus ulcers, expensive antibiotics to treat/ward off hospital acquired infections, pseudomonas, etc.. Endless supplies from IV and nasogastric and ventilator tubing to band aids, gauze pads, various dressings, impervious barriers, all of which will itemized bill. If you die day on day 20, you’ve got all that plus the funeral expenses. Twenty-one days could get you to half a million or more.
That’s what the hospital charges. That’s not what they get paid. The only person actually stuck with that kind of bill is the poor bastard who has neither Medicaid or Medicare nor commercial insurance. Don’t get sick if you are under 65, between jobs, and without insurance, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. And read your commercial policy: it will usually have a lifetime maximum benefit. Stay under that.
Here’s how the hospital bills will be paid. 37 states have Medicaid Spenddown provisions in which the hospital can apply directly to Medicaid for payment on the patient’s behalf if a catastrophic bill eclipses a patient’s income and/or exhausts the insurance benefit. The new stimulus act injects billions into Medicaid because Covid19 will crater the States Medicaid budget. States will go bankrupt because the Federal assistance to Medicaid will not be nearly enough.
Let’s see how much of that magically “trickles down” to where it’s actually needed like the theory says it will.
You mean “tinkle” down.
Oh, what you suggest sounds reasonable to be sure. But, that probably ain’t the way it actually works in real life here in the US of A. If a person leaves the hospital with a big bill, that is due and payable in 15 to 30 days. Whatever insurance does not cover the patient must cough up – pun intended. Whatever that sum may be. The only thing that “saves” the patient from having to pay in full is being indigent. So, if you’ve put away savings and other resources for a rainy day, getting CV19 could be your very rainy day, maybe more like a monsoon. Remember, here in the US, there are no free lunches, unless a person is already in dire finances. And even then it’s not “free” – such a person is quietly forced into a permanent underclass because such persons are others “clientele”. What a web we’ve managed to weave, no?
But if you are in. One of the Medicaid Spend down states and the catastrophic bill is greater than your income and you have no assets, (they don’t count your home and your car)Medicaid will pay the hospital.
Ordinary people might get clobbered but the hospital will get paid
Another good post Jim.
I appreciate your dedication to truth and awareness.
I live in a small rural Ontario Canada village. We have many Amish/Mennonite small farms which I am very thankful for. At one farm you go in the garage to a fridge and get your fresh eggs. $3.00. The chickens are in the coop and yard next to it. The farmer posts the dates he is “harvesting” the chickens if you want to order one up.
The European folks down the road make bread in their beautiful wood stove oven brought with them from Europe. They disliked our wheat so much, they now grow their own. We have so many places like this that the town has printed up a map . Plus I go down to the Lake Huron shore when the fishing boats come in for fresh perch and white fish. But alas, we now have a snitch line for people to report abusers of the “social distance ” rules. Even taking pictures of the people and posting on line. I think they are going to make me wear a yellow arm band soon if I don’t smarten up. Everyone is a health inspector now I guess.
There are theories that the corporate, massed produced wheat is behind a lot of the digestive woes afflicting increasing numbers of
Americans.
The Amish in New York don’t participate in the government agricultural
programs, it’s against their religion. Smart.
Not the wheat per se no I believe its the round up chemical agriculture used now.
GO back to using animal waste as fertilizer and this issue disappears.
Single crop industrial farming is an environmental travesty. Garden farming is the way to go…
A travesty it is. But probably the only way to feed an overpopulated planet. Perhaps mother nature is about to take care of that dilemma. Maybe then we can get back to a sensible scale.
No the way forward is small farm hydroponics and local area supply and distribution.
Big agra should be used for fuel sources not food.
The Amish and Mennonite communities provide a viable blueprint we can all learn something from. I have been a fan for many years…
They are a great example of an ‘intentional community’, people who come together because they share common beliefs and values…
Well it’s not really “intentional”, they are born into the community. And if they leave they are shunned.
Good point. They were originally…
If you wore an armband that would show cooperation. But your complaining shows you are already complying. We have a snitch line too and it is not for you. It is not going to be used unless there is something to snitch on. Beer burps can spread the virus. In times like these par-tays have to be shut down. The smoking lamp is off.
$3.00? For a dozen? You’re getting ripped off.
Janos,
No, because they are free-range, living space guaranteed, organic fed, gathered lovingly by a living-wage non gender assigned farmer in a sustainable environment that is climate change sensitive.
The chickens willfully give up their eggs to you…they want you to enjoy them.
Such chickens also pay with their lives for these benefits. Watch Portlandia anent the fate of Colin the Chicken.
I pay £2.75 for half a dozen delicious free-range duck eggs. I don’t buy hen’s eggs anyway, because duck eggs are delicious and significantly bigger, and local ones happen to be available at my corner shop. £2.75 for six breakfasts or two thirds of that for a delicious omelette for two (with some left over for the dog) is dirt cheap. And we don’t have American incomes.
Would you rather have eggs produced in JHK’s back garden or in chicken hell where they all peck each other to bits because they don’t have a decent amount of space and never see the light of day?
I agree, and duck eggs make a great cake, but yet our eggs are a still better deal – totally free range, and totally free. We give away dozens every week.
Miss those days as a kid I had sixty hens and two roosters with a sign over the coop called,,,,Bens hens. Was selling a dozen eggs for 50 cents with bright orange yolks. Was living with my grandparents who had 8 acres backed up against the Los Angeles national forest and always figured a wild animal would get in one day and slowly eat all my birds.
Nope was the next door neighbors dog got in while I was at school and ripped all but three hens and a rooster to shreds and even they were all bit up.
Was devastated and my income stream disappeared.
At 11 I had a couple hundred dollars in the bank which may not sound like a lot now but this was in 1980. I often had more money than my parents at the time. Some day I will have a chicken coop and a large garden someday.
Sounds good, sophia! I don’t have that option. Duck eggs make brilliant creamy scrambled egg too.
And a nice big poached duck egg on toast does me for many a breakfast. I’ve got nothing against hens’ eggs – just been easily won over by those big orange duck yolks!
Kellyfrombayfield: You live in Alice Munro country! A friend of mine lived in Clinton and later Goderich. Two other friends, a couple at the time, lived in Millbank for a number of years and visiting them was always a pleasure.
During a visit from the UK to visit my in-laws over Christmas three years ago, I developed severe pneumonia.
I was admitted into hospital immediately upon presentation.
I spent two nights there during which time I received two bags of saline, an IV antibiotic drip, a CT scan and a couple of antibiotic tabs.
Imagine my surprise when, after I arrived back in the UK, I began to receive a steady stream of bills from every person that I had apparently come into contact with during my stay.
Total – $18,700 !!
In the UK it would be “no charge”, the exact same price as all those who are currently on ventilators right now battling COVID-19.
Fortunately, my travel insurance paid it in full.
Nobody from Europe ever dares to travel to the US without travel insurance.
When my daughter and son-in-law visit me from the UK they buy temporary health insurance too.
You make a valid point, Jeremy, but to leave things as they are right now in America or adopt Great Britain’s system is a false choice.
We haven’t seen a true for-profit system. You can’t stay in business offering a product no one can afford to buy, and we still don’t have any idea of the real cost of medicine.
Add on that there is no cost consideration, what do we pay to get well, all that it takes.
I like the health system here in the UK. I needed a meniscus trim on my knee earlier this year; arthroscopic surgery and anaesthesia. The NHS could do it without charge – but the wait would be 40 weeks.
I chose to go private instead – total cost £3400. Had it done in two weeks. My private health insurance paid for it minus a £100 co-pay.
The monthly premium for my entire family is just £90 per month – that’s the total monthly amount, no employer.
Yup – the UK health care system suits us just fine here.
I’m not sure what you call the racket that operates over there, but you can keep it – that’s for sure!
Profit has no business (word intended) being in the healthcare system PERIOD!
Cost of administration of Medicare: 3%
Cost of administration of private health insurance: 22-25%
Case closed.
Well said. The madness of Americanism. Rule by the Lowest of the Low. Yet such Death Merchants are lauded as Pillars of Society by weirdo Conservative Christians. Sickness of soul, sick unto death.
Absolutely snarkmatic9000. Totally agree. I’ve been taking care of my disabled elderly Mother who is of course on Medicare. I have watched firsthand how it operates and it is MUCH more efficient that private insurance companies. Less administrative cost as you said, and less bureaucracy, which is ironic. A government run insurance that is LESS bureaucratic than the private for profits.
Last year when I was contacting some Home Health service companies I was asked which Medicare Plan my Mother has. The regular old fashioned one or the new Medicare Advantage. When I said the old one they were relieved. Why? The Advantage is run by for profit companies and the bureaucratic bullshit they put providers through is excruciating.
Anyone who still advocates for the current American system of health care insurance is just a fool. A foolish, foolish fool. And I’m talking about both pre and post Obamacare, which was and is a joke.
And its a nightmare for the layperson to understand. I recently went onto medicare, thinking it would be simple at last. Wow, was I wrong. I had two different tracks to choose from, and once on the track I selected I had 32 plans to choose from. The one I chose said I have a 195 dollar yearly deductible to pay for drugs. The first time I used it at the pharmacy, I expected to pay that. Actually, I paid zero. But why? Not to complain, but I have no idea why. You read stuff and try to understand it but there is no understanding it and no way to know in advance what to expect.
Growing food,consuming food,thansforming consumed food into bio-degradable fertilizer and starting all over again ?
Human history is much more interesting than that.
Let calculate energy return on investment (EROI) of 3 different activities:
Scenario A:
Growing food
Scenario B
Stealing food from the pathetic food growers
Scenatio C
Imposing 10% food tax on the peaceful,timorous food growers
Yes, Nilotics such as the Masai did just that to the poor Bantu farmers (themselves ruthless imperialists to the hunter gatherers they displaced in East Africa). Yet some of the Bantu Tribes gave us as good as they got, such as the Kikkuyu (sp?). In the long run of course, the warriors pastoralists had no chance against the agriculturalists.
We should be more PC and not use terms like “steal”.
I prefer military term “liberate”
Liberating the city means bombing it out of existence
Liberating the ville means burning it down.
Is not it wonderful to liberate a VC piglet who yearns to break free and augment your miserable C-ration in the process ? W/o going thru the hassle of feeding and raising it.
We realized it long time ago.Later on I read a short book by Franz Oppenheimer “The State” (1908) where Oppenheimer guy paints the big world-wide picture of this principle-at-work.
What about the Zulu who all but destroyed every other tribe in all of South Africa at the time?
“The fabled fog-of-war will conceal what is happening to the health care system itself, while the battle rages. After that, what?” Well, here’s what — massive bankruptcy for the many who have no money to pay hospital bills and cratering of the medical insurance companies hit with the charges of those who are somewhat covered with insurance. Maybe they could run an ad of Pete and Amy singing a duet “If You Like Your Health Insurance You Can Keep It”! Except everyone’s was cancelled. People seem to forget while blaming the government for a shortage of ventilators that we have a private health care system and the people responsible are the CEOs and inventory managers at each hospital.
$23,472.89 is a pretty shocking number.
I had surgery as well. Removal of a cancerous tumour which required laproscopic procedure. I checked in to the hospital on a thursday morning and left monday morning. I had to pay approximately $86.00 for the room, which was semi private. The company I work for paid for 80% of that as all employees are covered under a medical plan for which a very nominal amount is deducted off salary. I am retired now and still covered under that company plan as part of my retirement benefit. The province I live in also pays for my health care. If I get sick anywhere in Canada I can get good professional health care.
It’s not an ouch contest as to which country has a better ‘system’, but $23,472.89 seems pretty outrageous. The word ‘racket’ comes to mind.
Not sure why the word “socialism’ is such a boogey man word in the USA, but if you want to throw it at us, feel free. Guess Canada and Cuba will need to stand in solidarity on that matter.
The best solution is something akin to what they have here in Germany. One gets public or private insurance and the ability to switch to public from private depends on income. If you make beyond a certain amount, you cannot switch to the public option.
The public option is not as compy where hospital stays and wait times are concerned, but it is not bad either. And the private option, while cushier in some respects, is more expensive — particularly as one ages.
The system in the US is grotesque. Before moving to Germany, I had to give up my employer-based plan, and I went to a walk-in clinic after getting sick shortly before our big move. It was in a good part of town, clean, and somewhat upscale, but the patients were treated like dirt. I assume because they were viewed as being poor for not having “proper” insurance. That experience alone was quite eye-opening.
Compy should be comfy
You look for a system. For the majority, there is no system.
Medicare is a system, the VA is a system, Medicaid is a funding agency for the indigent. That is it.
Poverty of imagination meets emotional savagery. Libertarianism is simply Calvinism updated to the “needs” of latter day American hucksters in suits.
As a reformed Libertarian, I couldn’t agree with your post more JS.
“why the word ‘socialism’ is such a boogey man word in the USA”
Because most Americans are ignorant, having been totally brainwashed by the predatory Anglo-Saxon capitalist system for at least 100 years.
Prove it guy from Venezuela or Cuba.
That is why president Trump wants to enact legislation to force billing transparency. We didn’t have this kind of racket a couple of decades ago. And if he can do that, it will be the most useful thing a president has done for the public in at least 50 years.
I am now 100% well. That was 11 years ago this November.
Wider gauge trains would be safer faster and more efficient. Maybe a crash program to upgrade the major cross country lines, would give the nation a way to move goods and people, a way to stay connected.
Martin: Reminds me of the Feds coming to Tahoe in July 1997 and Chamber of Commerce response to proposal for rebuilding Truckee/Tahoe City standard gauge rail line (“for passengers & freight” actual words of Fed Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater}: :Monorail! Maglev! Gondolas! No stinkin’ tracks at Tahoe!
Slater offered Federal sponsored grants for updated railway linking Tahoe passengers to Reno Airport and in the bargain smooth rail connection to the national rail grid, and the whizzes at the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, showing the cowards they were, bowed to casinos and ski resorts demanding “SEXY” monorail run by the Lake Business Proprietors. Monorail is a plethora of unmatched cross sections meaning no national fixed guideway network.
It was understood rail link to Reno Airport (RNO) would bring Tahoe International passengers and some 1 million plus additional visitor room nights, adequate income for the many Tahoe water quality remediations never to be completed. Instead, drivers and passengers coming up US 50 hold their breath passing by “The Bluffs”; rotten granite akin to the (collapsed) “Old Man Of The Mountain” late of New Hampshire. Rock Roulette.
We can forgive Mr. Martins ignorance of existing 3 million railcar rolling stock fleet rendered useless with track gauge change…Or does he have !PRESTO! patented designs for up his sweaty sleeves for all rail mode associated equipment? Lets hear him discuss completely resized and redesigned paraphernalia needed with change track gauge, including automated track laying, tie changing, ballast renewal, and containers for the new order? Oh, silly me, I neglected to mention interfacing warehousing and pick up/delivery. Monster highway trucks for monster containers?
Or using conventional containers, stacked side by side on the extra wide railcars. Loading and unloading accomplished with magnets…. There is a rare disease, an abhorrence for railway exemplified by such idiot savants as Randy O’toot, sadsack that he is, dedicating his life to the greater glory of motor mania. Not satisfied with damping railway in the lower 48, there has been a worldwide clique of rubber tire boosters attempting to end railways.
Fortunately, as Famine Hedge alone, railway mileage (standard gauge) has been on the build around the world, probably partly in reaction to the anti-railway crowd? Inherent in genius of the railway is ability to be constructed and rebuilt by normal humans working off flatcars and pickup trucks, when fancy automated equipment is not available. Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform.
As famine appears, as a result of false flag troposphere nuclear detonations knocking down motor food distribution, we can duly credit the pernicious movement to remove branch rail food district links. Famine is appropriate segue to Scripture: Instead of Daniel 4 V-15 Iron Bands today; more appropriate and on JHK topic is the full O.T. Chapter read in Deuteronomy 28: Divine promises of Blessings and Curse.
Dt 28 in first half gives the story of prosperous America, now abusing the warnings and entering the second half, the Curse half of Dt 28. Baby sacrifice, debauchery, cheating the poor, etc… Washington’s Valley Forge Vision trial #3 is at hand. Note Lincoln’s acknowledgement of his duty and awareness as passing through the 2nd trial. Trump/Pence soon enough will be apprised of the Valley Forge Vision, and their unenviable place as proprietors through the 3rd Trial. Trials change people and nations.
All is not lost, just be ready for things as they is. Fix relationships and then do the needful things, including enhancing the work of Abraham Lincoln. See the lesson for the day: 2nd Chronicles Chapter 7, verse 14. Read and heed, encouraging words for our time.
How much longer will the quarantine continue?
How serious is China Virus?
It depends on whose guesses you want to go with.
The seriousness comes from the newness, in that they are learning as they go along how to treat it.
The major difference between this virus and the flu, is that this one is in your lower respiratory tract, a more hospitable environment.
The fear is that if the worst case scenarios come to realization, hospitals will be overwhelmed.
For some reason, this organism makes our immune system overreact. When the killer Ts kill viruses, they are killing parenchymal cells too. That is a cytokine storm. Too many lung cells destroyed, that is it.
Avoid aspirin, ibuprofen and blood pressure pills that end in ‘pril’ or ‘tan.’
Take massive amounts of vitamin C.
I read somewhere that Vitamin D can counter the (good) effect of blood pressure pills. It’s endless!
I’ve got BP pills ending in ‘tan’. The previous one gave me an ‘ACE cough’ and the one before that gave me swollen ankles!
Hence ending up with the one ending in ‘tan’. Am I going to succumb to nCV even more quickly than I already think I am? 🙂
It’s a Gain of Function Bioweapon manufactured to add subterfuge to a deflating macroeconomy. Top USA bureaucrat that designed protocol for bioweapons research claims nCorona is a bioweapon but MSM & Medical Establishment are claiming conspiracy theory just as they did with respect to 911 & controlled demolition.
RW
I recently worked in a vineyard adjacent to a derelict railroad. Decades ago, they tore up the rails and ties and sold them for scrap. They even dug up the crushed stone and resold it. But the stone archway bridges over the ravines are made of stone and will last for centuries. The survey work is done, and the ties and rails could be replaced. All we’ll need is an industrious immigrant labor force willing to do the grueling labor for subsistence wages.
Why immigrant labor force?
Indeed. Sad that such thoughts are simply automatic among some.
It’s because that is what we bring inso many unskilled immigrants for. To work hard for peanuts.
That’s a fact.
Americans work just as hard, but want to be paid a living wage to do so.
That’s the current status quo but what happens when the economy goes south? Those peanuts might be mighty tasty…
Corruption is a way of life and thought for those like Kruel.
The Chinese will look over the heads of all other people to hire their own.
White Americans will look over the heads of their own people to hire aliens. No we feeling whatsover.
The Chinese don’t care about each other as individuals per se but they have group pride – and that’s the basis of Nationalism. Since we lack it, what’s the point of keeping on with “America”? It’s simply a farce.
I think the poster was being sarcastic.
Tongue-in-cheek reference to the Chinese immigrant rail labor of the latter nineteenth century.
Yeah that’s possible…
It was obvious.
It’s a historical reference to the labor force that built the railroads in the 19th century. Apologies if I offended anyone.
If? All immigrants are created alike, right Kuehl? Just like all breeds of dogs are the same, they’re all dogs, right?
So what if they’re radically opposed to us and have been for millennia? Or are thirty points lower than on us in IQ? They’re still human! Set the bar as low as possible (just like wages….)
Do you post this stuff sitting around in a pair of dirty underwear?
So much for the Urantia book then. You might as well flush it down the toilet page by page.
You are infected with two American diseases: Optimism and Egalitarianism. A noxious brew, usually fatal. There is little hope for your recovery.
And btw, you know I’m right, thus your anger.
Because your average American refuses to work hard or get their hands dirty.
My direct experience at farm work proves you are correct, BenR. Farm work is hard. It’s often twelve-hour days, seven in a row. Tilling on a tractor, welding broken equipment, tying fence, digging post holes, clearing brush, harvesting crops—it ain’t for the flaccid or lazy. Many of the locals couldn’t make it until lunch and just wandered off. I would see others sitting in the shade dithering with their phones until caught and fired. On the other hand, when the migrant crews showed up, most from other countries, we stayed out of their way. They are lean, skilled, and amazingly fast and thorough in their work. It was a privilege to try and keep up with them.
invaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_p5MOK7CYM&t=68s
People who would import immigrant labor and pay subsistence wages should be enslaved and forced at the point of a gun and encouraged by a whip to do said grueling labor for no wages and subsisting on bread and water.
Ah, a man after my own heart. I’m growing my beard now as a sign of penance and renewal. Like Al Gore after he lost? Who said that? Fuck off.
Globalism in a nutshell.
You can bet that none of them will be the top 5%, You know, the ones who are getting those huge bailout checks. As time goes by, men will lose interest in attractive females, they’ll be looking for a woman who can catch a chicken.
Or who can wrassle a pig and look good doing it. We’re back to Lil Abner already….
All you folks that are talking about the cost of health care are either avoiding some issues or just want to deny them.
The hospitals are a business with fixed and variable costs like any other business. Do you think that medical care is free? Not! The reason costs seem high is because of the indigent folks that EMTALA into the hospital. Someone has to pay for the costs of these folks. So yes, you do. The hospital I worked at ran 30% indigent. So when you say you want everyone cared for, that it is a right, you are going to pay for the folks that cannot pay for themselves.
Socialized medicine is a joke in a healthcare crisis like this. Cost wise, everything is free, right? Not! When the dust settles, if it does, those health care facilities will come in and charge the governments for all that “free” medical care. The people will scream when their tax bills skyrocket to cover the costs. NOTHING IS FREE! Rethinking of national medical care may occur once the people find out the true cost.
If NYC had socialized medicine right now, it would be overwhelmed from insufficient staffing much more than it is, let alone medical facilities and equipment. How many socialized medicine countries have hospital ships to assist emergency situations like NYC and LA? Competition breeds overage of services which we have now, thank goodness.
The US system of medical care via insurance is going to take a real beating too. Premiums are going to soar after the dust settles. Big changes are going to happen here too. NOTHING IS FREE!
The only difference between the two systems is who is responsible to pay the piper, the government or insurance companies. Either way, the folks ultimately pay for health care. Pay taxes or pay premiums.
I hear ya. So you’ll be refusing any government write downs of your medical expenses should you get the virus then, I assume? And of course you’ll be doing the right thing and refusing delivery of any stimulus checks as well. And I know you’re not dipping your beak into Social Security or Medicare, and any of that socialist crap either. You know, because NOTHING IS FREE and you’re a RUGGED INDIVIDUALIST, and all that.
Social Security is my money, invested for forty years as payroll taxes. 80% of my medical costs are Medicare, also funded from taxes over forty years. The other twenty percent is funded by me through insurance. Stimulus checks, nope. Write downs, do not know anything about it and would not count on it. So yeah, I try to stay away from dependency on the government.
People who want to reduce Social Security and Medicare are stealing. The trust funds ensure that the government cannot steal the capital accumulated there. Yeah right! The Deep State has already stolen the trust fund for both.
I do too John. Nothing good to be gained from depending on the government. You are a man of faith so you have that to draw on in its stead. Faith is a real power and force; perhaps the most powerful force in the universe…
“Socialized medicine is a joke in a healthcare crisis like this. Cost wise, everything is free, right? Not! When the dust settles, if it does, those health care facilities will come in and charge the governments for all that “free” medical care. The people will scream when their tax bills skyrocket to cover the costs. NOTHING IS FREE! Rethinking of national medical care may occur once the people find out the true cost.”
Our new Chancellor of the Exchequer has promised all the funding necessary to get the country through Covid19, JohnAZ. The hospitals will get all the extra money they need for the ventilators, PPE and extra staffing. I’ll let you know how much the tax rate goes up in due course. I currently pay 21% income tax – in England it’s 20% for basic rate. And the first £11,500 of that isn’t taxed at all, so I pay tax on less than half my income.
If it went up another penny in the pound I wouldn’t mind in the slightest. In fact, I’m feeling guilty because my (modest, but perfectly adequate) pension is still being paid while a whole lot of self-employed and gig-economy people aren’t able to earn any money (the government is going to help most of them, but by …June!), so I’d be more than happy to donate a chunk of my state pension to them for the duration, if there was a mechanism to do that. For now, I’ve had to settle for donating money to the Trussell Trust, which organises a network of food banks throughout the country.
Also three quarters of a million people have volunteered to help the NHS out with extraneous jobs like ferrying non-Covid patients to and from hospital appointments, picking up prescriptions for vulnerable patients, etc. People pull together in an emergency – they’re not all just hoarding toilet paper. And for anyone who’s lost a relative to Covid19, a penny on their income tax will be the least of their worries. If it even happens (I’d still ditch HS first).
I think we agree. Someone is going to have to pay for the costs of the emergency. Think microeconomics.
We have rainy day accounts for emergencies. If insufficient, we borrow to pay the increased cost of an emergency.
That is what all the health care agencies are doing right now. Except there are no rainy day funds, so borrowing, also known as running the presses, is financing all the activity.
Who knows, we may just add this onto all the collective national debts and hope no one, like retirees, ever want their money.
Personally, GA, I think that due to the increasing income gap in the US, a lower service medical system is going to be created.
You’re so good! But what about those elderly British pensioners freezing to death though? Or young couples who have to wait years to get housing why immigrants from Pakistan wait a few days?
I’m not good at all. But the pensioners may also benefit from the food banks. I’m a British pensioner too, BTW.
“or young couples who have to wait years to get housing why immigrants from Pakistan wait a few days?'”
Utter ignorant bollocks. That’ll be the ones who come over in boats from Pakistan. 🙂
And you are presumably aware, from the habits of Asians over your way, that Pakistanis are very good at acquiring their own homes. There’s a generational solidarity thing that goes on in their communities. Mum, Dad, Grandpa and Grandma will help you get on your feet – and the quid pro quo is that you’ll support them in their old age.
Many of them end up as property-owning landlords.
They tend to be happy to support their kids through university too, but only if they do something they approve of, like medicine, law, dentistry, engineering etc. Or something that will lead to you ending up on TV.
If you want to study History, English or Underwater Basket-Weaving, they often think you should finance that yourself.
Private healthcare insurance and pharmacy is expensive because you are paying for the 3-5 administrators that are standing behind every front line health care worker. You are not just paying for the nurse and the doctors time, but the salary of 3-5, six figure administrators to work 9-5 (with benefits) and be on the company’s softball team on the weekends. These administrators also intentionally understaffed the healthcare facilities that a person is likely to frequent. With the exception of a few places, hospitals are routinely understaffed, and don’t even talk about long term care. That incident in Washington state with the elderly care unit, one sick CNA who has to work to feed their family, could easily have infected those elderly patients, most CNAs have two jobs to make ends meet. CNA’s and nurses commonly have from 15-20 patients to care for in a long term care facility. That kind of service is low quality and your bill still comes to 4000-12000 a month. Thats not intensive medical care, that someone like me bringing you pills in a cup with a cup of water, taking vitals and a 2x a week visit from an occupational therapist. The CNA’s, nurses, and attending physician, and PT’s, OT’s ST’s do ok but that isn’t even a fifth of the cost of staying there. You’re paying for the administrators lifestyle. We have pharmacist who are working like slaves in some of these chain pharmacies. They make good money, but there is a limit to how hard a person works before it gets dangerous to the patient. You seem to think that the free market will provide, yea for those administrators,who are denying you optimal care because they have to get their cut.
Shame on you John AZ. Hospitals charge way more than an extra 30%. The charges are more like 10 times what they should be, and they are nontransparent, which ought to be illegal. Yes, we can pay for the indigent, you stingy bastard.
You have made me mad because anger that should be directed toward the gouging rich are instead directed at poor people. Rather than solve the real problem, you just want a Dickensian country.
What will the business of America be after Covid-19? – JHK
==
More insular. China will be dropped. Manufacturing will return. The US stock markets will see all time high before the year’s end.
Of-course, our dear friend athiest Q will be busy compiling names of Catholics and lapsed Catholics in the banking industry as well as the US government. He will have to do it himself since I’ve yet to see anyone else do such, but should a Copy & Paste internet source be available, I would be VERY interested indeed. I would also be interested in the list of names of Irish Italian Germans Dutch and so on. We must have an “open discussion on the topic of ethnicity, race, and tribalism” as our dearest German friend hmuller so innocently requested.
Malthuss, Janos, please don’t hesitate to contribute to our lists as well. Let’s see how many names we get and how many lists we compiled. I’m looking forward to examining your efforts!
Atheism is a hothouse plant that will not survive the Long Emergency. A new Age of Faith will be one of the fruits of the collapse (or radical scale back) of the West…
I have noticed that a lot of people who bill themselves as atheist actually worship the president.
I don’t mean they worship Trump. I mean they see the president as God, kind of like the Romans saw Jupiter as king of the Gods.
Obama, The One, was fine with these people, because he didn’t interfere with their PC religion, he supported it.
But then the president was Donald Trump. You think a religion can’t recognize a new God? Didn’t the Catholics switch Popes?
Anyway this new God doesn’t do PC, and they are all upset with him.
Watch, the next time he does a press conference. The media elevated him to God even before he was elected, and the questions they ask him at this time are not about disease and preparedness, they are asking him about words he said that violate doctrine.
Government has to be the god of atheism. It’s all that stands between them and the harsh, mechanistic universe they have constructed…
That’s a good point, sun.
“Government has to be the god of atheism.”
A-theism doesn’t have a god. Or a religion. If people make a god of something, then you can give them an appropriate name, depending on what they ‘worship’. But ‘a-theist’ isn’t it.
I am currently a non-theist. I regard governments with the same wariness as I regard a whole lot of other things. And the idea that I would worship either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn is the kind of nonsense only dreamed up by the religious who petulantly insist that everyone must worship someone or somethingbecause their imagination is biased and their experience of non-religious people is limited to stereotypes. There are as many types of non-theist people as there are types of people generally. Some are nice; some are mean; some are generous; some are demanding and entitled. Just like religious people.
Anarchists are generally not religious. Neither do they have any time for governments.
The government exists to serve us, not to be worshipped by us. And when it doesn’t serve us, we should make more fuss than we do. And by ‘us’ I don’t mean ‘me’.
I’m not saying atheists worship government, I am saying they place their faith in government similar to how theists place their faith in God. The reason I believe a new Age of Faith is on the horizon is because the collapse (or increased impotence) of government will cause a crisis of faith which can only be resolved through a return to that which is incorruptible…
As Paul Tillich wrote, faith is an expression of our ultimate concern. Whatever we are ultimately concerned with there our faith will lie…
Alba: Negative numbers are still numbers or values. Pious Atheists weigh in at -100 whole pious Christians or Hindus or whatever clock in at +100.
True rationality is Agnosticism or “I don’t know”. That the Zero mark of secular peace. Small p intentional. The Peace that passeth understanding is religious in the positive sense.
Atheism is now popular. Future spiritual autobiographies will tell of young people throwing off its dogma and embracing Agnosticism and from there, awakening into positive territory, His Territory. A good “I don’t know” is thus, precious. Did you ever even tarry there? Or did you slingshot right into the Devil’s camp, fanatic that you are?
I don’t think it’s really that similar. It certainly isn’t from where I’m sitting.
I just don’t believe in ‘security’ as a thing. Never have. But it’s certainly been great having good services for the greater part of my life. I just don’t feel like complaining that my kids went to good schools at no up-front cost, and that we’ve all been able to see a doctor when we needed one likewise.
It has nothing to do with faith, although it does have something to do with a belief in a decent society, where people aren’t deprived of basic services because of their income.
Janos, I’m sorry you’re ignorant, but there isn’t anything I can do about it.
“True rationality is Agnosticism or “I don’t know”.”
That’s all an a-theist is. Someone without a belief in a deity for which there is no evidence. Not someone claiming they have proof of the non-existence of something.
You are free to live in whatever fantasy world you choose. You can leave the rest of us to live in the world without constantly trying to prove – primarily to yourself – that your fantasy is real.
It’s a nice fantasy. No-one’s denying that. For the most part anyway – it unfortunately has some vile parts.
Your own pretend Christianity is a joke. Give me an honest a-theist any day to someone who wears the superstitious veneer of a faith in whose tenets he doesn’t even believe.
GA
Funny thing about Anarchists … in Russia and Spain, they made common cause with Communists in their struggle to bring down the prevailing power … then, the communists turn on the Anarchists, and hunt them mercilessly.
See Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’
Brh
Oh, Green Alba, he didn’t mean that literally. He meant that atheists might fill the niche in their psyche with other things and give them a bit more gravitas than they deserve.
Why does a person have or lack gravitas on the basis of whether they believe in a deity or not?
That’s bizarre.
I had a friend for a while (college and a few years afterwards) who was very born again (a Pentecostal, born of atheist parents). She would mention things like her and her husband having to decide whether or not to sell their car at a particular time (and buy another one? no idea…) and they’d pray about it.
I didn’t find the narcissistic notion of thinking God should care about your flippin’ car lent her the slightest gravitas. 🙂
If you don’t know and know you don’t know, you’re an Agnostic. But that isn’t good enough for you! You want to be a card carrying member of the official State Church of Atheism.
The only card I carry that states my intentions is an organ-donor card, since I’ve mislaid my Living Will card. I don’t carry a card for anyone or anything.
I don’t count bank plastic as signifying anything other than solvency (because I only use the debit one, not the credit one, these days).
You misunderstand the meaning of a-theist, like the majority of people. Atheism quite literally refers to a lack of positive belief in a deity, nothing more. The more militant types require an adjective added to the noun. Like ‘militant’…
You can identify us mere a-theists because we never bring the subject up. We are only drawn in when the smug of the other persuasion assure each other smugly that one day we will see the light etc. etc. That can be irritating and we make no claim to sainthood.
A-theists are also by definition ‘agnostic’ on the matter, since ‘agnostic’ also means not believing something without evidence on which to base that belief.
Yes, and the belief in Nothing, with no proof of its ultimate non-existence.
Agnostics don’t believe in anything or nothing. They don’t know. You have not attained unto this Sublimity. You simply switched allegiance once the State Church became Atheism.
The established (state) church where I live is the Kirk. The Church of Scotland. It is of Presbyterian flavour. I used to go to it.
Your endless whining about what you fantasise are other people’s beliefs is tedious and childish. And I have say, rather desperate. It shows your insecurity. Which is something I’d probably share if I were an Aryan Pagan Mystic with a Veneer of Superstitious and Opportunistic Christianism that Doesn’t Hold Water.
Oh rubbish. I’m sure “the Kirk” is in serious decline – am I wrong? Lots of empty buildings, right? Few taking it seriously anymore, including ministers?
Superficial as ever – cunningly so, perhaps even trying to fool yourself. The real religion is Atheism and Political Correctness, with the idealism channeled into making this world into a multi-cultural/racial paradise. What a Tower of Baloney you’ve swallowed.
Green Alba,
Well, if we are right that there is a God and you have a soul, then of course one day you will find out.
Not that that solves anything in the here and now…
And if you’re wrong, sophia, you never will. Lucky you.
Did you think no-one had ever said that before? 🙂
“Oh rubbish. I’m sure “the Kirk” is in serious decline – am I wrong? Lots of empty buildings, right? Few taking it seriously anymore, including ministers?”
The only churches that are growing are the happy clappies. Pretty much everywhere.
Those that still go to the others take it seriously enough.
As for the rest of your post, you are projecting again. You continue to show your insecurity. You know that your Aryan Pagan Mysticism has nothing to do with Christianity and the cognitive dissonance pains you and forces you into displacement behaviour. Poor you.
That’s as good of an insight as anything I have seen as to why Trump is hated but here is another.
Trump was considered a Democrat and turned traitor and a traitor is the lowest form of scum in the Democrat world. In fact is still one of the only ways to actually get a death sentence without murdering anyone to this day.
Btw, Q , thank you for that list of Jews in the banking industry which you so gracelessly provided us on Friday’s blog post. But it wasn’t even a handful of Jewish names. WTF! Only a handful of Jewish names, that’s all?!! That is a complete and disgusting racist disgrace for supposed US meritocracy!
Now, how many Jews did Boeing hire? How many did GM? Are these companies completely infiltrated by Germans, is that what’s going on here? Is that why they’re sinking into bankruptcy with shoddy quality? Do we have a Mercedes/Volkswagen syndrome on our hands here? Thieving criminal German corporations selling the public shoddy goods? Is that why we have to bail them out again?!!
That is a complete and disgusting racist disgrace for supposed US meritocracy!
==
Indeed! Only a handful of Jewish names, and Jews are supposed to be the kings of money and banking. Of the 8 million Jews in the US, less then one in a million is hired as a banker?! WTF! That is racist discrimination if I’ve ever seen it!
Btw, Q , thank you for that list of Jews in the banking industry which you so gracelessly provided us on Friday’s blog post. – akmo
=========
Oh, you are more than welcome, akmo. But I notice you have come a bit unglued over my little (very unscientific) research project and I don’t know why. In what sense do you say gracelessly? There was barely a Goldfarb or a Feldstein in the bunch and I thought you would be pleased with that finding as it more or less confirmed your position relative to your spat with hmuller.
You also seem more than a little annoyed by my having stated right in front of God and everybody that I’m an atheist…….. and sunburst is a little bent out of shape over it too. Have I disturbed the confirmation bias you guys’ would prefer to wallow in?
I live in a small burg in Central NJ that has a high Jewish population (many of the more orthodox types are easily identifiable by their clothing). In the hours leading up to sundown on Fridays (when Shabbos, Shabbat, Sabbath begins) there is a noticeable quickening of the pace in town as the Jews scurry about getting things done (performing actions deemed to be ‘work’) before they turn into a pumpkin.
I have read all your posts and I wonder what type of Jew YOU are. For example, do you wear a yarmulke at all times except when showering? Do you pre-tear a supply of toilet prior to sundown on Fridays because you don’t want to be caught taking a dump on the John at 11PM and having to tear tissue off the roll and thereby violate the ‘day of rest’ rules. And how strictly do you observe the dietary laws. (One of our many Jewish friends, Ira, a Rutgers economics prof who (whom?) I have never seen without his yarmulke on, will not eat a potato chip until he has examined the bag from which it came to see if its kosher.)
So anyway, please describe your own level of orthodoxy or lack thereof. One of my wife’s best pals (last name Singer) and her husband (last name Seinfeld) practice no Jewish traditions and I would not doubt are atheists just like me although I would NEVER have the chutzpah to ask.
toilet paper
I’m not bent out of shape by your claim to atheism at all. I don’t put much stock in what people believe, a little reality adjustment can turn beliefs around in an instant…
“I don’t put much stock in what people believe, a little reality adjustment can turn beliefs around in an instant…”
Yep. Works from the other side too. 🙂
Read the King James version of the Bible, Q. I dare you to as a self-proclaimed atheist. Most atheists have never even read the Bible.
I’m a Grumpy Marxist in the secular world but an Anglican otherwise. I was raised an atheistic individual and then studied metaphysics.
Some people are heterodox and others are orthodox in terms of their belief systems & cosmologies adhered to over time & history.
Houses of worship exist the world over not as testament to an outdated way of thinking and believing.
RW
Read the King James version of the Bible, Q. I dare you to as a self-proclaimed atheist. – Robert White
============
Two or three years ago I mentally committed to reading the Bible from cover to cover. A Bible had been given to me by my mother in 1966 and I had never even cracked it. How could I tackle the Franklin Library 100 Greatest Books collection yet ignore one of the most important books of all time? It is the Catholic ‘Confraternity Version’ first issued in 1950.
I read 68% of the Old Testament and stopped there, unable to continue. What I had read up through page 692 (Sirach Chapter 40) confirmed the epiphany I had at age 18 during a Christmas break novena. Namely that the story being told was largely myth and that my non-belief was correct.
At least read the words of Jesus. There is something so authentic and original in his words and the way he reacted to the circumstances of his time that it at least makes you pause for consideration…
You got a lot farther than I did!
Most of the Old Testament is mythological in content, although much also contains a kernel of truth and is derived, however loosely, from historical records. Personally I don’t believe the bible in itself will convince anyone of the existence of God. Only a genuine personal religious experience will do the trick…
Sunny,
You’re absolutely right.
I bet you when Mrs Green was almost struck down with cancer, she prayed to God. And I bet you when Q will be in the same situation, he too will do the same.
Atheism is communism. It’s Satanism and it is fueled by depression and anger at God. But what many don’t know, is that God want to heal you, if you will only let him and follow his guidance.
Fear of God is said to be the beginning of wisdom, Q.
RW
“Read the King James version of the Bible, Q. I dare you to as a self-proclaimed atheist. Most atheists have never even read the Bible.”
I’ve read more of it than Janos. Catholics aren’t heavy on Bible reading. If it had been down to the priesthood they’d never have been able to read it in their own language.
I was brought up on the King James Bible. The language is unsurpassed. New versions were always a disappointment, linguistically. But that’s primarily because you love what you are used to. Most people younger than me weren’t brought up on the KJV, You can tell by how few of them can manage a simple thee, thou or ye and and a bit of exceedingly simple archaic verb conjugation.
“Houses of worship exist the world over…”
They do, and they are peaceful places to sit and enjoy not being outside in the bustling world. Even for people who don’t believe what their proprietors believe, although they happily follow the message of loving their neighbour, which doesn’t require a deity. People like to be obliged to do what they will not do off their own bat, sometimes. Hence they invent deities to do the obliging for them. If it works for them, who’s complaining? Not everyone needs the external obligation. Sometimes they invent obligations that are evil by moral standards, though, which is less good.
And some who go there every week do not wish to love their neighbour, unless their neighbour is of the same tribe and has exactly the same theological variety of priest or pastor.
“I bet you when Mrs Green was almost struck down with cancer, she prayed to God.”
Sorry to disappoint you. I wish you had put a monetary value on that bet, though. I’d have enjoyed watching you hand over the money.
Why would you pray to ‘God’ if you had cancer, when ‘he’ observably does not cure cancer patients, even the ones who believe ‘he’ could?
And ‘Mrs Green’ was at no point ‘almost struck down with cancer’, but I am used to you inventing your own self-serving mythologies.
I’d be grateful if you’d stop alluding to me in your posts, especially when your comments are pure invention. I do not wish to have any kind of discussion with you and such dishonest behaviour is a devious way of drawing a person in.
You’d be surprised how many a-theists of a certain age retain an affection for the the King James Bible, RW, just as they love Shakespeare.
Christopher Hitchens loved it too, and retained, as many do, a nostalgic affection for Anglicanism.
The Bible contains much wisdom. Wisdom contributed by humans, IMHO. Because it was contributed by humans, it also contains much which is inhuman, because humans can be inhuman too, especially when over-convinced of their own righteousness.
Why would you pray to ‘God’ if you had cancer, when ‘he’ observably does not cure cancer patients, even the ones who believe ‘he’ could?
==
Well, for one, I don’t believe you, because you were found to be a serial liar. And for second, the same process that causes cancer when reversed can uncause cancer. I should know since I have personal education to that fact. And so have many others.
Eliminate the man made foods and liquids that cause inflammation and that feed viruses and disease, replace them with God’s foods and liquids that eliminate inflammation and viruses, add sunshine and clean air to your life, and you have a very good chance of reversing cancer.
Now, Mrs Green, how would you explain the remains of intact tissue found to be present on the dug bones of dinosaurs that are supposed to be millions of years old?
Furthermore, Mrs Green, how would you explain the fact that such a thunderous finding did not make it to the Vatican propaganda outlets or anywhere in the MSM? Not newsworthy enough for our current Satanic paradigm?
I have no interest in what you believe, because you proved yourself on a previous thread to be an obnoxious little git unworthy of my time or consideration.
So you can FRO, sonny.
Ah ha, and when the cancer returns, and it will, you will do exactly as I said. And you will thank God that he showed you my words.
Believe whatever nonsense you like, little git.
Mr Green, be mighty thankful to God this little git still has the goat horns to piece the veil of lies that suffocates our lives, and he will continue to butt you in the ass and guide you out of your Vatican induced stupor.
pierce the veil
Piece it or pierce it. My indifference to your thoughts and doings is limitless.
It’s too bad Q, that you stopped in the Old Testament, although not surprising. I find it an insufferable, tedious and disheartening book with a few bright spots. Better you should have red the new.
But I notice you have come a bit unglued over my little (very unscientific) research project and I don’t know why.
==
No, I’m just amazed at your racist shamelessness. The racism is so ingrained you seem to be completely oblivious to it. Or, you’re putting on an act to the effect, which I think is likely the case. You’ve been suckled on this Vatican racism for so long, it’s now in your DNA.
As to the kind of Jew I am, am the kind of Jew who doesn’t wear the Vatican’s Jew uniform. Not the Vatican’s yamulka not the Vatican’s black hats not the Vatican’s black robes and not the Vatican’s yellow star. In other words, an emancipated Heeb. The kind of Hebrew of old, who if he knew you as a neighbor would feel completely free to bring my friends over and conversate with you in the ways of old.
Just so we are clear.
Jew is not a race.
Caucasoid (White) race
Negroid (Black) race
Capoid (Bushmen/Hottentots) race
Mongoloid (Oriental/Amerindian) race
Australoid (Australian Aborigine and Papuan) race
I see NO Jewishoid in there.
Calling someone a racist for not liking Jews is not racism its bigotry and all humans suffer this in one form or another.
Technically you’re correct, Ben, but the sentiment is exactly the same. The racists and the antisemites are exactly the same people.
Yes, the Irish control Hollywood too. Just look at the names of the owners and producers.
The owners are Chinese and Japanese, but 95% of the people on the Hollywood sets are still Irish. Same in the Police. Same in Fire Stations. Same in the Hospitals. Same in the commie Universities. Same on commie TV stations. Same in the commie Newspapers. Same in the Government. Same in the Banks. Everywhere the gov mafia exists you the same Vatican mafia of Irish Italian and Germans. They’re damn everywhere! You can’t run away from them.
What’s the Final Solution?
You become an American.
Finally the Chinese lies are breaking down and the truth is starting to trickle out.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/wuhan-covid-19-deaths-may-be-in-tens-of-thousands-data-on-cremations-show/ar-BB11T0Vb?ocid=spartandhp
Portable crematoriums have been glowing away for months 24 hours a day!
We haven’t heard too much in the MSM about the riots in Hubei province.
It’s almost as if they don’t want us to know.
Yea monkey see monkey do shit.
M O B S
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6439aOtzEWs
and invaders
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_p5MOK7CYM&t=68s
Paliwood. Now on your doorsteps.
Paki wood?
Nope. Paliwood, with Mexican flip flops.
Uhh how big of a shithole do those English people live in if the backwaters of India slums are a dream vacation?
My worst nightmare come to life!
Sensible wake up call from the man who coined the term “The Long Emergency.” Does that mean no more long screeds about the Mueller Report and the moronic milling donkeys and elephants? Ive covered this in my blogs for years but of course can’t hold a candle to Jim. The societal living structures in most of the world were perfectly set up to be leveled by any number of triggers including the pandemic trigger, if not this one then certainly the next. I am a long retired doctor who has intubated and put thousands on ventilators over a career and the thought occurred to me that maybe Trump is right. We may not need that many ventilators for the simple reason that the mortality of patients after they are placed on one in Chinese and Italian data is high, north of 70%. The danger to the person at the other end of the laryngoscope is also considerable and not many doctors possess that skill. I fear for my colleagues and I am also afraid that PTSD may come to dominate their later years.
No Jim, sorry, too optimistic. Any process of recovering a workable, cohesive society will necessarily have to deal with those armies of feral individuals who’ve missed critical stages of socialization due to lack of parenting and made worse with indoctrination of partisan painting of history that “informs” them that history owes them a debt — not, emphatically, that they’ve failed to exploit the advantage of free libraries and free education.
They wii dry up and blow away thank God…
Yes, children of single mothers and divorce, raised by the TV and Computer while Mom is working or entertaining boyfriends, or drugging it up.
Thank Liberalism and Feminism.
“You may not think that matters so much, but we’ve become so profoundly dishonest that it’s impeding our relationship with reality.”
–JHK
This is so very important. I think dishonesty, so prevalent in our time, is a disease of civilization (at least one that has broken down in Toynbee’s terms). In the real world, outside the pale of civilization, there is simply no place for dishonesty, you either pursue truth or you die…
As Dymtry Orlov wrote to me in an email.
“I don’t have to be nice to you, we will never meet.”
Dishonesty, so prevalent in our time can’t survive in a world where the people you see every day are the same.
That is a true story and I hope his self-serving ass gets to St. Petersburg and never comes back.
So true. I have never inquired of my neighbors where they sit on the political spectrum because it is so important to get along with the people you see every day. My neighbor two doors over rebuilt my roof and saved me a ton of money. He is a Hillary Clinton fan (whom I detest) but otherwise a great guy…
And they never asked you? Will they regret working for you if and when they ever find out?
Nice guyism is so American. You then project it onto others and are amazed when they don’t operate like that. You then want to attack them, like the coming Crusade against East Africans Christians who have rejected Globo-Homo.
Those who openly supported England during the Revolutionary War had to leave this Land. Politics matter.
Having a Nation means sharing a Vision. America really began to die when we allowed people to burn flags openly. How could that have ever be allowed? Cuz they “owned” the flag! Wow, how to think small, so small that the gutter then seems like the Grand Canyon.
“How will the big cities be able to manage their infrastructures with municipal bonds massively failing? How will they provide social services when tax revenues are down to a trickle? The answer is . . .”
The Fed will hit the CTRL-P key a few times and bail out all the rest of the non-Wall Street crowd:
All the pension funds
All the State and Municipal bonds,
All the health insurance companies,
All the “essential services” companies,
etc., etc., etc.
And you know what? It just might work for awhile. When you are still the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry basket, and people worldwide still keep accepting the trash dollar at face value, well then . . .
the Fed will just keep on issuing electronic digits ad infinitum until no one anywhere will accept it.
That’s the game plan, and they’re sticking to it.
all
Green Finance is stacked to the rafters in Mark Carney’s United Nations office, Jim. The Great Reset will stopgap the emergency finance via Emergency Preparedness Funding via the Green Finance coffers where grants & loans will be issued in Keynesian proportions.
I was heavily influenced early on in life by my friend’s step-father who landed on the Normandy beaches on D-Day as infantry. He was Professor Emeritus Joseph Levitt Canadian History University of Ottawa. Joe was injured after landing on Normandy beach and walked with a limp for the remainder of his life. He was about 6′ 4″ in height and the most compassionate WW2 veteran I have ever encountered.
Throughout my time in youth growing up in Ottawa I watched Joe write his Magnum Opus on Lester B. Pearson. I swear that it took him about eight years to write that historiography.
Joe was pretty much the coolest academic I have ever met.
Lastly, there is no possible way to utilize current railway systems as they were utilized in times past. In the countryside one does not need Grade Separation to maintain safety, but in towns & cities Grade Separation is a must have due to the degree of accidents that manifest without Grade Separation.
The expense of restoring heavy rail systems is prohibitively far too costly to be practical IMHO.
Be well & stay safe. And for God’s sake please consider moving away from the metropolis of NYC.
Cheers, Robert
People are leaving NYC in droves. Many will most likely never return.
I was listening to news last night and heard that State Troupers were stopping anyone with NYC license plates that were leaving the state to cross into the next jurisdiction.
From what I can discern the MSM now regards everyone in NYC as lepers from the largest leper colony in the USA.
I have always held NYC publishers & writers in highest regard for all the great stuff that emanated out of NYC over the history of the last two centuries plus.
Greatest drummer the world ever knew was Gene Krupa of Chicago. Today, Chicago is denigrated for being Chicago. People lose their perspective on what really matters when SHTF from what I have seen. Anti-social contagion is spreading along with the virus. If Martial Law is not declared people have a right to retain mobility throughout society.
Trump is the problem by not declaring Martial Law.
RW
When the people lose faith in the government to do their primary function, security, they will take matters into their own hands.
Trump may be the problem by not declaring martial law, but Trump is not over reacting by declaring martial law. Which does the media and Deep State support today, or tomorrow?
Is the maintenance of state border integrity a function of the Feds, or of the State governments? Neither one wants to do it right now!
Ok I thought the President couldn’t declare martial law; that would be the provenance of individual governors. It wouldn’t make much sense to place Wyoming or Idaho under martial law right now. NYC, yes.
All the best magazine and book publishing has come thru NYC, you are correct in that. In fact one of my favorite authors was the original Knickerbocker himself, Washington Irving (the only man in history to have met both Gearge Washongton and Abraham Lincoln)
Brh
And which ethnic group controls publishing? That’s right, the Germans!
Thank you, friend of Akmo.
Jan, you gain some you lose some. You should make nice with Q. Show him your favorite websites. Some I’m sure he already knows, but I’m sure there must be some he missed.
I caught that too!
Q: “as the Jews scurry about getting things done (performing actions deemed to be ‘work’) before they turn into a pumpkin.”
“Scurry” – classic Anti-Semitism. Where do these people come from? I asked him if they were still giving him a hard time, and he pretended he didn’t know what I was talking about.
And if he did, would you not condemn him for doing that?
But I agree with your current position (which will change): Trump should declare martial law. NYC is a City of Death.
In some ways you are a smart guy, Janos, but so is Akfomo.
You have met your match.
Brh
You will never understand how you and your clan betrayed America. That is Mercy indeed…..
That’s what they said after 9-11, right?
True, but this time I think we are dealing with a Gain of Function nCorona that is man made to be a bioweapon.
This is not a normal occurrence in our First World society, eh.
What if this nCorona virus ends up being a public menace for a number of years instead of the estimated/predicted four months or so?
RW
Could never figure out why anyone would want to live there.
BRH, your observation triggered a strange thought. Yours truly, who has never owned a piece of real estate in his life, immediately thought (not without a healthy spread of Schadenfreude) “…Now what’s that going to do to the exalted property market…?”
The answer is: probably nothing. Rents and prices will stay astronomical and the places will sit empty for years… just like all those malls out in Flyoverlandia.
There is nothing sadder (& funnier) than to see an owner of a nice house or building or piece of land run smack up against reality when demand for same has suddenly drained away. It is not in their nature to cut the price, unload it and move on. But the longer it sits empty the less desirable it becomes.
Except for the ghosts.
(Amusing to read thirty-story tilting office building, erected in a hurry – and likely with foundation corners cut – back in the late 1990s when Jakarta was a turbo-charged go-go business.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=id&u=https://www.republika.co.id/berita/senggang/unik/13/05/31/mnnpyr-5-misteri-seputar-menara-saidah-di-jakarta-timur&prev=search
RW
I think that JHKs insistence on trains stems from the in availability of airline transportation when the jet fuel runs out.
When the only option is ground transportation, what choice will there be? For the folks that do not want to drive their electric cars from Denver to Chicago. ( A snicker here)
If we are going to adopt rail it would have to be the kind that floats on magnets like the Chinese run now. Any mechanical friction is an energy waster.
For all of the tech today we need to be running on frictionless motive transport. Magnetized rail is the only potential mode of mass transport IMHO.
Diesel locomotive transport is yesteryear.
RW
We agree on this. The politics are difficult as evidenced by the California attempt at high speed rail.
I do wonder how much the refit of 80 mph RRs would cost compared to High speed alternatives. Also, if we removed the impossible regulations how much it would reduce cost.
Robert Moses was heavily criticized for adopting the same logic vis-à-vis renovating the slums of NYC. He advocated tearing down all the slums so that new construction could restore communities mired in slum living.
From Commercial/Residential mass housing to mass transportation we always need to get rid of the old technology in order to renovate/rebuild infrastructure because it is far too costly to use old technology given maintenance & upkeep/servicing costs.
Overhead costs govern the engineering IMHO. Every few decades we find everything is outdated & obsolete. Advances in engineering force these issues on costs alone.
Robert Moses of NYC should never have been vilified the way he was vilified.
P.S. If you don’t know who Moses was just watch Citizen Jane documentary.
Cheers, Robert
“If you don’t know who Moses was”
RW,
Do you think we are idiots? He parted the East River…or built a bridge over it…or something….
Are magnets a form of anti-gravity?
In a nano-space perspective a magnetic field would be a form of anti-gravity in so far as polarity is concerned, yes.
RW
The reason I ask is because there are those who claim anti-gravity to be an energy source of the future. This sounds intriguing but I am just a lay person in this field…
I think the way it may end up … a coal burning steam locomotive chugging thru town 2 days a week, stopping just long enough to take on water, drop off mail, pick up a few passengers, blow its whistle … then be on it’s way. And we’ll be grateful and happy to have it.
Brh
This is the good BRH, his heart always in the past, especially the 19th Century though the 18th was good too.
The 20th Century? The only good part was up to the apotheosis of the landing on Normandy Beach. After that it was all downhill.
They made some good rifles in the 20th Century. That’s about it.
What I meant Janos is if things get bad enough we could possibly cobble an old fashioned RR together as an expediency. Do I seriously think things will come to that. No, not really. On the other hand, I’m seeing things now I never thought I’d see, so it’s within the realm of possibility.
Our host has called up one of the songs that has remained lodged in my brain from long long ago:
People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’
You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
Let the midnight special shine its ever-luvin light on me.
I caught that too. Great song and upbeat message…
The new no_green new deal.
No got green man, I got no money honey.
Credit-card balances swelled to an unprecedented $930 billion last year and 3.28 million people filed for jobless benefits during the week ended March 21 — quadruple the previous record.
On average it works out to be less than a days hospital stay, only a few thousand dollars for every man woman and child. It’s no big deal.
Just like the looming death of 200,000 is no big deal because Trump saves the nation by getting out of the way of State Governors. If Trump is less incompetent and does not stay out of their way 2,000,000 could die instead. This makes our orange lizard a national hero. Think about that next time you watch him fall asleep at a press conference or snatch flies out of the air with his tongue. That is greatness you are watching.
The financial issues will work out in a giant fire sale. As America burns to the ground things will work out. Contrary to all of you who think I’m ONLY about doom and gloom, when everyone is dead or broke things HAVE to get better.
Lemonade from lemons, that sort of thing.
I live in Hollywood. The stores on Rodeo Drive and downtown Beverly Hills began boarding up their windows with plywood this weekend.
Good to know.
“People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’
You don’t need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin’
Don’t need no ticket, you just thank the Lord”
“I live in Hollywood. The stores on Rodeo Drive and downtown Beverly Hills began boarding up their windows with plywood this weekend.”
People get ready, diversity’s a-comin’,
Get you a weapon, you ain’t gonna be bored,
Gird your damn loins, and when the crowds a roilin’
If you on high ground, you can thank the Lord…
…Traditional gospel piece from the “Church of What’s Happenin’ Now”….
On the way to the horse and oxen powered agriculture 90% of people will have to die. At some point in the process a nonegligible portion of these will catch on and become hungry and violent. Available horse and oxen will be eaten.
The horse and oxen stage will last for some months, cannibalism is next, the age of the ants comes next.
Good to know.
“When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents….despotic in his ordinary demeanor- known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty – When such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity – to join in the cry of danger to liberty – to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion – to flatter and fall in with with all of the nonsense of the zealots of the day – it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.
Alexander Hamilton, 1792
The part that gets me is, “how did he know clear back then?”
Because he knew himself all too well.
Was he referring to Aaron Burr at the time?
I think he was just trying to work out some rap lyrics, not an easy thing to do with all those thee’s and thou’s getting in the way.
it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.
It is called ‘The Art of The Deal‘.
By letting hundreds of thousands die Trump cuts a path to a shining city on a hill. That is why he smiles. Confusion is key so we can all relax. Just repeat. ‘It won’t be me‘ 15 times in a row. Do this every hour and every day for a week. You will be fine.
KDFP
Do all the Trump haters out there really think Hillary would have done a better job?
Hillary never would have embarrassed America quite as bad as Trump has, and there is no way in Hell that she would have gone Smoot-Hawley Act II into a recessionary headwind given that she is experienced enough to know better, or at least us lefties would like to believe that.
Trump’s Smoot-Hawley Act II shenanigans didn’t help anyone, or himself, or Trump brand.
As they say in the Day Trading community…’never go full retard’ on Wall Street.
Trump is not the businessman he purports to be.
RW
HAHAHAHAHA
Yea right Hillary would have had us in another war inside of two months.
Well, here we go.
Rumor of several home invasions in this rural Connecticut town. Was it attempted burglary, but the residents happened to be at home? Probably not; just about everyone is home now.
That didn’t take long.
Brh
Give us your beans.
Biden must be having a very hard time with the social distancing. He hasn’t stuck his nose in a woman’s hair for days. And this six foot shit. Oh hell.
Why has the media ignored sexual assault and misbehavior allegations against Biden?
What’s a pervert to do? ‘Hard times’ and they can’t get no relief. Yeah the media looks the other way but still. It has to be cramping Joe’s style. Making his angry outbursts perfectly understandable.
KDFP
K-Dog, aren’t you the least bit sceptical of accusations in an incident that purportedly occured 27 years ago? And apparently nothing actually happened except he made somebody ‘feel uncomfortable’.
Its all about optics for the politically correct crowd…
Actually BRH, not one bit. KDFP and all that but really she presents very credibly and there are too many other stories about Joe. We have Joe on video being a total prick multiple times. And you should check your facts. Joe has obvious power issues, when he is aware of being vertical. That still happens sometimes.
‘Apparently nothing actually happened‘?
He stuck his fingers in her pussy. Having an understanding of the phy-sticks of such things I know he only tried to push his fingers in because if she was unwilling the door was likely slammed shut. From her point of view though she thinks he succeeded and from her point of view that is a totally understandable perception.
Joe will be Joe. He’s a ‘leg’ man, apparently.
Who isn’t?
Brh
People here ignore it, too. Biden feels up kids on camera. Fact.
Many a special agent assigned as his protection squad has talked.
If they are female sleepy joe is reported to like swimming in the nude in front of them.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2014/08/01/biden-swims-naked-upsetting-female-secret-service-agents-book-claims
Joe is a pervs perv.
I know about all that. But the kiddie fiddling is far worse.
Kids are not adults. Adults can defend themselves.
Because it doesn’t matter anymore. Suspend the Elections. Let it all be on Trump. He’s strong enough to take it. In any case, he’s now listening to the same experts as Biden or anybody else would. Why go thru the rigamarole of an “election”?
Where I live – Jacksonville, Florida – “the suffering poor of the ghettos” are shooting each other with gay abandon. As the illicit drug precursor chemicals provided to the Mexican drug cartels by the Chinese Communist Party grow scarce, I imagine the turf wars and shootings will increase.
Chinese chemicals can still come in on UPS. The brown army has you covered. Remember we only have GUIDELINES and until more people die Trump prefers to cultivate misery and confusion but really it is BAU sort of? Anyway it is part of a master plan. Don’t worry be happy.
La plej bona el ?iuj eblaj mondoj.
“The suffering poor of the ghettos” here don’t have the knowhow to synthesize the desired drugs from the Chinese precursor chemicals. Right now, they’re probably wishing they’d paid attention in high school, and taken a chemistry class….
Wrong bathtube meth or single jug meth is pretty easy to make.
Whats hard is not blowing yourself up or killing yourself with the fumes.
After a three day stay for what turned out to be diverticulosis I received a bill just shy of $100,000, which my insurance company refused to pay due to incorrect coding. Long story short, they eventually took a fraction of that and let me off the hook, undoubtedly using the rest as a write off to show how they were losing money. It cracks me up in the current flap with suppliers charging high prices for masks and such, and hospitals squawking like stuck pigs over it. Talk about calling the kettle black !
“I received a bill just shy of $100,000”
There are parts of the UK where that would buy you a house!
Not smart parts, but still…
It would pay for all the masks in a hospital for 1 hour too!
RIngo bought from John a fabulous estate.
Back in 1970 100k US $ would buy that.
Inflating the debt supply since 1913.
“..we better think about fixing the railroads.”
Who’s “we”? Unlike most countries, railroads in the U.S. are publicly traded companies. Burlington Northern Santa Fe for example, is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. It is up to Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, Kansas City Southern, etc. to invest the capital in their infrastructure which they do. When I drive out West, highways often follow the same route as railroads where I see mile long freight trains doing 70 mph on welded steel rails, sometimes 20 or 30 minutes apart.
Jim, I think you need to get out of the Northeast more. I’ve travelled between Boston and Washington, D.C. on Amtrak, and it really does seem in a lot of places like a Third World country with the exception of the Acela. I know Amtrak uses the rails of the freight carriers, but the decrepit stations, and rusting equipment bear little resemblance to first rate railroads like UP or KSC. I imagine the line most journalist and politicians travel between NYC and Washington inspires their “crumbling infrastructure” comments.
Jimbo’s LONG EMERGENCY position, (we are all assuming the position, Boys & Girls) regarding rails is circa WWII rail matrix, reaching most all the nations cities and smaller communities factories, and breadbasket districts. Notable element before FDR made Devil’s deal with the Saudies was an America “A Lending Not A Borrowing Nation.
See Martins post above 10:48 AM. Misguided on guideway, new age recovery must focus on enhanced existing railway mode; capacity & reach. Railway matrix redux is the one indispensable requisite to maintain the Union Of States. in post natural-manmade disaster & Climate/Resource constraints. Wars are coming as maniac sovereign leaders, particularly in the Asian and Middle East dictatorships go apeshit crazy.
One can imagine Putin finally paying heed to his National Orthodox Christian Heritage, backing away from his threat to Israel, and hunkering down with Mother Russian Oil and unmatched Siberian full regalia Periodic Table resources…. Imagine grumpy Bear Russia leading the Eastern Hemisphere as an exemplar nation in the post apocalypse millennium. All things are possible with God, Vladimir!
How will the Union Of States face up to imminent Dt 28 showdown with the Divine? Woodshed times at hand….
“All things are possible with God, Vladimir!”
All things are possible to Vladimir without God.
Vladimir is about to fix things so that he can remain in power until 2036. While passing laws to prohibit meetings of more than two people in the street. How neat is that? God would be impressed.
State Medicaid – The gift that keeps on giving. Atlantic magazine had an article about it, last month. Many States (including Washington, where I live) have a little known twist. “Estate Recovery.”
If you’ve participated in any Medicaid program, after you pop your clogs, they’ll come after any assets you’ve managed to hang on to. That run down little house you thought you were inheriting from Grandma? Forget about it.
There are ways around it, but it takes a lot of advance planing. And, you may have to involve a lawyer. Anyway – heads up, troops! Lew
LewisLucanBooks
=======
Welcome back Lew. It’s gotta be at least 5 years.
There are no red states
There are no blue states
There are no red casualties
There are no blue casualties
There are only casualties
Now there is only the red white and blue
I hope
You can’t have a red, white, and blue without Bob from CANADA leaning over the fence hollering at you, K-Dog.
No nation could be an island with me leaning over the fence hollering bloody murder & shaking my fist in the air, buddy.
RW
You have red and white, sorry you are feeling blue.
Not feeling blue, but you forget opposition, eh. Don’t ever forget who your closest & biggest trading partner is, K-Dog.
USA is not an island nation.
RW
Oh hell, I was not even talking about Canada. I don’t know what bug bit you today but I’m sure you guys sort of have your shit together. And WTF, you closed your borders. Mrs Dog was plotting escape. Now she can’t. Are you going to build a wall?
Walls cost money. Canadians will provide the labour and American taxpayers can fund it. We should build on your side to save space IMHO, K. If you think about the perimeter of the USA it’s best to build closer to the center of the USA in order to save on materials, eh.
You fund it we will build it because you know what happens when the USA builds stuff with the same bureaucrats that built the US Postal System, and Congress.
RW
The US is Canada’s Mexico.
I am a dreamer
i hope one day you will join us ect
Terrific entry here, Jim! Well done! What a shame we, the world, America in particular, didn’t heed your words in your great and true vision of the future (a future which is upon us), THE LONG EMERGENCY. That new era is here. My only regret is that at 68 years of age, assuming I survive this year, I may not be strong enough to do much to help build this new world.
Best of luck to us all.
“
Right now, we’re in the heroic phase of the battle against a modern age plague. The doctors, nurses, and their helpers are like the trembling soldiers in an amphibious landing craft churning toward the Normandy beach where the enemy is dug in and waiting for them, with sweaty fingers on their machine guns and a stink in the pillbox. Some of the doctors and nurses will go down in the battle. The fabled fog-of-war will conceal what is happening to the health care system itself, while the battle rages. After that, what?
”
Pacifists are not so keen on the analogy. They would rather just fight an epidemic.
Cuomo’s dog and pony show was pretty good. Asking people to come to New York though. That part was weak. He needed to give something in return and he could have done it. He could have asked the volunteers to ask their community to follow the guidelines as if they were the law of the land. Which with competence they would be. The request for solidarity would have been taken as a gift. — KDFP
If you are going to take you should give.
Also my hospital bill wouldn’t be that high, but I fear the German hospitals in my area.
After having done some intensive research on this subject, I (as a dentist) prefer to drink a self made chlorine dioxide solution with about 25 ppm as a prevention and as a cure, which costs almost nothing (about a cent or two, per patient and day).
A good introduction in English is: https://andreaskalcker.com/en/coronavirus-special-information-for-physicians-and-researchers/ as well as Andreas Kalckers website and his book “Forbidden Health: Incurable Was Yesterday”
If German is not a problem, http://www.freizahn.de/2020/02/mehrzweckwaffe-gegen-viren-und-bakterien/ is good compilation of studies and sources. Even for readers who don’t know German, may find there many links to important papers.
The only really big problem with chlorine dioxide is that it has the potential to ruin the pharmaceutical industry and parts of the health care system. But, on the other hand, this is one of the simple drugs that can make life and healthcare in “A World Made by Hand” astonishingly good compared with now.
Why do you fear the German hospitals in your area? Are you in Germany? If not, what do you mean by German hospitals?
Thank you Mr. K for a sober assessment,
“it will matter again to be upright and to act in good faith” JHK
Let us hope the bar is not set too high.
If SARS-Cov2 continues on its exponential trajectory, I’m contemplating either an RV up in Alaska, or a decent-sized boat off the coast of some South American port where food and supplies can be gotten every 2-3 weeks.
Who do you think you are Will Smith? I’ll guess the dog being walked was a German Shepard. A video of Italian mayors bitching. Trump complains about state governors wanting to keep everyone home. He should live in an Italian town!
Jim Kunstler wrote: “The scale of agriculture will have to change downward, too. AgriBiz, with its giant “inputs” of chemicals and borrowed money, is not going to make it ”
and yet…
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2020/03/30/agriculture-secretary-sonny-perdue-coronavirus-having-very-little-impact-on-food-supply/
Can we reconcile the two points of view.
Shab: Do you seriously propose that something that works for-the-moment, or that worked in the past, will continue to work indefinitely? — JHK ADMIN
Three wheels on my wagon
And I’m still carrying on
The Cherokees are after me
But I’m singing a happy song
Reconciled, there you go.
I wonder how the extended homeschooling that is now going on will affect public education? With so much education material on the web, will parents withdraw from public education?
I liked being with my kids and if I had to do it all again, I would home school. I saw too much horrible behavior from other students, teachers, and even some parents.
Jen in Salt Lake
As Lao Tzu said, Close the schools. The people will benefit a hundred fold.
Most are uneducable past the basics in any case. Thus education is really just indoctrination and internalized pressure to abandon their natural instincts to value themselves and their own more than aliens. To believe themselves rather than talking heads on the tube.
Did he really say that?
I’ll have to start reading him again.
RW
I agree Jen, home schooling has a lot to commend to it, especially if you are not necessarily aligned with the politically correct status quo. However it does take a lot more effort to school a child at home where he/she is in their comfort zone and without the authoritarian atmosphere and peer pressure of a public or private school…
2880 dead in America. The Trump has made us go full hockey stick. The last update was about +300. Get ready! Say goodbye to Grandma.
The straw man needs a brain and the lion man needs a heart. I wonder if the orange man will understand how the exponential function works at the end of this.
Naahhhhh.
KDFP
K-Dog.
I’m a thick old dumbass farmer, a knob, a bell-end. What the hell is
KDFP?
King David Frozen Pizza?
What the hell is KDFP? – knucle
==========
K Dog For President
It would be all different if Clinton had been elected instead of Trump.
Yes, we would not have the virus like this but we would have to wear PPE to interact with the opposite sexes.
There is a reason the idiot youth in America called this the boomer remover.
Said good bye to both my grandmas long ago.
I would how ever like to say good bye to the kind of shit rhetoric I see you spewing daily. Right now all you are doing is stampeding the herd and its so easy being the nay sayer and prognosticator of dissent much harder to actually have a plan and execute it.
Lots of hand wringing whining and pissing on the floor but little else in reasonable discourse.
Tell me with all that piss on the floor did Trump smack you on the nose with a rolled up newspaper or simply put you outside without a dog house?
If, as JHK suggests, hardship is destined to be the new normal we will likely remember the ‘good, old days’ of our present era with fondness and nostalgia (if not acute longing). Future generations however will not have such memories to draw upon and will be better off for it. As harsh as this may sound, only through overcoming adversity and enduring hardship does character development occur. As a species we have become weak and sloppy, and perhaps it is time we were compelled to do something about it. We gain strength in mind and spirit when we strive to address severe challenge, and from the interaction between these two qualities we weave the soul; that aspect of the human being which survives mortal death…
“This will be a different country.”
I laughed out loud when I read that. I don’t have argument with the article, but that line, expressing belief in the American people, is laughable. This country was founded by people who murdered the inhabitants of this land (we can call them Americans) and stole everything they could see. Has this people changed their DNA?
These people to this day live a life based on the murder of anyone who has anything, and the theft of their things. Mideast oil, Libyan gold, whatever is visible. If an American sees it, he will kill for it.
I think what will happen is we will see gangs roaming, killing people so they can look in the pantry. Those who do grow things will be in constant danger of being murdered when their crops come in.
Should they stop growing things? No, but they ought to have weapons strapped to their belts, because you can’t trust an American. His charm is used to put you at ease, so he can cut your throat and steal your stuff.
In the meantime, gas at the pump is under $2.00 per gallon, thanks to Syrian blood.
The “Native Americans” were weak, technologically inferior, disorganized and ultimately stupid. They got smoked for a reason, or in fact, a multitude of reasons. Now they are captive nations. And nothing you say or do will ever change that. And in fact, the “Native Americans” are getting rich on that alone. Well played.
Well said. Whites created this Nation. We are the Native Americans. To have let this title be taken from us and given to another people was a cognitive and spiritual defeat of the highest magnitude.
Let Pat D go find “natives” who live in tipis and become their slave. He will have to look long and hard. Most Indians just want more stuff like all the rest of the American slobs.
You appear to dislike America as much as Patrickd, Janos, but in another way.
It’s been hijacked by Judeo-Masons and Satanists – with lots of help from ordinary Americans like you.
Your relatively high IQ and large fund of knowledge only means you will be judged more harshly. To whom much is given, much is asked.
President Andrew Jackson didn’t have full understanding, but he knew something was dreadfully wrong and he tried to save us – but in the wrong direction, the direction of more Democracy. A very, very great Man. But Ely prefers Nixon. Another one! Whose your favorite President? This should be fascinating….
Probably TR, Janos.
The Masons? Do they still exist? I remember them as a bunch of old guys in town with a secret handshake, an organization with more ranks in it than the Byzantine army. There were many civic organizations around back in the day — the Red Men, Elks, Lions, Moose (in an old Honeymooners skit; they had a secret handshake too)
How could they hijack the country?
As far as the Judeo part goes, Jews have been here since day 1. A guy from Philidelphia, I believe his name was Moses Solomon, helped finance the Revolutionary War for Krissake.
Brh
Ok his name was Haym Solomon. My mistake.
TR? Oh you want to get into this? Fine. Do you really think Akmo beleives the stuff he screams about? Like the Vatican Nazis (they were enemies) owning the banks? Or the Irish controlling Hollywood? Go up and look at us fooling around. He knows I know that he doesn’t believe it. Only you believe him – and he pats you on the head like you’re a kid on a regular basis. And I assume then that you believe what he says? So you’re a vicious Anti-Catholic too?
Here since the beginning. In very small numbers. And not everyone liked that. And they were doing terrible things as per the slave trade. Alas, so were we. Thus the Judeo-Masons. But yeah, the damage is done and the Masons aren’t really that important anymore, at least not here. Maybe on the Continent they still are. Or in South America perhaps. The workmen depart when the Masters come into the dwellings they have built for them.
Was your guy funding the Brits too? Which side are the Judeo-Masons on? Their own side, never ours.
You may have been right about Vodka though:
Sky News
Few measures have been enforced to curb coronavirus in Belarus – instead, people are being urged to drink vodka and go to saunas.
The country – specifically its president – has shrugged off concerns about the COVID-19 outbreak, starkly illustrated on Sunday with the nation’s football matches continuing as normal.
As most countries enforce strict measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus, fans continued to shuffle into football grounds as they would any other weekend.
Few social distancing measures appear to be in force, but spectators at some grounds did have their temperatures checked before being granted entry.
A small number of fans opted to wear face masks while huddled together in packed stands, but they were few and far between.
Belarusian football organisers have said they have no intention of postponing matches or cancelling the season – and the country’s leader has also shown that he is keen for sporting fixtures to continue.
President Alexander Lukashenko took part in an ice hockey match on Saturday – controversially declaring that sport “is the best anti-virus remedy”.
At the event, he told a reporter: “It’s better to die standing on your feet than to live on your knees.”
No, I’m not anti Catholic, just the opposite.
I think Akfomo is writing some of those things to antagonize you, personally. And then you return the compliment by answering one of his posts with the phrase, ‘Final Solution’.
It’s a vicious cycle.
Brh
So you’re a vicious Anti-Catholic too?
==
Oh, c’mon Jan, who is vicious? I’m just making friends with you Nazi lizards. It’s all good fun. Get with the program, dweeb!
He knows who really owns and/or controls Banking, Publishing, Media, Advertising, etc.
You don’t. When called upon it, he commences his reptilian rage. And you think he’s just trying to get my goat? He does it with everybody.
BRH,
Go visit the Octagon in DC on the rare occasion that their exhibit on Masonry and the United States is open (top floor, once per year?). Once the creep factor has worn off, you will likely be interested to learn more.
The idea that Masonry has died out is rather funny to me. The country was founded on it.
Hay pattyboy do you think the Native Americans were all peaceful vegans?
Let me educate you they murdered enslaved and raped each other some even ate each other.
They were not the peaceniks or the noble savage.
They were human beings with all the same FATAL flaws wee see today.
Stop absorbing the leftist bullshit about white man evil.
Ha! Trump is both white man evil AND orange man bad. No wonder TDS is so virulent and strong.
When the Pilgrims showed up in Mass. Bay in 1620, they immediately noticed the abandoned villages up and down the coast. Some appeared to have been recently inhabited, others showing signs of abandonment long ago. It was a mystery. Turns out earlier expeditions to New England, by the Portugese and Spanish, Basque fisherman, English freebooters, French under Champlain, Henry Hudson, and a few others, had unleashed infectious diseases on the Indians for which they had no immunity — primarily smallpox — that had wiped out 90% of their population 1540-1620.
Not the first pandemic brought to the Americas by Europeans — that would be on Columbus’ expedition to the Caribbean — but not the last either.
Brh
U N Z……COMMENT>
just over the border in New Haven and all the local Hasidic community is getting sick with Covid-19.
A Bat Mitzvah was fully attended in a synagogue with 100+ attending with an ensuing party.
Meanwhile, there are mobs riding around on dirt bikes and robbing people who venture outside their homes for a walk. Interesting times.
Security cameras and a 12 gauge 00 is the current prescription but if this continues into mob riots the AK is coming out with loaded mags.
Community members on dirt bikes are a problem in New Haven even in good times. They’ll run you down, rob you, or both. Sometimes you can get stabbed just for good measure Not the type of erudite behavior you would expect at the home of Yale University, but there it is.
Brh
Most of the bikes are stolen, none are registered or insured, nobody has a motorcycle operators license, bikes are not street legal. No matter. It’s a no man’s land out there. Civilization itself has eroded into fine dust.
Not the first pandemic brought to the Americas by European–
The China Virus?
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/fda-approves-emergency-use-of-malaria-pill-for-covid-19-treatment-133908197.html
Bravo. No time for tests – it will be tested on the battlefield! We are beginning to fight back. Now declare martial law and close the borders. Judges who say nay must be defrocked.
Masons.
Mnuchin is Skull n Bones. See his wiki page.
We will all be Skull & Bones soon thanks to Mnuchin et al.
RW
How about a few laughs? Check it out!
https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2020/03/nj-comedians-riff-on-trumps-coronavirus-response-goes-viral.html
https://www.nj.com/entertainment/2020/03/nj-comedians-riff-on-trumps-coronavirus-response-goes-viral.html
Yeah, these weeks and days do kind of feel like the premier episode of “Fear The Walking Dead”, don’t they?
Yes. And if you remember, in TWD, everybody is infected, every living person.
Google Coronavirus and the top story is about what the last East Fauci models are showing him.
Here is a hint, Easter is out of the question. April 30 is a put off.
The first time that a daily death tally will be zero is The end of July. His projection shows a peak in the third week of April greater that 2000 deaths per day. Then a long tailing off until July.
This is a model based on what? What is going to cause the tailing off?
I think Trump has listened to these experts with their science predict 15 day isolations to flatten the curve, etc. I am afraid he will do something drastic to wake up the economy if some thing does not happen to show the models are correct. If something does not indicate the disease will tail off, all bets are off.
In Trump’s words, “This country was not designed to work this way.”
IMHO, if we do not see a tail off start in April, humanity is in dire straits.
@JohnAZ
“The models” back in 2000 indicated “dire straits”, end of economic growth, and human dieoff.
DENIAL is so fucking powerful! …you people…
~toktomi~
It wasn’t designed to work this way – as if it was working before. As if it WAS designed to work with 329 million people or the coming White minority. Or industrialism and mass urbanization.
National Socialism WAS designed with Industrialism and a huge population (mono-racial) in mind – a serious attempt to keep alive traditional values and culture in a radically changed society. It’s most serious critics were and are, Traditionalists.
Obviously working with Nature is one thing but trying to deny it something else entirely. No one can make different races get along. India gets partial success from National Socialism because of the shared Vedic Culture – even among groups that don’t share belief in the Vedas per se, such as the Sikhs, Jains, etc. Long shared history under the Muslim threat has helped to forge them together.
doreen dotan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_TT6csVMkM
“The biggest problem we have as humans is trying to convince our minds of something our heart knows is a lie.”
Wes Watson, Aryan Brotherhood
JS: You refuse to read Bhagavad Gita, so I give you a chance to study with Wes, a man who has overcome ignorance and criminality and now, having paid his debt to society, is teaching others to do the same. He would never admit to having overcome, because that would mean he isn’t still working hard every day. In this, he is wise indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtrEv7-tT38&t=638s
Looks like a nice old lady. How did you find this? How does she know all this? Did she come from an orthodox or conservative Jewish background?
Doreen–you goy are humans, we jews are something else.
JohnAZ
Yet it didn’t need to be this way…have you seen how life in Singapore is these days?
https://youtu.be/IdDpmAt3lxo
“Flatten the Curve” has the same sort of media psych. trauma-inducing quality as “Ground Zero,” or any other phrase rolled out in manufactured crises over the past two decades.
I saw that in NYC they’ve got the Empire State building lit up like a giant red flashing siren.
FEAR!
…waitin’ for the numbers to explode…
I still can’t see the details but there are hints in “three weeks for stimulus checks” and “April 29 [or 30]”. The Easter references don’t seem to carry much significance.
Happy Dieoff,
~toktomi~
Even a 10 to 20% death rate will not equal a die off. And even still, the contraction and ensuing disorder will not equal a die off. Not on the seven billion scale you are thinking. But this is just round one. Now. Will this bring profound changes to society? It appears inevitable. And some changes..well, no one will have forseen. IMHO.
The profound changes will be what the US government does as a result of the hyped up fear mongering. * We are going to be China-fied for the most part. IMO. That little globalist @#%$* Dr. Fauci gets aroused just thinking about this future. As well as that globalist b@*#&^ Deborah Brix. Both are also beholden to WHO and Super Big Pharma, BTW.
Oh, and mandated by law vaccines for all! No, you won’t take the vaccine? Fine. Then you can’t work or be allowed out in public. We have a nice converted former Super Walmart for you and your……rebellious ilk.
(Not you specifically SSL….generally speaking).
*Will Trump be on board with this? No. I don’t think so. He’s actually not a totalitarian kind of guy, despite what some delusional types here post. Or the deranged, I should say. Trump’s days are numbered. He will not be president next year. By hook or by crook. I think the crook will be NY Gov. Cuomo. Yes, Biden is out. It just hasn’t been made official yet.
Consider this….. http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20153
Yeah, I totally agree that anything is possible and the goal post moves all the time. That is why it is so important to try and take charge of the narrative.
I’ve known ever since the Summer of 1994 when I was 27 years old that it was all going to end ugly. I merely had the cold comfort of not knowing exactly how. Well, now I guess I do.
What happened?
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/29/sweden-health-board-prioritise-migrants-over-swedes-with-pre-existing-conditions-elderly-for-virus-care/
The End of Socialized medicine? Unless that Socialism is National Socialism which by Law would forbid any immigration at all for the most part.
National Socialist Japan for example, (which hides its reality under a Corporate veneer) is interested in immigration from Brazil – of Japanese Brazilians that is.
Sweden, as it is currently comprised, does not deserve to exist. Nor can or will it exist for much longer. Like most Western countries at this point.
Sweden will survive … as an Islamic Republic. Most native Swedes will be down with that. Outside of undergrads at NYU and Berkeley, has there ever been a group of people in the history of the world who hate themselves and their own heritage more than citizens of Sweden? The first thing to be scrapped is the national flag; the gold cross has to go. Lutheran churches if any still exist, can be converted to Mosques.
Brh
No they won’t. They will freeze in the winter. You worry about things that are not problems.
One mayor at two local mayors phone conferences asked how long would it be before it took a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a loaf of bread. No one answered his inquiry nor will anyone address the danger in limitless money printing. –Walter B
I have been hearing about the “danger of hyperinflation” “wheelbarrows” “Weimar” etc. since the US went off the gold standard during the Nixon administration in 1971. So far, with 50 years of printing fiat money under our belt, no hyperinflation.
The inflation rate in 2019 (last full year’s data) was 1.76% … Just as a reality check, hyperinflation is rapidly rising inflation, typically measuring more than 50% per month.
And why don’t we have hyperinflation after so many years of “pretend and extend” and so many years of “quantitative easing”? The answer is because people still have faith in the financial system.
And how do we know people still have faith in they system? Because people still have a meaningful amount of cash in checking or savings accounts; because people rely on electronic payment systems (credit cards, bill pay etc.) for transactions; because people are still comfortable with being paid by their employer in legal tender or, if they own a business, with their customers paying in legal tender.
Think about your net worth. How much is tied up in physical hard [i.e. gold and/or silver] assets? If it amounts to] less than 50%, chances are you still have faith in the financial system as well.
Based on the last 50 years of printing fiat money, there is no danger, except what you are imagining in your mind. But your transactional actions belie your words. And that is why the system works. That is why there is no hyperinflation, no wheelbarrows, nor any danger of hyperinflation. They fiat money system works without increasing inflation, let alone hyperinflation. That is fact based on five decades of no gold backing up the dollar. 1.76% inflation in 2019, not 50% a month.
Animal Names from Eden
By Isaac Mozeson
“..And Adam called out names to for all the beasts, for the birds of the sky and all the living things of the field…” Genesis 2:20
The bible places a profound emphasis on the naming of every person, place or thing. What’s in a name? Everything, apparently. Semites are named for the son of Noah named SHeM (name). The name is the essence of the thing, its SHAY-Ma or reputation. Commentaries have much to say about each unknown person in a list of begats and begots or each unknown, one cametotown on the journey to somewhere else. Reputation — or name -is something to live for or die for to a Semite. No less than the supreme deity is referred to by the Jews as HaShem, The Name. The name of an animal is therefore far more than an echoic device for identification. If the chinese call a cat something like a meow (it sounds much like it) and if we’ve named a bird a Chickadee (after its call) –these are sure signs that the creature was not named at Eden by our first human ancestors.
None of the animals are so specialized that a sub-species is named in the bible. All primordial animal names are generic: Bird or Raven, and even the “children of the raven” (Psalms ) –but never Crow, Blackbird or Grackle. Gen 2:19-20 Seals in Middle East? SEECATCH. Otherwise, general terms like /TSAKHAN so the Algonquin Indians could name their stinker (the skunk).
“Who Named the Animals?” Where did animal names come from? According to the bow-wow theory, all words are echoic, some grunting caveman’s attempt to capture the essence of a thing by it’s sound. Among the many thousands of animal names, however, only a few creatures like the chickadee have an echoic name. Even in Chinese, where the cat word sounds like “meow meow,” echoic names are the exception. A larger set of animal names are clearly descriptive, like the grasshopper or hippopotamus (Greek for river horse). Most of the older, more generic animal names have unknown origins, suggesting that the bow-wow theory is for the dogs. Now the world’s oldest etymological text is the last place that an academic would look, but Genesis 2:20 relates that “Adam called out names for all the beasts, for the birds of the sky and all the living things of the field…” Let us see if Biblical Hebrew offers any insights into animal names of unknown origin and meaning.
The carrion-eating BUZZARD is traced only as far back as Old French busart, a word without apparent cognate or meaning. In Hebrew, BuZ means a hawk and BeeZa spoils (of war). BoZeZ would mean the plunderer or looter, while a BuZiaR is a falconer. Unlike the EAGLE (from oKHeL, to eat or destroy), the BUZZARD is merely a scavenger who emBeZZles WaSte or BooTy. (These BZ, BT and W-ST words are related to our Bet-Zayin family of words of plunder).
The Kiowa plains Indians named this same bird a bosen for good reason. If you think the GIRAFFE is a strange animal, check out its wierd (given) etymology. French girafe and Italian giraffa is aid to be a corruption of Arabic zirafah, although the term is meaningless is Arabic too and a G from a Z corruption is unnatural.. Using Emetology instead of etymology, one could suppose that zirafah is a common jumble (called metathesis in linguistics and relat! ed to the neurological disorder called dyslexia) of Hebrew [T]ZaVaR (neck). While Adam or any ancient human would do well to call the GIRAFFE a “neck” creature, the Hebrew term stresses the throat or front of the neck rather than the GIRAFFE’s prominent back or scruff of the neck. The Hebrew for this part of the anatomy is OReF, more correctly pronounced by Sephardim as KHoReF or GHoReF. Now we’ve got the perfect sound and sense for GIRAFFE, since GHoReF means the scruff of the neck. Like SCARF, SCRUF is a neck word whose initial S is non-historic.
Any word with more than 3 root letters in Hebrew or any language is carrying extra baggage around the root or roots. These CRF neck words come from Biblical Hebrew KHoReF (neck) just like the CRAVat (necktie). A related Gimel-Resh term, GaRoN (throat, neck) gives us other long-necked animals, like the CRANE, EGRET and HERON, along with neckwear like the GORGEOUS GORGET, the throaty GROAN of a CROONer and the GARGLING of a GOURMET GARGOYLE.
Returning to animals and addressing the interchangeable C/G/H/K sounds above, both the Hebrew Ayin and the Gimel are gutturals that can harden to make the hard C of Latin corvus (raven) and French corbeau (raven) or soften to make the soft H of Anglo-Saxon hraefn (raven). Do these disparate Indo-European cousins meet when linked to a common Semitic ancestor? The Hebrew raven is an OReV or KHoReBH (Ayin-Resh-Bet). Etymologists don’t have to dig far to get true word origins, but they refuse to consider Hebrew. The prolific digger among American rodents (and net surfers) is the GOPHER. The given guess in our dictionaries is an attribution to French gaufre (a honeycomb or waffle). Those who dig for a true source will consider Hebrew KHoPHeR (digger).
Now a HORSE is a horse of course, and of course there is no known meaning for this term. It doesn’t relate to the German horse (Pferd, a knock-off of the Hebrew PHeReD or mule) or the Latin equs (an echo of Hebrew AQeV–heel or HooF). The mystery unraveled when I noticed the similarity of HORSE and HEARSE (a funeral wagon named for an elaborate plow). Unlike their Continental forbears, the British plowed with horses instead of oxen. The horse was the plower, and plower in Hebrew is HoReS[H]. The Americans continued the awkward tradition of plowing with a horse, which needs blinders and constant attention. The God-given plowing animal is clearly the SHoRe (ox), witch innately knows how to plow a SHuRa [Ya]SHaR (straight row or SuRe SeRies). True, the ox doesn’t sound like the ShoRe at all, but Aramaic constantly corrupted the Hebrew Shin to a T, later giving us the Latin taurus (bull) and Spanish toro. Reject the bull and discover a world of meaning– with the majesty and science of! Hebrew.
Sounds like Pyramid Science. All human knowledge can be correlated with the dimensions of the Great Pyramid. Of course it doesn’t work the other way – you’re not going to find out anything new by studying the Pyramid, not in this way. And you could also correlate all human knowledge with any structure, such as somebody’s house chosen at random. This kind of stuff is simply fandom.
Of course etymology is a real study. And human languages do connect, at least within families. There is even some connection between the Semitic and the Indo-Aryan. Much less with with Afro-Asiatic. And very little with the East Asian or Black African needless to say, except perhaps within the mantric or sound aspect. Some sounds may have universal meaning, say like Mama or something like that. Of course, not all languages may adhere to this universalism, such as it is. But it may explains incredible “synchronicities” between far flung language families when it comes to certain basic words.
Of course, being you, you try to make a system out of such lucky hits – which is like making a mountain out of molehill. Be content to know that there is a Pattern and you may have found a few of the keys to it. The long lost language of Eden was not modern Hebrew or ancient Hebrew either. Adam wasn’t circumcised nor was he a Jew…..
Isaac Mozeson found 30,000 such correlations with the Hebrew. Them are not “lucky hits”. That’s as many words as there are in the Yiddish language, which is medieval German. Shakespeare whose real name was Lady Amelia Bassano, an Italian Marrano Jewess whose family were the Royal English Court musicians, and was mistress of Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon, first cousin of Elizabeth I of England, “invented” 10,000 words in English. Them were all Hebrew words in disguise. Nothing is coincidence.
Shakespeare a woman? Ridiculous. But at least you admit the existence of Italian Cryptos, so why couldn’t Pelosi be one too?
Not just a woman, but a Jewish woman, and one of the first published female poets of England:
At the age of 42, in 1611, Lanier published a collection of poetry called Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (Hail, God, King of the Jews). At this time it was still highly unusual for an Englishwoman to publish, especially in an attempt to make a living. Emilia was only the fourth woman in the British Isles to publish poetry. Hitherto, Isabella Whitney had published a 38-page pamphlet of poetry partly written by her correspondents, Anne Dowriche, who was Cornish, and Elizabeth Melville, who was Scottish. So Lanier’s book is the first book of substantial, original poetry written by an Englishwoman. She wrote it in the hope of attracting a patron. It was also the first potentially feminist work published in England, as all the dedications are to women and the title poem “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”, about the crucifixion of Christ, is written from a woman’s point of view.[12] Her poems advocate and praise female virtue and Christian piety, but reflect a desire for an idealized, classless world.[13]
Or could it be that God’s language supersedes Hebrew? In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. And after the Garden when all the people gathered together to build the Tower, God confounded all of their words so that they couldn’t understand one another. It was after all that when the Hebrew tribe and language actually came about.
The Bible is only safe in your soft but strong hands.
God spoke to Abraham and to Moses in Hebrew. And if your God, Caesar Christ, was a poor Rabbi from Israel, he also spoke Hebrew. Not Greek not Latin and not Aramaic.
Ah, the hatred of Christ begins to arise at last. The Talmud wins out!
No, Yan, I don’t like and don’t tolerate lies. Caesar Christ is a sly Roman forgery. So is the Talmud.
Another example of the foolishness, the danger, the irrationality of religion:
https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/florida-pastor-arrested-for-holding-services-in-violation-of-coronavirus-restrictions/
Authorities practically begged him not to do it.
Hundreds huddled together with Death.
Not the irrationality of religion in itself but the irrationality of fanatics. True religion is not fanatical but the quintessence of sanity as it is the gateway to the knowledge and wisdom at large in the universe…
We will need religion more than ever in our brave, new post-virus world as it is through the religious experience we draw upon the knowledge and wisdom at large in the universe. There is a strong correspondence between the religious experience and the creative experience (as in creative problem solving) as both are inner directed and make use of the deep mind or supra-conscious levels of being…
Whoo!
Last day of March, 2020, and one has to admit it’s been a transformative month. A short 30 days ago I don’t think I’d heard of the C- Virus yet; I was like a clueless character in a 50s scifi film, (when a radio report in the background briefly mentions strange meteorites crashing into farm fields in the next county) out in the driveway spooling monofilament onto one of my fishing reels, looking forward to spring, radio playing in the background, and on the news report a brief mention of a new sort of flu emanating out of Wuhan Province, China. Which I didn’t pay much attention too.
Truly a Black Swan event, one for the ages.
Brh
If any place needs a union its these massive Amazon warehouses which have sprung up all over the country. From what I’ve heard they run their employees ragged and treat them like sh#t. The workforce needs to organize.
Oh, oh, oh, an objective reading of history, what? And most particularly that of the US before our Civil War, to illustrate that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s religious screed obscured the reality that labor management in the industrializing north was — in practice — often no less exploitative and inhumane than treatment of chattel labor by plantation owners in the south. Often, to the contrary, southern “owners”– by “genteel”, post Enlightenment standards of the era — not only educated and nurtured their slaves to levels above off-plantation Whites but promoted those exhibiting more promising capabilities to what amounted to a bourgeois standing. Recall, the slur of off-plantation Whites toward that plantation bourgeois as “uppity niggers”, and that bourgeois class’ reference to off-plantation Whites as “white trash”? Hmmm, sound familiar to today’s virtue signalling Alt-Left?
Well, at least people in the north were getting paid.
Actually the pay and benefits at the Amazon warehouse up in Windsor Locks isn’t too bad; it’s the working conditions that need improvement (from what 2 people I know who work there tell me) and I doubt if Amazon will be making improvements on it’s own. Actually I’m surprised the Teamsters aren’t in there yet.
Brh
Well said, Brh.
I worked for UPS at the Sylmar hub as a temp in nor East LA and I can tell you UPS treated us like shit as well and they had a worthless union.
Loading 1800 boxes an hour for $8 bucks an hour boxes coming at you that could weigh as little as an ounce to as heavy as 45 pounds. I specifically loaded trucks going to Riverside. Lasted three months in the hellish summer heat before they let me go.
The shit we do for a paycheck when we don’t know any better.
You know, since we don’t have government funded health care, it’s not the federal government’s fault that initially there were an inadequate number of ventilators. Blame the bean counters at individual hospitals who draw up budgets and make purchasing decisions
Very true and also the idea that resources are just a phone call and purchase order away.
We used to value being prepared as a society and hospitals used to have huge storage areas full of needed supplies but now those same supplies are seen as an expense to be shoved off till next quarter or just before being needed.
Profit rules the words and the deeds.
One thing that may happen is an identification of the roles of various levels of government in maintaining the integrity of health care systems. Is maintenance of certain levels of medical equipment a responsibility of government in the first place? Or maybe local bond issues?
Should go like this business, town/city, county, state, region, feds.
To try and keep track of everything else in any other order is insanity.
https://publicintegrity.org/health/coronavirus-and-inequality/the-governments-secret-ventilator-stockpile-is-nowhere-near-enough-to-fight-the-coronavirus/
Why is this surprising? Why should we have made and maintained a hundred thousand ventilators to maybe fight a pandemic?
The real issue is why did we give up the ability to create a hundred thousand ventilators in three weeks if need be. Giving away our manufacturing ability should be considered a crime. People who have favored “free trade” as a directive to giving away our manufacturing capability, may they be the first to get the virus!
If this pandemic makes the “free trade” paradigm die, it could be a silver lining!
“Giving away our manufacturing ability should be considered a crime.”
Sadly, Maggie Thatcher’s already gawn … and got off pretty much scot free, other than a touch of dementia. She thought we’d do a lot better selling each other cappuccinos and insurance policies.
Coal mines are closing. Do you have any problem with those lost jobs?
Doug Casey [the guy with the bad investments] mentions in one of his books…the place is surrounded by fish and has lots of coal but the socialist gov created scarcity in both.
‘Crisis investing’ or ‘Crisis for the 80s or 90s’.
“Coal mines are closing. Do you have any problem with those lost jobs?”
Tin mines in Cornwall closed a long time ago – it happens. Children lost chimney sweeping jobs in Victorian times because of those damned do-gooders.
Every last medical publishing job in Edinburgh has gone, the final ones last Christmas.
What do you think about poppy farming jobs?
For the cost of this baby we could have purchased 520,000 vents at the inflated price of 25 G’s each. That 13 B does not cover airplanes and support craft. Beware the MIC!
https://www.cnet.com/pictures/meet-the-navys-new-13-billion-aircraft-carrier/
The real problem is not the pandemic we now face but the fact that our technocratic civilization is unsustainable. We should consider this a wake-up call informing us we need to get back on track. How do we get back on track? Only through reconnecting with the Source via the religious/creative experience…
American citizens dutifully social distancing 03/30/2020
https://twitter.com/i/status/1244071074356224000
ha ha
Lots of gunfire in the background and a woman yelling Fuck dat shit!…fuck dat shit!
All those shots and I don’t see any bodies. That tells me the gangsta’s can’t hit shit.
Greetings, Brother.
Ahahahahahaha
Louisville Sluggers.
Yesterday in Stanford a jeweler shot to death in his store in the middle of the afternoon. IOW, in and around the ‘Hood’ its business as usual.
of course. how could it be any better?
ONCE THE EBT STOPS, WATCH OUT BROTHA.
So the greed has over come caution and guess who has infection rates climbing again?
https://www.oann.com/mainland-china-reports-48-new-confirmed-coronavirus-cases/
If you have ever dealt with these people one thing they do not value is your personal space they are the perfect culture and vessels for something like this.
What I have been doing during this period of social distancing is taking long walks in abandoned areas of Detroit (with my MFLB). There is something about the way derelict Victorian houses are reclaimed by nature that I find aesthetically pleasing. I wonder about the families that once lived in the homes when they were new and the world seemed like bright, shiny penny full of untold possibility…
Sunburstsoldier
“taking long walks in abandoned area of Detroit (with my MFLB) ”
Yikes!!!
I hope ‘MFLB’ is a new brand of semi auto, or at least a sturdy .38 Special revolver.
Brh
Jerusalem Post Israel News
Expert claims inscriptions from Egyptian exodus proves Hebrew is world’s oldest alphabet
By DANIEL K. EISENBUD
Critics argue first alphabet an amalgam of Semitic languages.
ONE OF the ancient Egyptian stone slabs inscribed with the name Ahisamach, from Exodus 31:6, used by Petrovich in his research. (photo credit: COURTESY OF DOUGLAS PETROVICH)
ONE OF the ancient Egyptian stone slabs inscribed with the name Ahisamach, from Exodus 31:6, used by Petrovich in his research.
(photo credit: COURTESY OF DOUGLAS PETROVICH)
Hebrew, resurrected by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda during the late 19th century after having been considered a dead language, may contain the oldest alphabet in the world, a Canadian expert contends.
According to Douglas Petrovich, an ancient-inscription specialist, archeologist and professor of Egyptian history at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, more than 3,800 years ago Israelites enslaved in Egypt invented the alphabet using roughly two dozen Egyptian hieroglyphs.
While critics argue that the original alphabet likely derived from a grouping of Afro-Asiatic languages – including Akkadian, Aramaic, Phoenician, Ethiopic and Hebrew – Petrovich claims that an inscription discovered on an ancient Egyptian stone slab in 2012 proves his case.
The slab in question, known as Sania 115, dates from 1842 BCE and is on display at Harvard’s Semitic Museum. It identifies Joseph and his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, and is inscribed with the words “6 Levantines: Hebrews of Bethel, the beloved.”
“I was translating Middle Egyptian and proto-consonantal Hebrew inscriptions that nobody ever had translated successfully before,” Petrovich said during a recent interview with Fox News. “There were many Aha! moments along the way, because I was stumbling across biblical figures never attested before in the epigraphical record, or seeing connections that I had not understood before.”
“On this otherwise Middle Egyptian caption were a Canaanite syllabic and the world’s oldest attested proto-consonantal letter ‘B,’ depicting a house for the Hebrew consonant ‘bet,’” he said. “It was this single proto-consonantal Hebrew letter that helped me to understand that the world’s oldest alphabet – the language of which has been unidentified for over 150 years of scholarship – is Hebrew.”
Petrovich said he subsequently translated 16 more Hebrew inscriptions from four other ancient slabs discovered in Egypt and Sinai, including one from 1446 BCE, which describes Moses as a figure heralded by the ancient Jews shortly before he led the exodus from Egypt.
“I absolutely was surprised to find the Moses [reference], because he resided in Egypt for less than a year at the time of his provoking of astonishment there,” Petrovich told Fox News.
After exhaustive research to determine whether the combination of letters could have other meanings, the researcher said he eliminated all possible options.
“Only after realizing that every other possibility had to be eliminated, whether due to contextual or grammatical limitations, was I forced to admit that this word must be taken as a proper noun and almost undoubtedly refers to the Moses who is credited with writing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Torah,” he said.
While conceding that his research has been met with considerable cynicism from fellow scholars, who state that biblical dates are unreliable, Petrovich contended that the onus is on them to prove him wrong.
“My discoveries are so controversial because, if correct, they will rewrite the history books and undermine much of the assumptions and misconceptions about the ancient Hebrew people and the Bible that have become commonly accepted in the scholarly world and taught as factual in the world’s leading universities,” he said during the interview.
“To my skeptics, I say: ‘Continue to be skeptical. Do not accept my conclusions until you are convinced they are correct.’” Petrovich added: “Truth is un-killable, so if I am correct, my findings will outlast scholarly scrutiny.”
call trust.
Denmark has passed an emergency law that allows for the government to force people to take a vaccine for coronavirus.
Citizens who refuse to be tested for the coronavirus will face fines and potential prison time, and will be prevented from entering shops, grocery stores, public institutions and hospitals while also being restricted from using public transport.
Here’s the kicker, the law also allows the authorities to force people to be vaccinated, even though there is currently no vaccination for the virus.
With these mandatory vaccinations it is possible that they will also include the RFID chipping of people after all this is the perfect excuse “we need to get rid of the money because the virus spreads through the money.
Relax, Denmark is not the US. They are not taught to push the limits and get as much as they can for themselves. They learn about SOLIDARITY which Americans don’t even know about. You don’t what SOLIDARITY is for example. Danes learn to get along with others and unlike Americans they would not overstep their authority to plant a chip.
Read his post again: they are setting the stage to overstep natural law by making it legal to do so. Be honest with us and yourself. As the Bard said, To thine own self be true and as follows the night the day, thou canst be false to any man.
Do you have to mangle quotations like that? It’s distressing.
You’ve said the exact opposite of what you meant to say. And what he said.
I don’t need to look it up because I learned it when I was 16. But you should.
‘As the Bard said’. Yeah…
Obviously leaving out the “not” was a typo. Don’t be so desperate to get over on me. Have some dignity.
Nice try, bozo.
Allow Shakespeare some dignity and stop mangling quotations.
Look. Them. Up.
It still wasn’t right even with the ‘not’ reinstated.
And I realise leaving out the ‘one’ in your petulant post must have been a typo too. 🙂
Why are we trying to tie Jesus to any language? Stems from a discussion between Netanyahu and the Pope. Who cares?
Scholars say that Jesus spoke Aramaic because he spent most of his ministry in Galilee, an Aramaic speaking area at the time. However, when he entered the world of the Jewish religion, every thing was in Hebrew. Maybe, in his twelve year old story in the NT, people were amazed because here was a poor carpenter’s son conversing with the elders in Jerusalem in Hebrew.
Maybe Jesus’ words were heard by people in their own language wherever He spoke, maybe it was one of the miracles He wrought during his ministry.
Also, remember the writing of St. Luke, the Acts of the Apostles. He was a witness to the early church, a Roman doctor. He eventually became a witness to the early ministry of Paul.
He witnessed the Pentecost, where people in Jerusalem heard some of the first teachings of the disciples, in their own language.
Never take away from the Power of God. Anything is possible, every miracle is credible. Do not humanize God!
Scholars figure that Jesus spoke at least Aramaic, but also Hebrew, and probably Greek. Maybe all the above plus any other language in the audience at the moment.
All things are possible with God.
“All things are possible with God.” —JohnAZ
Is that because God is all-powerful? Is God powerful enough to instantly eliminate all coronavirus from earth and from human lungs?
Apparently being deprived of breath till you croak is character forming, which is the point of us being here.
Or something.
Sorry. You’re mistaking God with Santa Clause
Good point. If God doesn’t bring us all ? than ‘He’ must not exist. However God has already given us the greatest gift of all, the freedom to participate in our own moral and spiritual development…
The question mark is supposed to be ‘presents’ but the little icon did not transcribe for some reason…
It’s a very common mistake or assumption. That somehow because God is there and can do all things translates to that attitude in people of “if you won’t wave the wand for me then I want believe in you”. Humans are so human LOL! When you support the free flow of peoples across the entire planet then you will always run the risk of devastating global pandemic at any moment. And btw, the Lord did warn about that. But anyhoo.
“Sorry. You’re mistaking God with Santa Clause”
Do you mean ‘the Santa clause’? 🙂
I think what you’re basically saying is that you can credit ‘God’ with anything you like and never be expected to show the slightest evidence of anything.
Which is fine if that’s what floats your boat. With or without the animals going in two by two.
“When you support the free flow of peoples across the entire planet…”
So would you have begged your ancestors to stay at home in the old world so as not to spread measles and smallpox to those who had no immunity? Or are you happy to have been part of that free flow of peoples across the planet?
You could go back to try to atone, if that’s the way you feel.
Didn’t your ancestors know about those lines God drew for them?
If God wanted to, He could destroy the earth anytime. If natural history is correct, He has done it. A number of times. His rules of existence are sacrosanct.
You are judging God by your statement. Is the virus God’s fault? If things do not go the way we think they should go, it is God’s fault? God is everything, any way you look or feel. His expression to us is our detectable universe, his rules are natural laws.
When you violate the natural laws, overpopulation, pollution, etc., you pay the price. God gave us the power of free choice, our wonderful humanism has created the situations we face, not God.
So did we create ovarian and testicular cancer too? And volcanic eruptions? And earthquakes and tsunamis?
What natural laws did any newborn baby violate in the womb to get this?
https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/skin-children-harlequin-fetusharlequin-type-600w-1345909256.jpg
Mrs Green,
I had 6,000,000 such questions. Until I realized them are not the right questions to be asking. The right question to be asking, is how much worse could it have been, but wasn’t. Be ever thankful it is not worse.
We live in God’s universe and His world. We have volcanoes, do we have to build cities on their flanks? We have cancers, mistakes in DNA, do we have to pollute the earth with carcinogens? Earthquakes and tsunamis, why build on top of faults and next to the ocean. Same with hurricanes.
God gave us the power of reasoning, too bad we suck at it.
JohnAZ
You have a devious answer for everything. Are you telling me that no-one beyond the immediate vicinity was harmed by Krakatoa blowing? That when Yellowstone blows it will be the fault of half of America for ‘choosing’ to live there? That all cancers are manmade? Cancer has been recorded since antiquity.
And the meteor that probably exterminated the dinosaurs was because they did what? If it had landed later and killed humans instead, would that be the fault of the humans for being there?
As I said, religious people can say ANYTHING! Which is why my husband makes a point of never arguing with them about religion. Ever. Because it’s utterly pointless. 🙂
It impossible for these words to be scribed in flawless formal Greek on mountains of leather parchment rolls that would only be available to and can only be afforded by kings, and to be done so by poor native Hebrew speaking fisherman from Judea that are barely subsisting and are further burdened by heavy Roman taxes.
Think about how many mistakes you make, and you are a native speaker of the language who was for decades formally schooled in the language and has an electronic dictionary available to consult and correct, and you still make mistakes. Think how many mistakes would have to have been corrected, just typos alone. How is it that all these words are perfectly spelled? How come the grammar is perfect? How come we see no mistakes and no corrections whatsoever of any kind in any of the copies? This is because it was done by multiple teams of professional scribes at the Imperial Roman Court. It is pure Roman PSYOPS propaganda.
Akmo is trying to “own” the Lord of the Universe for his own tribe, turn God back into Jehovah, their tribal deity. Others do the same for their own tribe or religion. Christians do it too, as if God is trapped within the pages of their Bible.
No, Jan, God is trapped within a marble statue of a man called Zeus. Then in a marble statue of a man called Caesar. Then within a wooden carving of a cross and in the Greek and Latin forgery of Hebrew testimony and prophecy.
Yet, somehow the Hebrew God always survives as the truth.
And before Ba’al and Zeus and Caesar and the Cross, a 1000 ton!! statue of God Pharaoh now broken to a thousand unrecognizable pieces strewn in the graveyard of history.
https://youtu.be/FpPoZlDxOxk
Your cognitive statue is far worse. The product of marble heads.
Nope. There is only witness testimony to a long history of wrong and right paths as illuminated by God the consequences thereof.
Hmmm?
Watching Andrew Cuomo.
Wondering why when he talks about the situation in New York with all the bad news, the Media just listens to him with eyes and mouths agape getting ready to call him the new messiah. Why is he held up saying the identical info that Trump and his team put out two hours later?
There is no better example of the hypocrisy of the media in this country than the contrast between these two annunciators.
I like what I hear from Cuomo, a straight shooter in a field of liars. His message has been converging with Trump’s group over the last month or so. Cuomo seems, right now, to be a bright light in a Democratic field of scoundrels.
JHK, could you give a paragraph on your impressions of Cuomo for us uninformed folks about his history?
Is he a representative of the Democratic Party that has been lost?
Not by a longshot, JohnAZ
https://www.ontheissues.org/Andrew_Cuomo.htm
Plus he’s shacking up with Sandra Lee, a former Food Network “superstar”
If we really judged our male leaders by their sexual exploits, we would not have elected at least half of the presidents in our history.
Read the link stating his positions on issues and tell me you support him
Some people say perception is reality. I perceive that Governor Cuomo is very empathetic and connects with people well. In addition to that he has a strong presence and a commanding attitude and appears to simply want to get the job done. Trump has the confidence, but often times he seems to care more about money making, making deals, and one-upmanship. Trump doesn’t do empathy well and has issues connecting because he doesn’t keep his most important promises. I don’t want to hear what his guesses are when we are dealing with a pandemic. I want him to do stuff and make people do stuff and I also want him to act like every life matters. Cuomo has done a very good job at exhibiting all these traits in a tough time so here we are.
So presentation is the difference. Trump’s presentation is what got him elected, people were sick of the Deep State’s BS.
Is Cuomo the best of both worlds? The presentation of Obama, who could have sold ice to the Eskimos, and the guts and bravado of Trump, who is not afraid of anything.
He has stated over and over he wants no part of the Presidency. I hope he changes his mind, Biden is a potential nation destroyer.
I personally feel like Biden is definitely going to lose against Trump. But if Cuomo runs against Trump then I think Trump has a problem. If Cuomo somehow “sees the light” and turn Nationalist and Border Strong then it will be over for Trump.
Biden is falling apart. No way while he ever be president…
If Cuomo “sees the light”, he will leave the Progressive movement behind. We will have the remake of the Dems that is imperative for the country to survive intact. Both parties need to make America First.
A national leader needs to make tough decisions for the good of the whole group. Sometimes the decisions hurt.
We currently have a media that takes tough decisions and turn them always against the leader. They spend 24/7 screening for items they can use against him. He will be remembered for making the tough decisions not for the idiot media’s reactions.
They’re all going to be listening to the same people I assume. Biden would just be a puppet. Maybe that’s better than having someone who thinks he’s real like Trump apparently does.
Obviously you didn’t read where he stands on the issues SSL
You know what. I do admit that my post was totally emotional. And I looked at the link you provided and there was simply too much information to read but I realize that he is liberal and open borders and all. But I do feel that he is getting positive ratings for the qualities I mentioned. And you know, he isn’t going to run for President anyways at least that is what he says now.
A Loony once told me, his voice dripping with contempt,
that Adam didn’t eat an apple but rather, a pear.
/ Well he was a Rev Moon devotee. I read stories about their squads of ‘give us yr money’ people, going door to door.
Your anecdotes are TOO much.
One of the great political mysteries of the late 20th Century is why Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s father never ran for President.
Too closely linked to the mob, like many of your ex RI governors and Providence mayors.
Brh
I loved Mario Cuomo and would have loved to have had him as president. But he refused. I think he also refused a Supreme Court nomination. I think he was tired. Andrew Cuomo is supposed to be a very nasty and mean individual. He is showing his best side right now with his pressers. I recall Kunstler saying that Cuomo was nasty.
The Associated Press
Have Israeli archaeologists found world’s oldest Israeli Hebrew inscription?
Lines on pottery found near Beit Shemesh written 3,000 years ago, at time of Bible’s King David.
An Israeli archaeologist digging at a hilltop south of Jerusalem believes a ceramic shard found in the ruins of an ancient town bears the oldest Hebrew inscription ever discovered, a find that could provide an important glimpse into the culture and language of the Holy Land at the time of the Bible.
The five lines of faded characters written 3,000 years ago, and the ruins of the fortified settlement where they were found, are indications that a powerful Israelite kingdom existed at the time of the Old Testament’s King David, says Yossi Garfinkel, the Hebrew University archaeologist in charge of the new dig at Hirbet Qeiyafa.
Other scholars are hesitant to embrace Garfinkel’s interpretation of the finds, made public on Thursday. The discoveries are already being wielded in a vigorous and ongoing argument over whether the Bible’s account of events and geography is meant to be taken literally.
Hirbet Qeiyafa sits near the city of Beit Shemesh in the Judean foothills, an area that was once the frontier between the hill-dwelling Israelites and their enemies, the coastal Philistines. The site overlooks the Elah Valley, said to be the scene of the slingshot showdown between David and the Philistine giant Goliath, and lies near the ruins of Goliath’s hometown in the Philistine metropolis of Gath.
A teenage volunteer found the curved pottery shard, 15 centimeters by 15 centimeters, in July near the stairs and stone washtub of an excavated home. It was later discovered to bear five lines of characters known as proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
Carbon-14 analysis of burnt olive pits found in the same layer of the site dated them to between 1,000 and 975 B.C., the same time as the Biblical golden age of David’s rule in Jerusalem.
Scholars have identified other, smaller Hebrew fragments from the 10th century B.C., but the script, which Garfinkel suggests might be part of a letter, predates the next significant Hebrew inscription by between 100 and 200 years. History’s best-known Hebrew texts, the Dead Sea scrolls, were penned on parchment beginning 850 years later.
The shard is now kept in a university safe while philologists translate it, a task expected to take months. But several words have already been tentatively identified, including ones meaning judge, slave and king.
The Israelites were not the only ones using proto-Canaanite characters, and other scholars suggest it is difficult – perhaps impossible – to conclude the text is Hebrew and not a related tongue spoken in the area at the time. Garfinkel bases his identification on a three-letter verb from the inscription meaning to do, a word he said existed only in Hebrew.
“That leads us to believe that this is Hebrew, and that this is the oldest Hebrew inscription that has been found,” he said.
Other prominent Biblical archaeologists warned against jumping to conclusions.
Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was very important, as it is the longest proto-Canaanite text ever found. But he suggested that calling the text Hebrew might be going too far.
“It’s proto-Canaanite,” he said. “The differentiation between the scripts, and between the languages themselves in that period, remains unclear.”
Some scholars and archeologists argue that the Bible’s account of David’s time inflates his importance and that of his kingdom, and is essentially myth, perhaps rooted in a shred of fact.
But if Garfinkel’s claim is borne out, it would bolster the case for the Bible’s accuracy by indicating the Israelites could record events as they happened, transmitting the history that was later written down in the Old Testament several hundred years later.
It also would mean that the settlement – a fortified town with a 10-meter-wide monumental gate, a central fortress and a wall running 700 meters in circumference – was probably inhabited by Israelites.
The finds have not yet established who the residents were, says Aren Maier, a Bar Ilan University archaeologist who is digging at nearby Gath. It will become more clear if, for example, evidence of the local diet is found, he said: “Excavations have shown that Philistines ate dogs and pigs, while Israelites did not.”
“The nature of the ceramic shards found at the site suggest residents might have been neither Israelites nor Philistines but members of a third, forgotten people,” he said.
“If the inscription is Hebrew, it would indicate a connection to the Israelites and make the text one of the most important texts, without a doubt, in the corpus of Hebrew inscriptions,” Maier said. “But it has great importance whatever the language turns out to be,” he added.
Saar Ganor, an Israel Antiquities Authority ranger, noticed the unusual scale of the walls while patrolling the area in 2003. Three years later he interested Garfinkel, and after a preliminary dig they began work in earnest this summer. They have excavated only 4 percent of the six-acre settlement so far.
Archaeology has turned up only scant finds from David’s time in the early 10th century B.C., leading some scholars to suggest his kingdom may have been little more than a small chiefdom or that he might not have existed at all.
Garfinkel believes building fortifications like those at Hirbet Qeiyafa could not have been a local initiative: The walls would have required moving 200,000 tons of stone, a task too big for the 500 or so people who lived there. Instead, it would have required an organized kingdom like the one the Bible says David ruled.
Zionism has traditionally seen archaeology as a way of strengthening and explaining the Jewish claim to Israel, and regarded David’s kingdom as the glorious ancestor of the new Jewish state. So finding evidence of his rule has importance beyond its interest to scholars.
The dig is partially funded by Foundation Stone, a Jewish educational organization, which hopes to bring volunteers to work there as a way of teaching them a national and historical lesson.
“When I stand here, I understand that I’m on the front lines of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines,” said Rabbi Barnea Levi Selavan, the group’s director. “I open my Bible and read about David and Goliath, and I understand that I’m in the Biblical context.”
While the site could be useful to scholars, archaeologist Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University urged adhering to the strict boundaries of science.
Finkelstein, who has not visited the dig but attended a presentation of the findings, warned against what he said was a revival in the belief that what’s written in the Bible is accurate like a newspaper. That style of archaeology was favored by 19th century European diggers who trolled the Holy Land for physical traces of Biblical stories, their motivation and methods more romantic than scientific.
“This can be seen as part of this phenomenon,” Finkelstein said.
Now I have to read about KING Davids rule in Jerusalem.
How many people were killed in the walled cities?
A lot.
The article admits they used Cannanite script. So they didn’t invent it. Maybe you should read the things you post and maybe the authors should edit their own articles since they seem confused too.
Canaan is geographical Israel. Hebrews are Canaanites.
“Garfinkel bases his identification on a three-letter verb from the inscription meaning to do, a word he said existed only in Hebrew.”
No, the Israelites invaded Canaan and put the people to the sword. Read your TANAKH and get your story straight.
Do you know where in Exodus this is mentioned?
I have a book-‘The Dark Side of Man’ and the author mentions this but the bibliography doesnt index it.
Only Jericho was put the sword as they blocked and refused Israel passage to the land. There was no looting of Jericho and its goods weren’t touched as the city was torched. The rest of Canaan then sent emissaries to make peace treaties with Israel, and those peace treaties were accepted and made. Hebron was purchased by Abraham prior to the exodus and after the return to Israel its new inhabitants refused to hand it back over. Hebron then made an alliance with another five Amorite cities against Israel and were defeated in battle at Gibeon, where God made the sun and moon stands still so that the battle could finish in daylight. God also hurled huge hailstones from the sky that killed the combined armies of the Canaanite alliance. And that’s that.
God gave Canaan to Abram who was from Mesopotamia. Abram was God’s choice to be the patriarch of the Hebrew people. His family propagated into both the Arabs and Hebrews. Abram’s family dwelt in Canaan until a drought hit during the Time of Jacob and his sons. One of his sons Joseph was a soothsayer in Egypt and got the whole fam damily to move to Egypt. Four hundred years later, the discipline and procreation rate of the Hebrews scared the heck out of the Pharaoh who enslaved them. Then came Moses, trained in the imperial court. Then came the Exodus with God’s promise of a promised land, Canaan. Then a falling out of faith by the Moses generation with forty years in the desert to let that generation die out. Even Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land. His hand picked, Joshua, started the conquering of Canaan. Everything was positive for the Hebrews through David and Solomon until sibling rivalry caused a split in the tribes of Israel. I believe eleven tribes ended up in Samaria and Galilee and two, Judah and Benjamin ended up in Jerusalem and its area.
Hence, Galilee, Samaria and Judaea at the time of Christ. Many Separate kings ran Judea and Israel (Galilee and Samaria) until the Babylonians destroyed Israel and Enslaved Judea.
Very simple history. Joshua did put the current Canaanites to the sword, and successive generations wiped out the people there. Philistines best known.
Such a god is a Devil. Thank God that Jehovah is not real, or perhaps just a thought form or egregor that serves the Jewish people.
Well, Tyranny Rex, when dealing with lizards one must be a devil. Them lizards are now mostly dead and buried and some are in museums hung on display by their naked bones. Some have reincarnated as Satanic Vatican Commies of the various brands, but the basic idea of their vanquish is the same.
Jericho was torched to the ground and left abandoned for 300 years. And that’s the lesson of God for Tyranny Rex. You best learn this lesson should you wish to avoid the Devil God appear again. But you won’t. You never do. And that’s why you will become extinct, just like the dinosaurs before you.
Egypt, prior to Jericho, was so decimated by God’s plagues, that it was felt completely open for the most cruel of the Arab tribes, the tribe of Amalek, to freely enter from the Arabian desert and rule over her for 400 years.
This is a warning to the Vatican mafia as well. God has a sense of humour, but karma does not.
Hey tucsonspur. You are right that a lot of times there is irrationality in religion. And also clearly, fraud. But also their is fraud in science too. So that is why I think it really is a heart issue no matter the person. Some preachers are actually wolves in sheep’s clothing. Maybe the best can be found somewhere between religion and science? They do intersect somewhere in the universe.
Or maybe science is Man’s exploration of the expressions of God.
Two people describing a crime scene remember things very differently.
One person says I accept the explanations of God given in the Bible, another says I want an explanation of why things are the way they are that makes sense to me. Both are exploring the age old questions where did we come from and where are we going?
Who is right? Who knows? Who cares? And IMHO, both mechanisms end up with answers that are just as right. They just use a different language.
Religion and science are not opposed to one another anyway. Science deals with the physical or outer reality where phenomena can be observed, measured, and quantified. On the other hand religion deals with the spiritual/moral or inner reality of the individual, and this is something which lies beyond the methodological scope of science.
The reason it is difficult for a theist to convince a non-theist of the reality of God is because real faith is at bottom derived from a personal religious experience, and such experiences are only meaningful to those who have shared them.
Yoga is the Spiritual Science but the man cannot stand apart from it since he is the object being studied and experimented on, albeit by himself. So objectivity, though not thrown out the window, (else fantasy wins), must be profoundly modified. Both experimenter and the experiment? Not easy!
Other religions have their own versions of this, though of course they might consider this kind of language cold. Christianity and Islam prefer the image of a love affair between the soul and God. But some of the Sufis love Wisdom too, and would accept this language as long as it didn’t interfere with the love affair.
Some Christian mystics have studied mysticism and can present it rationally, their viewpoint similar to that of such Sufis.
Yes. You are speaking of the Inner Mystic Path which lies at the heart of all the major forms of organized religion. This path is made up of all those who have heard and responded to the Inner Voice for God, often in the face of extreme persecution from their fellow religionists.
Is there a difference between Jesus’ message and the Roman Catholic Church? Anything Man touches is corrupted. God himself tried to realign the Hebrews over and over during the OT days. Prophets came and went trying to give God’s message, most of them rejected by the Hebrew people.
Our job is to see past the human garbage and perceive “the Truth.”
How can any one religion own God? Trap Him within the pages of their scripture, be it the Bible, Gita, or Koran?
The Sufi, Martin Lings, offered a different way of seeing it via this metaphor: Each of God’s revelations to man is like a Divine Tide. The subsequent religions are like the pools left by the Tide as it goes out. Good? Yes. Necessary? Of course? But the whole of God’s Wisdom and Love? Ridiculous. And the tidal pools get smaller and smaller as they dry up over the ages, unless partially renewed by new prophets and saints.
God speaks to the individual. The individual interprets God’s inner guidance in terms of the belief system in which he or she is brought up…
There are many paths but only one WAY…
Why would he talk to one who refused to study his Revelation? Or studied it and then rejected it – as you know reject parts of the your scripture, the Urantia Book?
You have to work the stages, Sunny. You can’t go all the way on the first date.
God talks to everyone all the time (Inner Voice) not just those who read ‘His’ supposed scriptures. The only purpose those scriptures serve is to encourage us to listen…
I think you already know this but get a kick out of throwing a monkey wrench in the works…
Your inner voice tells you that race doesn’t exist or that it doesn’t matter. Mine tells me the opposite.
They actually intersect right here on Earth. Many books on science and religion.
Albert Einstein once declared: “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”
The above to SSL.
Also, consider books like “The God Particle” by Lederman or “The God Effect” by Clegg, on quantum entanglement, etc.
The God Particle
Problem solved, the primal particle.
Uh-huh!
Where did the God particle come from?
Yeah, pretty lame. God is a Proton! Who could believe that? Or worship that?
No, God is a Quark! A Moony once told me, his voice dripping with contempt, that Adam didn’t eat an apple but rather, a pear.
Holding a belief in the existence of God is not nearly as important as following the Inner Voice which speaks for God. Since following the Inner Voice is usually not a conscious process it is possible a so-called atheist can actually be more adherent to the Divine Will than a card-carrying believer. It is no secret that organized religion often provides the greatest stumbling block to genuine faith…
By their fruits (moral integrity, righteousness, sincerity) you will know them, not necessarily by their beliefs…
Inner voice= Holy Spirit?
Could be John.
The best tasting chicken is freshly-killed Chinese chicken from the Chinese wet market.
Good News: Results out of Germany, which is aggressively testing (500,000 per week), seem to suggest that the case fatality rate is only 0.4%. Plus it looks like Zinc helps as an inexpensive treatment. This is ironic since it looks like the US deliberately chose not to test believing that if there was no testing then there would be no cases. I guess that this was ok until people starting showing up in hospitals and they were forced to do testing? In contrast, the Germans chose to be honest and to do aggressive testing and to let the chips fall where they may. The Germans may not be as psychotic and deranged as the Americans? The Americans always seems to prefer being dishonest. Strange society…. Now everyone is freaking out and the propaganda effect of the pandemic may have set in motion various authoritarian, bureaucratic pathologies that could go terribly awry, perhaps, a bit like during the outset of the US Civil War or WWI?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Gy9nPAQE0&noapp=1
0.4%? Is my maths THAT bad? When I divide the 42,000 dead by the 858,000 cases, I get 4.9%
Today, I divide 937,000 by 47,000 & get the same answer. This is no annual seasonal “flu” style deal.
Green Alba:
“Sorry. You’re mistaking God with Santa Clause”
Do you mean ‘the Santa clause’? ?
I think what you’re basically saying is that you can credit ‘God’ with anything you like and never be expected to show the slightest evidence of anything.
Which is fine if that’s what floats your boat. With or without the animals going in two by two.
1) Thanks for the correction.
2) Read Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands A Verdict. It was sufficient evidence for me.
Oh and by the way Green Alba, you do of course know that the “Flood Myth” is found in many cultures, don’t you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_flood_myths
Warning: This link is evangelical in nature:https://www.icr.org/article/why-does-nearly-every-culture-have-tradition-globa/
Attack Sub
Lots of myths are recycled in various religions. Ideas that are found in Judeo-Christianity can be found in Zoroastrianism, following the Hebrew exile in Babylon, which led to cross-cultural fertilisation. Just one example.
I don’t know why you would find this surprising.
The point remains that believers can claim absolutely anything they like and demand that it be considered irrefutable … because ‘not amenable to scientific verification’ etc. Easy peasy.
Belief is individual, the Holy Spirit is in each one of us, in many different forms according to culture.
Jesus represented God to the Hebrews to say that individual response to God-in-us was paramount, all the good things flow from this. When Jesus interceded with Paul, the whole world was invited.
Your assertion doesn’t refute my point, JohnAZ.
You just keep asserting. That’s fine. Keep asserting. 🙂
I listened to it for 40-odd years. It’s not new to me.
But your version is at least more appealing than that of the Aryan Mystic Pagan etc. etc.
No, GA, you dismissed his point to easily. Flood myths of a major, near extinction level event, are found throughout the world. Nothing to do with the Hebrews. Of course, the Christians think it proves the Noah story, but it becomes obvious that the world had a catastrophe, yet far more than 8 people survived it.
The flood was relegated to the Mediterranean basin and occurred when the land barrier separating the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean was destroyed by an earthquake. It caused a tremendous loss of life which is why it has persisted in mythological form even to our day…
No Sunburst, that may be true so far as it goes, but there have been in the past 12,000 years some megacatastrophes and some more localized ones.
You believers are doing a lousy job and saying silly things. Green Alba, you also say silly things.
We are living in the material plane. It isn’t heaven. On the material plane, everything dies. We might ask why. We might ask what is the purpose of it all. But the purpose is obviously not that we live in a playpen and God makes sure no earthquakes ever happen. This is a rough place. There is probably a purpose. There is quite a bit of evidence for a spiritual reality. Not easy to prove, especially to those who have a grudge and bias against it.
If there is a spiritual plane it is obvious that our human bodies have very poor mechanisms for detecting it. The idea that someone has committed a great crime because they don’t perceive it is – well it is just more of the demonic crap that passes for religious dogma.
Yeah, I believe in God and I also believe in a demonic realm. People think the Bible was written under inspiration of God or the Holy Spirit but I think some of it was, and some of it was written by men with their own beliefs and agendas, and some of it was written under inspiration of demons.
And especially, lots of theologies were written under inspiration of demons. And all these Christians who say they believe in demons and think they and their pastors are immune.
It is pathetic. I loathe the Old Testament but Isaiah got it right. People do not even see the difference between good and evil, between light and dark, between bitter and sweet.
They teach a bitterness and call it good news. They teach a demon and call it God. And because they call it God they think it is by definition good. And because it is a wickedness they then say if the God who must be good is wicked, then this wickedness is really good.
And I know why all this goes on. It goes on because so many of those pithy sayings are quite true: This world is the devil’s playground. Satan is the god of this world. Well, ponder that. What does it mean? For one it means that it is quite attractive to worship the god of this world. People worship a wicked representation of God because they prefer it. God is simple and evil is complex. More interesting. Better drama.
God the Good is an acquired taste and many have not acquired it.
If you read autobiographies of ex-prisoners, you might be astonished at the low level of a large number of them, the predation, the violence, the crudity and the lack of responsibility. We people of the world are much like that, and the religion we arrange for ourselves suit the criminal minded. They all claim to be innocent. They blame everything else for their misery. Well, I have news for you humans – the issue is not a bad God, the issue is, why are you in prison and when will you take responsibility?
You lose nothing, Green Alba, by not believing in the demonic god that most Christians believe in.
Who said anyone was immune to demonic activity? It sounds like you know very well that demons naturally gravitate to “anti-demons”. A spiritual law of physics? Perhaps! So I am assuming you would take your conjecture all the way and presume that this occasional demonic inspiration is not unique to Christianity, but rather occurs in all religious and spiritual traditions? Maybe any human worldview or philosophy? And that fact, coupled with the general wickedness of human nature that you so succinctly point out may mean that Green Alba believes in demonic gods be they Christian or otherwise whether she’s aware of it or not.
Don’tcha just love it when people start discussing what you believe or don’t believe without even asking you? Hilarious. Well, not quite.
The narcissism is amazing. ‘I can tell you what you probably believe in because my righteousness’. Nice one.
As I pointed out already, SSL, I believed most of what you believe (well, without the fundamentalism and literalism, obviously, and with a whole lot of obvious questions to which you only dare offer yourself templated answers) for waaaay longer than you’ve even been alive.
Yet you still feel righteous. And right. Just because.
You believe what you believe because you were told to believe it. Same as I was. If you’d been born in Islamabad, you’d believe something else. Absolutely and without question.
SSL,
What is an anti-demon??
Yes, most Christians fear demons, but they don’t see the true influence. How can you if you don’t see the difference between good and evil?
Analyzing whether Green Alba believes in a demonic god – hmm, not too sure. It’s the way religious people worship a demonic god that troubles me.
Green Alba,
I do think that people can be unaware of what they actually believe or of their actual motivations, thus things like projection. So how did you come to decide that your prior belief was nonsense?
Well it was somewhat of a joke but in some ways I guess it isn’t. Sophia, anti-demon is a term I made up for that comment but I was just insinuating that, at least according to many accounts, demons appear to be attracted to good people or beings. Most likely because they want to test and torment them. Likewise, if you believe such things, the Devil and his minions don’t really need to spend much time working on the wicked because they are already, intentionally or unintentionally on the same side the demons are on. But I am not exactly sure what you mean by most Christians not understanding the difference between good and evil. It seems like all people inherently know the difference between good and evil. But most people get thrown off course by all the gray areas in life. I believe that is where the tests truly are but that is just me.
Alba, I was more or less insinuating what Sophia picked up on. That many people are not necessarily consciously aware of what beliefs underlie their actions and perceptions. And if there is a spirit world, you may be susceptible to it precisely because you do not believe it exists. That’s all.
I didn’t say it was nonsense, sophia. I totally understand the need for the only self-aware creature on the planet to believe it’s not just a creature like all the rest (I don’t think it is either, but not in the same way as religious people).
But after decades of the religious beliefs into which I was indoctrinated as a child, and which were bolstered by weekly reinforcing pep talks (as well as by years of my own confirmation-biased reading, I gave myself permission to look from the outside. It was a gradual process, nothing dramatic. But there are lots of interesting books by people who have travelled the same path in different ways and have more interesting things to say than I have.
I’ve already recommended Richard Holloway, the former Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Episcopal Church, and the American, Dan Barker, a former (incredibly fundamentalist) evangelical preacher, now co-founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Barker could be less long-winded. Holloway writes well and is a compassionate and highly educated man, with no arrogance at all. I recently read his small book on the history of religions and he doesn’t even say at the end what his own judgement is, but leaves it to the reader.
I loved Richard Holloway’s Looking into the Distance: the human search for meaning. I know no-one will read it, but there we are. It’s short – and excellent.
I hope nCV doesn’t get me before I manage to read some more of his books, starting with Waiting for the last bus: Reflections on Life and Death which has some excellent reviews.
He doesn’t refer to himself as an agnostic or an atheist, but an ‘after-religionist’. I guess that’s what I am for the moment too.
The problem is that religious people can’t read the writings of such people without looking down on them – or even commiserating with them – as having ‘lost their faith’, rather than looking at the wisdom they may have gained.
“Alba, I was more or less insinuating what Sophia picked up on. That many people are not necessarily consciously aware of what beliefs underlie their actions and perceptions. ”
Indeed. As long as you are aware that it applies to you too. Although I would argue that what they are unaware of is not their actual beliefs (who is anyone to tell someone else what they believe or don’t believe?) but the underlying and sometimes unconscious reasons for that belief.
I wonder what Satan and his minions found to do with themselves for all those billions of years before there were any humans to torment. 🙂
I agree that that same rule does apply to everyone, including me. You have pointed out some of my unconscious beliefs before like my apparent attraction to Aryan Mysticism. But the other thing is that I think you make too much of a blanket assumption that religious people look down automatically at people who have left their faith. I don’t think that is the case all the time. In fact I have heard some preachers say that it is no surprise at all that people leave the faith all the time. You and them may disagree on the reasons why those people left the faith but I don’t think everyone is going to look down their nose at people who have done something they sort of expect anyway. Now they may try to get them back into the fold. That is another story.
The god atheists don’t believe in doesn’t exist so there is nothing to disbelieve…
“The god atheists don’t believe in doesn’t exist ”
Sunburst
You seem like a nice person. But telling people what kind of God they (don’t) believe in is presumptuous. Inevitable, possibly, from religious people (who all believe they’re right even with their multifarious beliefs), but presumptuous nevertheless.
But the majority of ‘positive atheists’ would agree with you that the god they don’t believe in doesn’t exist. Which is why they don’t believe in ‘him’.
I shouldn’t make statements like that without explaining myself better. We all hold in our mind, whether we believe in God or not, a mental projection of what God is like (old white man on a throne, etc.) usually inherited from the religious tradition in which we were raised. The non- believer is someone who rejects this mental image or ‘god’ and says ‘he’ (or she or it) doesn’t exist. Of course they are absolutely right, but the next step should be to realize what they don’t believe in never existed in the first place. I submit the real God cannot be not believed in since being infinite and eternal ‘He’ lies beyond our finite comprehension. How is it possible to not believe in something which we cannot comprehend?
Not sure I succeeded in explaining myself any better…
I knew what you meant, sunburst. I was only teasing you.
I didn’t abandon a faith in an old man with a white beard.
I do, however, recall imagining, as a very young child, some being entirely covered in eyes that was watching me constantly. I remember horrifying myself by realising it must even be able to see me when the bathroom door was shut!
Imagine doing that to a child.
Woodrow Wilson grew up as a kid in Augusta, Georgia during the US Civil War in straitened circumstances. His dad was a Presbyterian preacher in a town church who would preach about how God and the Bible condoned Slavery. General Sherman did not rape and pillage Augusta allegedly because of some Georgia girl from the area that Sherman was Fuck’n. It appears that a big impetus for the Yankees’ occupation of the South was that they liked screwing Southern girls which they learned during Grant’s prior occupation of Mississippi. Those Southern girls can really Fuck! “Mmmm..,mmmm…mmmm…,”
The Comm…unist Chinese shot JR.
The Chicoms shot JR.
“True religion is not fanatical but the quintessence of sanity as it is the gateway to the knowledge and wisdom at large in the universe…” SS
Is wisdom the Dark Matter, just floating out there at large in the Universe? The gateway to knowledge has been science, not religion. And so, what is ‘true’ religion? The one that executes fewer people in its name? True science, not religion, is the quintessence of sanity.
As far as the ‘deep mind’ or ‘supra-conscious’ levels go, I think one can argue that it’s more of a spiritual connection here rather than a religious one, although the two can be as one. Something like in “The Tao of Physics”.
Cantor looked into the Infinite, the Ein Sof.
Ramanujan’s equations came to him in dreams.
Yeah, ‘at large in the universe’ does give the impression knowledge and wisdom is floating around in space doesn’t it. Let’s just say there is a whole dimension of cosmic reality beyond our physical senses, as well as our scientific instrumentation, that is contactable only through direct revelation — God or ‘His’ agencies speaking directly to our heart and mind. True religion is the personal religious experience that arises from such direct contact. As I said in earlier post Science deals with the physical or outer reality where phenomena can be observed, measured, and quantified. On the other hand religion deals with the spiritual/moral or inner reality of the individual, and this is something which lies beyond the methodological scope of science.
As far as not wanting to be I don’t think you would have lived, loved, and struggled this long if you didn’t want to be ( I’m assuming you’re no spring chicken). Those for whom the trials and tribulations of life are more than they wish to bear usually take themselves out of the picture early on. If you were able to stick it out through this vale of tears what comes after will really get you pumped up…
“Ramanujan’s equations came to him in dreams.” –tucsonspur
The creative experience and the religious experience are closely related in that they are both ways of acquiring knowledge that lies beyond the current pale of scientific understanding through the medium of the deep self. God ceaselessly speaks to us through our deep self but ‘His’ voice rarely filters up to our conscious mind due to the electrochemical inference of our physicality. However when it does this it results in creative insights and religious experiences…