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Clusterfuck Nation
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The ruins of Mary McClellan Hospital stand on a hill overlooking the village of Cambridge, New York, in what was a “flyover” corner of the country until the planes stopped flying. The hospital cornerstone was laid July 4, 1917. The USA had entered the war against Germany a few months earlier. The “Spanish” flu pandemic kicked off in January 1918. The hospital opened in January 1919. The flu burned out a year later. The hospital shut down for good in 2003.
I’ve lived around here for decades and never actually got a look at the place until I went up there on a blustery spring Saturday before Easter to look around. I like to read landscapes and the human imprint upon them. This one is a ghost story, not just of the bygone souls who came and went here, but of an entire society, the nation that we used to be and stopped being not so long ago.
This is the old main building today. It’s astounding how quickly buildings begin to rot when the human life within them is gone. The style was Beaux Arts Institutional, seen everywhere across America in that period in schools, libraries, museums, and hospitals, an austere neoclassicism that radiated decorum in a confident and well-run society – because that is what we were then. Note especially, the entrance and the beautiful bronze marquee above it. The message is this: You enter through a portal of beauty to a place of hope and trust.
This is Mary McClellan Hospital not long after it opened. The site itself, on its hill, with views east across the state line to the Green Mountains, speaks of authority and command. The America of 1919 was a deeply hierarchical society. Today we regard hierarchy as a bane and a curse. The truth is, it is absolutely required if you expect to live in a well-run society, and proof of that is the disordered mess of bureaucratic irresponsibility we live in today, with virtually every institution failing – well before the Covid-19 virus arrived on the scene — and nobody called to account for anything anymore. Hierarchy must be fit to scale to function successfully. In small institutions like this, everybody knows who is responsible for what. That’s what makes authority credible.
These are the ruins of the nursing school associated with the hospital (and also associated with Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, 25 miles west). The nurses lived here, in Florence Nightingale Hall. In the early 20th century, the profession favored young, unmarried women whose allegiance and attention to the patients would not be distracted by the needs of a family. Was that exploitation? Or was it simply an intelligent way to organize a hospital subculture? The nurses lived here very comfortably. The institution cared for them, literally.
There’s no record available of what exactly these buildings were for. The one in the foreground has a cut stone sign that says “The Junior” on it. I infer that this may have been where a couple of staff resident physicians lived, young men probably, just out of their internships, close at hand and on-call for emergencies. The building in the background is a rather grand country cottage, possibly the residence of the chief surgeon or the hospital director. The hospital was, after all, a community unto itself, and it was important that authority have a visible presence there all the time. Both buildings display architectural grace-notes that humanized and dignified that resident authority. We no longer believe in grace-notes for the things we build, so is it surprising that we live in a graceless society?
This is the power plant for the whole operation, on the premises, ensuring that the electricity would stay on at all times. In the early 20th century, electric power was the new sine qua non of advanced civilization. America’s rural electrification program really didn’t get underway until the 1930s, so it’s likely that many of the farms outside the village were not hooked up to a grid. The hospital generators must have been driven by coal, or perhaps oil. Somebody had to attend to all that machinery. The laundry – hospitals produce a lot of that – was also on-premises, as was all the meal preparation. The hospital maintained a large garden to furnish some of the food. All these tasks required crews of people working purposefully and getting paid. The hospital was a complex organism, a world within a nation within a world.
Things rise and self-organize beautifully into fully-formed systems and after a while they run down, even while they over-grow; authority starts working more and more for its own sake and its own benefit; hierarchy breaks down into disrespect, lack of trust, fear; and then society loses its vital institutions, which is exactly what happened at Mary McClellan Hospital in little Cambridge, New York. It dwindled and then quickly collapsed. The town lost a part of itself, the part that welcomed people in a particular kind of trouble and cared for them, as it cared for those who did the caring. By the way, in 1919, a private room was $7-a-day (a bed on a ward was $3). Imagine that! The town also lost a vital component of its economy. And that was all of-a-piece with its decline into the flyover place it became in our time.
American health care, as we call it today, and for all its high-tech miracles, has evolved into one of the most atrocious rackets the world has ever seen. By racket, I mean an enterprise organized explicitly to make money dishonestly. This is what we’ve become, and the fact that we seem to be okay with that tells you more about what we have become. The advent of Covid-19, along with the extreme economic disorders it has triggered, will probably be the beginning of the end of that racket. We have no idea how medicine will re-organize itself, but I’d guess that it will happen at a much more primitive scale – because that’s usually what happens when human societies overshoot badly. Alas, history is not exactly symmetrical.
But read these photos and meditate on what we were once capable of putting together in this land, and maybe you will find some clues about what was truly admirable about the American condition before we stopped caring.
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Corporate Bailouts A Call To My Congressman: https://youtu.be/nxfHiP5CUIQ
But read these photos and meditate on what we were once capable of putting together in this land, and maybe you will find some clues about what was truly admirable about the American condition before we stopped caring.
Or more accurately phrased, started only caring about very short-term material benefit.
Deuteronomy 28 very accurately describes transition from a good national state of being to a bad national state of being. In America, Alexis de Toqueville saw good and a direction to improve with time. He put it succinctly: In so many words: So long as America is Good, America will be Great. Red hats don’t do it. Subsidies don’t do it.
We are sliding into the second half of Deuteronomy 28. Karma or Divine Consequence; Infant Sacrifice, or “Choice”… BDS or honest, objective assessment of Mohammedanism Vs. Israel interaction. Evil a forethought to gain advantage or the Golden Rule. Whadat? For New Millenial generation- “Do To/For Others As You Would Have Others Do To/For You” No Duh.
We need to get past blaming “Lawyers”. Study of Law is an honorable pursuit; misuse and taking advantage of the law for dishonest gain is the evil in these proceedings. A more circumspect summation reveals a decline of morality on the part of institutional shareholders. Do you have a pension? “We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us”, sez Pogo; look up under Wise Possums. . Modern incarnation of The Possum is Dilbert. Some lawyers bend the law to benefit an immoral end. Shareholders look the other way while they approve management practices resulting in off shoring employment and plant facilities. Its about the shareholders, and they are us.
Nobody has clean hands whether they have a pension, own stock, or look the other way regarding abortion when the “Choice” preferred alternative would be inconvenient: provide care for unwed mother & child. Unloved pregnancies in a marriage need an adoptive home, a system to place infants in a caring home. Denying school prayer in 1954 sent morality in America on a downward tilt.
Witnessing real time 1950’s through1980’s railway management decision to abandon and demolish hundreds of viable railway branch lines, so many into breadbasket districts, brought this writer to simple acceptance & fear America would face massive famine at some future time. This time in history, with food distribution well ensconced in the “Juist In Time” illusion, Famine in America is very close and very likely. A False Flag Event away. “ONE SECOND AFTER”
Lincoln brought mature railway mode to America as a Strategic, ultimately a rebuilding tool for the Union Of States. Railway is orders of magnitude less subject to impacts of Cyberwarfare (see Richard Clarke & William Forstchen) and can be kept operable in an apolitical, in-house operations & maintenance of way environment. Without reservation there is call on the wealthy and wise in America to commence rebuild of food district railway corridor, reconnect rail food distribution to decentralized processing plants in urban areas, and do away with inventory tax on life essential victuals and sundries. Food District RR Maps
Deuteronomy 28 is in motion, boys and girls. For Professional Help, see Isaiah 63:19, or 2 Chronicles Chapter 7 Verse 14.
An all time resource for US railway footprint is available from “Mike Walker Publishing in Great Britain: “US Rail Map Atlas Booklets”. Many US City & County planning bureaus, and Libraries still archive detailed “Thomas Bros” maps circa 1940’s -1950’s including meticulous inclusion of rail lines serving warehousing.
NYC elevated lines had enroute food warehousing served by night time victuals shipment by rail; standard gauge allowed fruit express boxcars as well as the commute trains.
Recommissioned US Army/Guard RR Maintenance & Operations Battalions (see Ft Eustes VA template) are natural component for the breadbasket rail line rebuild. “The way to get a big job done is to start doing it” (Lewis Tuthill, concrete design engineer/consultant on Hoover, Shasta & Grand Coulee Dams)
I like your posts about the RR. Got me subscribing to Trains magazine again.
Brh
In every city there are fat guys in overalls who build large model railways. Maybe some of them do Civil War reenactments as well.
Trains Magazine covers active freight and passenger rail and some RR history, not model trains.
I subscribe to Classic Trains magazine. The same company, Kalmbach, also publishes a magazine devoted to model railroading. Classic Trains covers railroading from about 1900 through 1970, with historic photos from various archives and fascinating text.
The British build the Indian railroads to enable the fast deployment of troops wherever needed. But it also helped create the India that would insist that they leave.
Jim
What a beautiful example of how things work so well when they are first developed into a society that has a need – pictures included – I don’t ever recall pictures in your post. Greed is an unfortunate flaw in man. If only all people lived by truth.
Your Long Emergency is no longer smoldering it is fully aflame.
PEACE
That might be the saddest column I’ve seen to date.
Indeed, RB, but an eloquent eulogy for what we once were.
Very good James. Makes one cry.
Frank
We have a few small community hospitals round the parts; they are struggling. Malpractice lawyers circle round them like sharks around a stranded lifeboat.
Lawyers, THE bane of society. Fifty years ago, companies started to “modernize”, move offshore, robotize, and the number of manufacturing jobs with their potent value added, plummeted. At the same time, parents started insisting their kids go to college to get ahead. Graduating seniors found out that the jobs promised just were not there. So, a big choice was made. MBA or law school. Hence, we probably have ten times the lawyers we need. The effect is seen on TV anytime you look at it. The most inane commercials ever.
I bring good tidings:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/02/09/will-a-i-put-lawyers-out-of-business/
Lawyers is only the visible side of things, John. We are over staffed in members of what bArbara Ehrenreich (lefty, by makes some good points in books like nickled and dined) called the Professional Managerial class. One possibly salutary effect of these ridiculous shutdowns is that people who got to work from home and collect a paycheck will he derided as non-essential.
They’re next. Not just the directors of diversity, for a popular target, but most of the ass-covering cruft in HR. Ultimately, we will decide that a computer can do a better job of outsourcing labor and fragilizing the supply chain and fire the useless top managements of every company currently getting a bailout that bought back stock over the last few years.
the MBA’s aren’t much better than the lawyers. They dump them into companies they don’t understand and the defense mechanism is to make everything about numbers. As if there is a KPI (key performance indicator) for competence and caring about what you do and how you do it!
Causes a place to lose its soul and heart and leaves the organization a hollowed out shell that can no longer do the things it once did… prime example is what happened to manufacturing in the 1990’s.
It’s all about the money, always and ever thus. The sole redeeming aspect of capitalism is long-term employment – if you can find it. Play along with the corporate nonsense, because there is no choice. Squirrel away a nest egg. Then get out as soon as you can. Live a nice, simple life in a quiet, small town away from urban sprawl. The world is overpopulated – too many people with too many problems. Walk away.
Sewing machines were replaced with “suing machines”…
Since John is in AZ (as am I) he probably refers to the inane commercials of the “husband and wife” law team who bombard the airwaves in Phoenix with their execrable ads.
yep! among many others.
Maybe one change we can come out of this pandemic with is to alter the method of examining medical errors, from the lawyer-focused blame culture (which encourages lying and coverups by the medical staff) to the sort of culture seen with plane crashes and the NTSB.
The NTSB shut down the 737Max after two plane crashes that killed about 700 people over 6 months. According to some studies, over 200,000 people die every year of medical errors in the USA. That’s two plane crashes per day, every day.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading-cause-of-death-in-america.html
Boeing managed a fair dose of lying & cover-ups when the issue first arose, though.
People back then were humbler for the most part – and knew how uncertain it was. They knew that Doctors couldn’t perform miracles and anything like that would come from above if it all.
We expect miracles now because of the incredible things we have accomplished with high tech – and thus feel we are being cheated when our loved ones die.
What a treat to view these photos. Why do the ruins stand though? If the buildings are not in use with no intention to renovate them for other use why are they not torn down? Don’t they represent some risk to public safety? We have no such ruins where I live.
Demolition costs money. Often in unleashes asbestos which is very expensive to contain and dispose of. It’s likely our host walked past some warning signs, but didn’t have to jump any fences to take a look. The northeast has many such abandoned places–elegance in decay.
Thank you. I would be scared to walk those grounds. Maybe not so much if JHK was with me.
I will bet it takes at least as much to demolish as it takes to build.
Asbestos for sure, and most likely some lead paint, lead pipes, etc.
The 2 scariest places I’ve ever walked around were in that area of the US. Skylands Manor by Ringwood NJ (don’t go there) and then some ruins of a movie mogul or someone like that up high on a ridge overlooking a valley, big mansion-y thing with a tiled pool at the end of a winding wooded road. Both haunted af.
I never believed ‘ghosts’ were possible till I lived out east for a while. Even the flat I lived in was weird. I’d wake at the same time I mean to the exact minute each night with the same light turned back on. And weird, weird shit happened on the road in Pennsylvania. I still don’t actually believe in ghosts in the normal sense of the phrase, but on the other hand…the whole mid-east coast is a seething mass of undead. No doubt in my mind.
Those are all solid masonry buildings. Those shells could be repurposed for residential or commercial use. In my city we have an old hospital of about the same age. It sat unused for many years, then was converted into an overflow facility for the county jail, and used in that capacity for about 10 years. Finally it was bought and renovated as part of a larger office complex.
They are sturdy. I worked for an engineer who did some great renovation projects on buildings like this. A jail became an office building and old schools make good senior housing. it’s hard to run new conduit and windows and doors have to be custom made. You have to be willing to make the investment, but it’s worth it.
Yes, we have many abandoned textile mills in eastern Ct. Built along rivers, some of them go back 175 years. Made with granite and locally produced brick, walls 2 ft thick, they look like medieval castles and are as durable as medieval castles. Empty for 50, 60 or 70 years or more, there they rest, still intact, symbols of an earlier day.
Brh
I see some ruins and i need them painted green
The most obnoxious shade of neon to be seen
My head is up my ass im blinded by the fear
I just cant get enough so make it ladt all year
Just had to piss in golden pond again, too much coffee
I will pee, I will pee
and make a mighty sea!
Thank you for this, Mr. Kunstler. As a sociologist (older variety), you have described in a nutshell the basis for a well-ordered society and that is the basis for our national collapse. Viruses come and go, as do economies. But, the ultimate basis for massive social change is the culture upon which human character is built. Our culture is so debased now that the character of the American people will simply not allow a revival along traditional lines. We simply do not know what will arise in the next hundred years.
Don McLean said the obvious:
There no longer good music in the US due to the nihilistic nature of our society. Look it up, it really fits.
Jane Jacobs, in Dark Age Ahead (a dark age is when the memory of what was lost is lost) said the same: you’ll see the decay in a society first in its music. Black music went from Motown to funk, and then on to rap and hip hop. White music went to the point that autotune makes signers, not talent.
You can see a different possible future in this roast of Muhammad Ali from 1976:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=2ahUKEwiBgaac2uXoAhV8hHIEHV_CAHEQtwIwAXoECAYQNg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DR1AzvMCvCzU&usg=AOvVaw1ppq0305vhfc-043uKOVsI
Instead of the highly politically incorrect inter-ethnic joking seen in that video, we elected divisive identity politics (well, WE not so much. Someone did.) maybe we will get it right coming out of this new Depression.
Jacobs also mentions in her book one of the consequences of a Dark Age is the irreplaceable loss of the skills and knowhow developed when society was a going concern…
Jane Jacobs, like JHK, is a true innovator. Her first book ‘The Rise and Fall of Great American Cities ‘ (I think that was the title) was one of the pioneer studies behind the New Urbanism movement.
Your reference to Jacobs informs me as to how you ended up on this forum…
Why not take people on tours of the Ruins of that Colossus of the North, Detroit? Needless to say, you will have to hire professional armed security. I’d advise an actual Detroit Cop who wants some overtime. It might help if things go south….
I walk around in Detroit all the time. You just need to know which areas are ‘safe’…
“I actually think, after having tried to understand what the actual fuck Justin Vernon is doing, that what his fans are admiring (whether they’d admit it or not) is the extent to which he produces a type of anti-music. A step beyond nihilism, if that’s even possible.
I don’t mean anti-music in a sense of musical taste, but more physically, like matter/anti-matter. It should be a self-limiting paradox – how can one take a creative endeavor like music and yet use the tones and the relationships between them not to create but to “deconstruct”. How can Vernon manage to be so banal, insipid, and trivial, and yet so soaringly satanic at the same instant? Is genius required? Or is it simply a black hole fueled anti-genius that we see, held within the paunchy confines of a pasty, be-stubbled meatsack swathed in a salmon sweatshirt….”
– Don McMean, stating the also obvious
If you want beautiful, soul-stirring music you need melody. I think one of the reasons contemporary musicians are unable to compose melodies is because melody is a function of our higher mind which pursues high ideals and eternal values…
Music is math. The stupidification effort in the schools has removed the understanding of math.
True in a sense, music is math. Also true is stupidification of the schools. Music is math when you study written music and the most fascinating part of it is the theory. If they ever attain Uncle Alberts unification of theories concerning physics, it will probably include some elements of music theory. If and when they reach that grand unification it will be an AHA, slap your forehead moment, a what the hell were we thinking situation.
Math is also Music – but only for the very, very few. Music is open to all. One doesn’t have to know or be at math to enjoy Classical – one just needs a refinement of spirit.
I agree with you that music is one of the first things to go, but probably the most significant aspect of social decay is the degradation of language. Language, family and religion are the keys to culture; everything else is built on those foundations.
Agreed. Why is the country losing its goodness is an appropriate question.
I’ll disagree. Visual “language” (meaning and and response) comes first (ask any infant) and “art” hit the shitter first, before music and literature did. Take a jaunt thru art history and you’ll see that’s true. Visual artists hit hard, mean, first, and fast.
Thank you for this poignant and thoughtful essay, Jim. How fitting that America’s avaricious healthcare cartel should fail to be prepared for the black swan that is precipitating this nation’s downfall.
It’s not a Black Swan. That’s sort of an unknown unknown. The pandemic was a known unknown: knew it was coming, just not when.
The pandemic will bankrupt a lot of hospitals, which don’t make money (due to free care to the indigent) on emergency room services as they are now exclusively providing. All those elective procedures paid for by patients with insurance cover a lot of administrative fat.
My city recently closed its hospital. Then sold the land to a developer for 1 dollar, agreed to pay for demolition and excavation and “site preparation”, and handed the developer a decades long tax abatement on whatever they develop. They got as far as the excavation, and it looks like the city will be stuck with a giant hole in the ground for the foreseeable future.
The Metrohealth campus in nearby Cleveland is tearing down one of its main buildings which is only 25 years old, to build a new building that is nearly 800 million dollars on paper. Of course, newer outpatient facilities and hospitals have been going up in the suburbs, so the main campus should increasingly be reserved for the lower 20 percent of the Cleveland-ese population.
Cities have got to stop following this trend of courting builders with all this free stuff. It has been found in the vast majority of cases that companies build in the cities they would have built in anyway because of location to resources, workers, and transportation, so cities do these giveaways with no ultimate financial benefit to their area. Also, they should always have the builder post “vacancy insurance” so if the builder doesn’t finish the project, the city will have the money to get the project finished. At least in the case of your city, they now have a “pre-excavated” site to get something built on. However, if the city has no money, perhaps they can just let the site fill with rainwater and it can be the new “municipal pool.”
They do this for the short term and self-serving (the “self” being your town council and the local developer’s) gains.
The city’s debts are increased, kicked into the future, and onto the taxpayers of course. The promise is always that this is needed to bring growth and development as if (this is the funny part) ALL other communities in the US are not doing the exact same and so there’s nothing particularly enticing to “new business” about any given bankrupt-leaning town in the country. They’re all doing the same illusion-based shit.
If there was a new business that brought family-supporting jobs it could fall over absolutely anywhere at all and land on the same economic development platform. The particulars of your town and my town do not matter, no one is coming. Godot Inc.
But if you argue against it at city hall you’re “anti-progress” which is one micron less socially leprous than being “anti-vax”.
The instant ability for your city hall minions to do a revaluation of the tax rolls once development commences brings in more for the sitting politicians who can then to some headline making bullshit project that makes them LOOK like they’re bringing progress when it’s more alike a trip to Disneyland funded by next year’s grocery money.
I live in a place with more brand new and not paid-for empty retail and office space than anyone can imagine, and the “leadership” is still full steam ahead to create more. It’s so fucking insane you truly reach a point where you can’t care anymore, nothing stops it.
“Cities have got to stop following this trend of courting builders with all this free stuff.”
Perhaps WalterB would have a perspective on this issue.
…Hizzhonor?
“Today we regard hierarchy as a bane and a curse. The truth is, it is absolutely required if you expect to live in a well-run society…”
In those few words lie the ruin of our nation.
The problem for the progressives is that the hierarchy was too full of human beings with all there faults and failings. This justified their replacement with the blessings of our labyrinthine bureaucracy and beneficient mommy state.
there=their faults etc.
Rats!
Maybe, but the main problem is that the hierarchy was White and Male. They think they will do better, but they will not. Or even as good since the Races are in a hierarchy as well.
“the Races are a hierarchy as well”, Touche.
Hierarchy is essential. Someone must be in charge and be the leader.
Whether in a jungle tribe or a modern office, once people organize into a group they soon see the need to pick a team leader and develop what are called “rules of engagement” or “limits and boundaries.” It’s the family unit, writ larger.
Just about every civilization ever studied, including recently located tribes in the deep Amazon Basin, had a set of limits and boundaries that closely mirror the so-called ten commandments. Call it natural order if you wish, but to live or work in a group there has to be a group ethic around which the group can co-exist and function.
We’ve lost a lot of that when we slid into the “me” generation where anything goes, nothing matters, and no one cares. Profits over people.
This would be a perfect property to restore for other uses. It could house so many people. I imagine it used as it would be in the “Made by Hand” books. I wonder who owns it now and what would they sell it for so it could be used again.
There would need to be an economy for them to b needed in.
There’s an obvious place of many jobs and high wages located 150 miles south, Bush that would require high speed rail to NYC so that commutes could be accomplished in an hour or so.
Instead, the governor and mayor, by shutting down the economy, have shown that there really isn’t a need for concentrated office space in Manhattan. That’s going to drive down demand, which will drive down prices, which will drive down taxes collected, which will remove the government supports (subway, trains) that made that concentration possible in the first place.
If you can wait a few years, you’ll be able to pick up real estate in Manhattan at 5% of current prices. The taxes on it will be severe, however.
Anything BUT a gasp. Hospital!
Jim, thank you.
What happens when you’re running on the treadmill downstairs and then the power suddenly goes off? Do you just fly off across the room?
Good question. 65 mph winds today, lights are flickering. Don’t ventilators run off electricity?
It’s just like hitting the emergency off switch. You just come to a gradual standstill. I’ve worked out on treadmills that don’t use electricity. They have a flywheel attached that you set in motion with your own muscle power. Imagine that.
Sad, but excellent column!
The USA, indeed the Western world, became complacent.
That hospital was built in an era of optimism and unparalleled technological progress. People appreciated electricity and hot water.
On the one hand, I marvel that the hospital lasted till 2003. On the other, Given that it lasted that long, why couldn’t it remain today?
Redundancy may not be efficient, but it has its benefits. The same socioeconomic forces (that Mr Kunstler has written about here and elsewhere) that have led to the demise of this hospital and the devaluation of honest work done by ordinary people have given us a nation that cannot make, or simply provide by other means, simple personal protective equipment for our doctors and nurses.
Thanks for a great column!
Part of being “dynamic” is destroying the old. Brahma the Creator needs Shiva the destroyer. And Vishnu the Preserver is downgraded since continuity and tradition are no longer valued.
I wonder what it would take to get this operational, even in a minimal way. A powerplant? That’s amazing. It would take fossil fuels to to keep it going, however. Is there any hydro source nearby? Then, of course, the doctors, nurses, and infrastructure, but in 1917, this all was probably a lot more local.
It’s a real shame, but this seems the trajectory of every civilization.
Some nice photos, Jim. And I agree with RB; one of the saddest columns I’ve read.
Agreed, dissolution and collapse are trajectories found in most every civilization, but salvage, regeneration and renewal are there too, embodied in your question, “I wonder what it would take . . . ?” In the absence of capital, restricted by very limited access to technology, people would at least have access to their own physical energies, strength enough to persevere, and the power of their individual and collective imaginations.
Amen. Challenge compels creative response and brings out the best in us…
Amen indeed, comrade!
Look at the Flemish Bond brickwork in those buildings. Not maintained, those walls will stand for hundreds of years. Maintained and you’d have something like Bruges in 500 years. And the Slate Roofs on the outer buildings!
Not long before this building was built we had passed our first income tax and I 1916 our first Federal Estate Tax. The rich had learned to put wealth into foundations, like the Rockefeller’s, to preserve it over time. For the rest of society, the message was clear: build something to last 100 years and the government has the right to claim it.
What followed was a society increasingly building houses of “ticky-tacky,” with asphalt roof shingles designed to last the lifespan of the 30-year mortgage. These were built in shoddily-planned neighborhoods in the post-war suburbia that JHK criticizes, designed to be thrown away when white flight became incumbent upon neighborhood residents.
Traveling around places like Ireland and the U.K., I was struck by the high quality of most current residential construction. Many new houses are constructed of solid masonry with slate roofs, iron gutters, and solid looking windows and doors. Their philosophy seems to be, “buy it once”. Spend the money up front on quality, instead of incrementally over the years constantly fixing and replacing things.
Current? Here in Germany, construction standards are still higher than in the US, but they are moving away from masonry.
We lucked out and were able to find and buy a house from the 30s. Many of our friends lust after the latest sterile modern cubes made from wood and fiberboard.
And they all look just the same.
Thank you for mentioning Whites, the Builder Race, now forgotten and despised.
I grew up near the Kings Park state hospital. This article hits me hard. I spent many days on the grounds as a painter on a summer job during high school. That hospital has been closed for years. It was a good place that helped many many people.
Absolutely masterful, Mr. K! The photos and your observations are timeless and sublime.
Thanks JHK! Reflection on past accomplishments may be an important excercise if and when the time for rebuilding comes. If the fourth turning folk are right and we are going through a social crisis, and if we are successful in overcoming our present difficulties, then the time for rebuilding is not far off. Thanks again.
you have to replace the old facilities many people cannot afford with new facilities even more people cannot afford.
So when I was a kid in the 60’s Northampton was the butt of many jokes. Nuts and psychos. State home for crazys. Now pretty much Homos and lesbians. Go figure. Now the place is haunted.Another deserted State home.
https://opacity.us/site13_northampton_state_hospital.htm.
Wow, that’s a great site. Mind boggling the working infrastructure in the US for mental institutions from about 1900 to 1980.
The Northampton Lunatic Hospital opened in 1858. Now the kooks live in the hood.
They’re all over the streets of NHampton, panhandling and blocking sidewalks.
The Gays and Lesbians?
Jim has a fascination with buildings and towns and walk able cities.
But there is a bigger picture, globalism and its cyclone of destruction.
That may be bigger issue at present, but with regard to the US, the loss of quality architecture and the destruction of public space and living spaces designed with actual quality of life in mind is a seperate issue.
@Htruth
Much to late to complain about corporate bailouts now after the horse has long since left the barn. No doubt we’ll like the coming “belt-tightening” even less. Get ready for it. This was nothing less than a declaration of full scale war on any nascent socialist tendencies in the US. All the good little capitalists should just love what’s coming next.
Good post, James.
As I said in the week’s last post, it all has to do with a culture of accountability. Because there’s no sense of ownership and anyway it’s ok to steal from the government, what we have is a culture of complete lawlessness, even at the law enforcement agencies. This is true for all gov mafia agencies and public enterprises/corporations, no matter where. That’s why they should all be abolished. They are unreformable and an open invitation for abuse. They all need to go!
We need get on a path to a world run exclusively by family owned businesses and governments limited to small city states. Abolish all federal and global governmental institutions, including banks, currencies, and armies.
akmofo – See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Truce_with_Kings
Maybe we won’t have the grand technology of today, but we might have a lot more sanity with more local government.
Very interesting, thanks!
Globalism is a failure. So is Federalism. I just came to that conclusion a little earlier than others, but eventually we will all see and understand this.
Sounds a bit utopian Akmofo. No armies? Will the whole world follow suit? And I think we need a US post office.
No taxes = No armies
I think it’s a good trade off. Think of how much energy is wasted on maintaining an army. If people can be persuaded off the ideas of empire and conquest, and I think most people around the globe are sick of these ideas of empire and conquest, there’s no reason why it can’t be done. It takes a change in culture. An enlightenment to a higher state of mind and wisdom.
I don’t mean to be a downer Akmofo, but I don’t know that such a state of affairs has ever been achieved. Sometimes, nations go on the attack. Lacking an army could be an invitation.
There has to be a global consensus. A rejection of big government and everything that goes along with it, is a step in the right direction.
“An enlightenment to a higher state of mind and wisdom.”
Mofo,
Excellent idea. Israel first….
Is that the global consensus?
I find myself at 53 (white male) with the same positive melancholy I get when I stroll around buildings and such of my youth. The pics you posted are both sad and warming to me, like the schools I went to and walk around today. But I hope you will someday do a piece on the America those who werent so white and so male had to live in. For instances, the farms they fled and why. The Soviet-style everything-taken-care-of “happiness” associated with complexes such as these pics werent always happy. “.. Good times werent always good .. ” By the way, looks like frakking has reached its peak …
What’s that up ahead, a slit trench with people armed with hypodermics standing by? History has irony. The “Dead End” sign was not noticed on the road to a “Great Society”.
One of the underlying causes of the decline of American society, I submit, is the loss of a permanent, inviolable, authoritative center around which people (initially in the form of small towns and villages) organized themselves into a going concern. This center was the church, which served not only as a house of worship but a place for communal gatherings as well. The faith which gave rise to this church was what made the level of trust and cooperation between those who built these towns and villages possible. When this faith began to decline, partly due to the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself, and partly to the rising tide of atheism eating away at the soul of Western Civilization, the center which once held the community together began to lose its magnetic, centrifugal force of attraction. It was all downhill from here…
Centripetal force of attraction…
The central role of the church in suburban and rural America might have been important (and it might have been exaggerated as well), but as I didn’t grow up there, it’s outside my experience.
But in a general sense, I disagree strongly that the decline in church membership somehow equals a decline in core values and social cohesion. I actually think it’s the reverse of that – that the rise of a civilised, grass-roots secularism has been one of the defining features of progress, over at least the last hundred years, but more broadly since the Enlightenment.
I remember my four grandparents very well, and none of them ever demonstrated any religious affiliations, nor had religious funerals, and neither did my parents. None of the extended family living today are “churchy” – the casual slang word that is rather out-dated today. My mother-in-law was a traditional catholic, but she was very much the exception.
The removal of religious oppression, bigotry, and indeed conflict from Australian life has been one of its great achievements. And of course we aren’t alone … many of the successful nations of Western Europe and Scandinavia have made similar achievements. It is nothing like the forced “atheism” of the USSR and China.
As I say, it is bottom-up, not top-down.
During this corona crisis, not only are the big-money pro sports shut down, but so are thousands of community sports competitions. If you wish to see the centre of community life in every suburb, regional city, and small town, go to the sports clubs on a weekend.
This is the heart’n’soul of these places, and there is no doubt that sport is the ‘religion’ of Australians, and we are a much better society for it. These sports clubs are run – generation after generation – by passionate volunteers and parents, who give countless hours to the community.
Far better than a religious ritual in my view. The clubs are the centre of social life, with meals, a beer, dances, birthday parties, untold charity events and fund-raisers, weddings, wakes. Society spins around them.
This isn’t the saddest post from James I have read – the saddest was his tale about his town not having a pub or “watering-hole” to create a community focus. Such a state of affairs is unimaginable in Australia.
Secularism (atheism) is a hothouse plant that can only bloom in a civilization that is already a going concern. At the same time it is a clear symptom of a civilization in its latter stages of disintegration when a majority embrace this destructive ideology.
Atheism has absolutely no scientific merit in that the unbelievable complexity exhibited by the network of living things which blanket this planet could never have evolved through some random process.
One day, when you come face to face with your own mortality you will question your insolent, insufferable secularism…
Secularism (atheism) is a hothouse plant that can only bloom in a civilization that is already a going concern. At the same time it is a clear symptom of a civilization in its latter stages of disintegration when a majority embrace this destructive ideology.
Secularism is not atheism at all. Secularism recognises that that there are organised religions and people who are religious, however secularism – in preserving freedoms and an open society – is all about ensuring that the institutions and laws of the state are separate from and superior to those of any religions.
It has taken hundreds of years for modern societies to advance sufficiently to throw off the yoke of religious persecution and enslavement.
Freedom from religion is one of the most important freedoms that can exist. If you disagree, perhaps go and live under the Taliban, or under the mullahs in Iran, and caliphates elsewhere.
And you make an important point for me – the sports clubs of Australia are important, vital, healthy, and welcoming community places, but no-one would ever traipse their religion or their beliefs in through the doors. Some might even go to church on the Sunday, after football or basketball on the Saturday.
Atheism has absolutely no scientific merit in that the unbelievable complexity exhibited by the network of living things which blanket this planet could never have evolved through some random process.
We’ve covered this previously, pretty well. The Modern Synthesis – the beautiful marriage between Darwinism and genetic science leads to the scientific facts of evolution. Handling the truth can be hard, I understand that.
One day, when you come face to face with your own mortality you will question your insolent, insufferable secularism …
The arrogance of this is beneath being worthy of a reply – why don’t all you happy-clapping evangelistas form your own little chatroom somewhere? It is necessary to clog a forum about architecture, design, resource depletion, landscape, history, and politics, with all this stuff?
We definitely need more freedom from religion.
“Secularism is not atheism at all. Secularism recognises that that there are organised religions and people who are religious, however secularism – in preserving freedoms and an open society – is all about ensuring that the institutions and laws of the state are separate from and superior to those of any religions. ”
The state should be separate from ORGANIZED religion I agree but its laws and institutions are not superior to the teachings of Jesus (or the Buddha for that matter). The laws of the secular state are naturally transcended by those individuals who live Christ-like or Buddha-like lives…
“Freedom from religion is one of the most important freedoms that can exist. If you disagree, perhaps go and live under the Taliban, or under the mullahs in Iran, and caliphates elsewhere.”
Interesting how you bring up the Taliban when speaking of religion. The Taliban are not ‘religious’, they are terrorists…
“We’ve covered this previously, pretty well. The Modern Synthesis – the beautiful marriage between Darwinism and genetic science leads to the scientific facts of evolution.”
There is no ‘ beautiful marriage between Darwinism and genetic science ‘ . The secular scientist begins with the unproven assumption that God doesn’t exist and then tries to explain the origin of life without reference to ‘Him’. However the secular scientist’s theory concerning the origin of life is just that, a theory and nothing more. Anyone who wasn’t blinded with an anti-god bias and had a lick of common sense realizes intuitively the unbelievable complexity of the earth’s biosphere with its welter of living things COULD NEVER HAVE EVOLVED RANDOMLY. When will you get this through your thick head?
“why don’t all you happy-clapping evangelistas form your own little chatroom somewhere? It is necessary to clog a forum about architecture, design, resource depletion, landscape, history, and politics, with all this stuff?”
A. I am not an evangelical. You like to assume all religionists are evangelicals because their colorful antics make religion look bad. Personally I don’t hold with most of the dogmas of institutionalized Christianity…
B. Hypocrite! How many of your posts are about architecture, design, resource management, etc? You spend most of your time attacking others in an insolent and haughty manner because they don’t support your drive to establish a godless totalitarian state.
I am not an evangelical. You like to assume all religionists are evangelicals – sunburst
==========
OK, so I guess we can pin the label ‘religionist’ on you. So next question: What the
fuckheck is a religionist?“Secularism” is NOT necessarily Atheism. Secularism is simply the absence of any (let alone a particular) religious influence in the day-to-day workings of any given society. It’s called the Separation of Church & State and is a philosophical MO that has served the West extremely well over the last 150+ years.
This is particularly important where there is a plethora of competing ‘religious sects’ – whether it’s the basic carbon-copy/ cookie-cutter of Protestantism’s various schisms, or under a wide diversity of ‘faiths’ – Mormonism, Judaism, Spiritualism, Christian Science, Scientology and on and on.
Where any ONE particular sect has sway over the expectations & norms of a society which comprises a wide diversity of sects, nothing but grievous trouble can arise as those who become ‘subject’ to these imposed expectations lead to a revolution – (we hear often enough from Janos et al about how the ‘once-all-powerful white Christians’ have been put-upon).
Indeed – the only way to keep it all in check is to make sure none of them has ascendancy. It takes eternal vigilance to do so – almost all religions believe they are the one true faith, and everybody outside their tent is guilty of apostasy, revisionism, and heresy.
Religions are so autocratic and anti-democratic that you have to cage the tiger.
I really dislike the fact that taxpayers money in Australia is given to all manner of religious schools – from mainstream parish-pump catholic ones, through to far out loopy happy clapper ones out in feral country.
To me it totally offends the separation of church and state, but the political consensus here is that funding of such schools is on balance better than not doing so. Personally I don’t buy the argument, but I live with it. My wife works in catholic primary schools, and they’re pretty good places, but still, there is a principle being offended here.
Cargill – the same abides in NZ, where the church schools are termed ‘integrated’.
The single advantage of state-funding for church schools is that those institutions are required to follow the state curricula and are assessed on the same parameters as state schools.
I agree Majella….
The religion of Atheism – simultaneously a positive Belief in Nothing typically combined with a positive believe that Man can be improved based on nothing – must also be kept from having ascendancy.
Janos
You’re being obtuse. The point was that a Secular society is one that allows ALL & ANY religions to flourish with NONE in an ascendancy.
Atheism was only once promulgated as a State philosophy, in the USSR. Even then, it ‘approved’ a tame religion (Russia Orthodoxy) and for all the official Atheism, it didn’t stop anyone who chose to believe in the fantasy religions from holding those beliefs.
So, there’s absolutely no substance in your assertion that ‘atheism’ can be imposed on a society. Just your usual vapidity…
The religion of Atheism – simultaneously a positive Belief in Nothing typically combined with a positive believe that Man can be improved based on nothing – must also be kept from having ascendancy.
It’s an old trick, but not a very good one – that atheism it iself a belief system and analogous to a religion – it doesn’t wash of course.
Atheism is simply a fact-based and science-based set of systemic understandings of the universe, the solar system, and our evolution over millions of years from apes.
It doesn’t require a “belief” in something that cannot be proved, that all religions require – all religions are based on faith and the “unknowable”.
Secularism does require not only the separation of church and state – no school prayers in state schools, etc – but also no establishment of any religion where the “laws” of that religion have influence over secular rule.
Secularists don’t wish to persecute the religious – they just want to (a) keep them away from the law-making machinery, and (b) stop the pestering the rest of us.
Also, we don’t want the religious to discriminate or harm the rest of us. I think mayors and governors have every right to shut down mega-church services during an infectious pandemic. It’s not an attack on the freedom of some people to be jerks, but rather it’s a public health issue, since those people will re-enter the wider community.
Besides it’s not about how many people occupy the pews. It’s about depth of faith, and true faith is rooted in the personal religious experience. The faith of the Puritans and other persecuted Christian cults was strong enough for them to submit to the horrendous conditions they had to endure on their passage from the Old World to the New World, not mention the incredible hardships they underwent trying to survive in primeval wilderness. Do you think secularists and atheists would have undertaken this journey? No way. They stayed back in the comfort of European society no doubt while mocking those who were willing to risk their lives for the sake of religious freedom…
Do you think secularists and atheists would have undertaken this journey? No way.
Even the Mayflower had two groups, Saints and Strangers – plenty of atheists (or at least the very religiously calm) were on board.
See here: https://ancestralfindings.com/mayflower-passengers-not-religious-reasons/
“Even the Mayflower had two groups, Saints and Strangers – plenty of atheists (or at least the very religiously calm) were on board.”
But who was the driving force Cargill? Certainly not your so-called atheists or ‘the very religiously calm’ (whatever that means). They were just along for the ride. It was the FAITH of the Pilgrims and Puritans in their quest for religious freedom that fueled the Mayflower. This is the important point…
sbs
The irony of the Pilgrims & the Mayflower expedition is that they were not escaping religious persecution – they were looking for somewhere where they could practice religious persecution without social blow-back.
Who needs church when Party Headquarters is your church?
Brh
Your statement struck me. Is that what has happened? Are people substituting politics for religion? Is Bernie the new Messiah for a generation raised as atheists? Is identity politics a sad substitute for “Do unto others”. The problem with identity politics is that the full applicable quote is,
Do unto others before they do unto you.
Who needs a church when a free secular society is a happy place, devoid of superstition and ancient myths, and when a fact-based scientific world is available?
The so-called free secular society you like to tout doesn’t seem like a very happy place to me. In fact your beloved secular society appears to be circling the drain…
Aye, that, Cap’n! I’ve been to Aus. ” . . . a beer. . . . ” That’s the most understated noun I’ve read on this site to date! Of course, it was 1984 and I was a twenty-something at the time!
The Family is the building block and the Father is the center of that – He whose Word is Law. Let Men rule again and they’ll take care of Women who will take care of children. Let Women rule and Men die under bridges, and Women remain alone without children.
The Churches are increasingly just places for Women. Nothing there for men at all. The Pope should open the priesthood to Women and have done with it. The real Church can then begin again in secret and under the rule of Men at all levels.
As you might imagine Janos, I disagree with you here. You often see the wrong causes to problems. I think the priestesshood is likely a natural vocation for women. The all-male hierarchy of the church does not appear to me to have been healthy.
When it comes to leadership, males do not rule alone. Rather each sex has its sphere. Men should lead the family, but the real center of the family is the woman and she is actually the ruler of it. Most men don’t think to question it. Never have and never will.
Take horses. The stallion is the leader, and the obvious one. He leads the herd and protects it as best he can. But there is a lead mare as well. Probably every horse knows its place in the pecking order.
It seems to me women are more religious than men. What would be driving men away, in your opinion?
Well each religion is different, but obviously during the Golden Age of each, the Priesthood has been male. Maybe things will be different in the next Age and the civilizations it brings forth. Maybe it was different in Old Atlantis, but the above is what we know for sure. Think about it. It’s at odds with your inner feelings I know, but it is Fact. Again, I leave open the possibility of something else. In the Old Middle Eastern Civilizations, Women may have been the Priestesses. Thank you for using that word btw – nothing is more horrible than short haired dyke types calling themselves priests.
And sure, Alpha females want the Alpha males if they can get them. If they lack the looks, they’ll be career women and/or dominate some poor Beta male in marriage. Such a mate and marriage would not have been their first choice however – if they were to be honest. I know how difficult this is for unattractive women of course. The Psychologist has the last word here, not the Unfortunates of Nature.
No to Women ruling the family. Just No. No man of our Civilization when it was healthy would have agreed to this. The Old Roman Pater Familias would take the baby to see if it deserved to live. He, not her. His opinion was objective, not the subjectivity of the mother. Or her subjective desire to kill perfectly good babies in the womb as is now common.
She has authority of the children – and He over Her and God over him. The Chain of Hierarchy. Would you break it? Be a spiritual criminal? The complication arises when he is not subordinate to God and Natural Law and she is. Then he is unworthy to lead her.
The reign of women and feminization is driving men away. But yes, I’m afraid Christianity is flawed in this respect. Once people start taking the proverbs of Christ seriously, there’s not much space for masculine energy. Turn the other cheek? Well there goes almost all masculine dignity. Serious Christians renounced the world. In Islam, Man is allowed to become a “caliph” or Lord of over the World. Enjoyment is lawful if done lawfully. Sin isn’t everywhere and in everything.
Christendom flourished because only a spiritual elite took Christ’s dictums seriously – and the only reason they could is because the rest did not. You need Warriors to protect those monks and priests, and those gorgeous Churches and Virgins. As Orwell said of Gandhi’s asceticism: It is very expensive and society can only afford a few such.
Addendum to the above: Yes, Woman gets to be Queen of the Home – as long as that doesn’t include making her husband her subject.
It seems to me women are more religious than men. What would be driving men away, in your opinion? – sophia
===========
Perhaps men are better at recognizing bullshit when they see it?
Q.,
Please read my post below…
Please read my posts above.
Q.,
Please ignore Janos’ comment…
“Perhaps men are better at recognizing bullshit when they see it?”
ha ha
Zing!
If I may intrude, Sophia,
Men are leaving churches because they are rackets too, generally speaking. Churches have been (and should be) places where we get together and work out our spirituality in a shared community. In my own case, I started going to church to grow in faith and spiritual maturity. After a while, I figured out how to make that happen, not only for myself but for other church people. The secret is to have a small group of families meet for dinner and prayer in each others’ homes–something like once a week, and not on Sundays. When you do that you get to know the other families as they really are, and you become involved in each others’ real lives. And then you are there to help each other out when inevitable crises happen.
The really important stuff, in my experience, always happens outside of the church building and almost never on a Sunday.
Only problem is that, when you encourage real spiritual growth, the people with a mature faith are no longer intimidated by the Pastor or under his control. They may work with him for worthy goals, but they can as easily walk away.
Seminaries seem to be in the business of teaching professional pastors how to make a living out of farming a bunch of believers–and the key to that is maintaining control and preventing the sort of spiritual maturity that results in good works done in the community at large–because the spiritually mature see the needs around them and use their funds to meet those needs directly, rather than hand over funds to a pastor.
Women have their own ways of developing hierarchies. In any community (church, work, or social) where there are a bunch of women, there will be a lead woman–and woe to you if you ignore her or try to get around her!
But after a certain point in their maturity, Men will find a place where they expect and demand the esteem and respect of their peers. This is unlikely in the usual sort of church these days, where the pastor sets himself above and apart, and works to prevent spiritual maturity.
Another unhelpful thing–There are a lot of churches where the pastor and elders no longer themselves have a living faith. They are going through the motions to keep the organization going, but don’t any longer believe it; sort of like the folks that operate Kermit the Frog and the other Muppets. Saint Paul once wrote, “Whoever wants to know God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.” Is it the case that the church leadership no longer seeks God because they believe He does not exist, or that they don’t think God will reward those who seek? Or perhaps something else–I don’t know… But I am pretty certain that a church with a vacuum at its heart will not long endure in any useful way.
Best of luck to all of us (and if you will allow it, the blessings and guidance of God) as we navigate the Long Emergency…
I started going to church to grow in faith and spiritual maturity. – aibohphobia
=============
A couple of questions, aiboh:
. Are you male or female? I’ll guess female.
. What the
fuckhell is spiritual maturity?aibohphobia,
So, it would appear that you are a Sabbath keeper and home church advocate?
I’m not sure your response answers the question of men leaving the church more than women.
Much of what you say is probably true. I can only compare with the Orthodox church in which I grew up and see how very many problems it quite simply avoids because it is not a free for all.
Men are very hierarchical with alpha and beta and all that. Women have that pecking order. I need to think more on this because I am pretty sure women are less structured than men in this, but maybe no less severe.
The problem that interests me is what if you don’t want to be part of a pecking order, don’t want to play that game? It is difficult as a woman to get respect unless you are one of the recognized leaders, most of whom – in my opinion! – deserve less respect because they are less thoughtful than me. And it is very difficult to have a place outside the pecking order, but being part of it may be unpleasant for the rare personality who isn’t interested.
I agree that successful and enduring family formation, and a warm secure place for children, are extremely important to happiness and life chances.
But equality between husband and wife in all aspects of family life is far more beneficial. There is no need for some vast culture war between the sexes. The churches are irrelevant to all of this, in my view.
I agree about the feminisation of the catholic church. My wife teaches in Catholic primary schools – almost the entire staff are women … the only blokes running around are usually the garener-handyman, and the parish priest.
For once I can agree with you. Men and women are equals…
What is that supposed to mean? The same?
Equal does not mean same…
It does to a lot of people who use that word. Your allies may not be your allies at all.
Well that’s their problem…
“What is that supposed to mean? The same?”
Oh, gawd, it’s groundhog day.
No, it’s your problem too – obviously.
The essence of true religion is the personal religious experience. Without this there is nothing. One who has had such a personal religious experience has no doubt of the reality of God. Organized, institutional religion may be unavoidable to a certain extent but it also leads to intolerance and dogma. Having a paid clergy is the biggest mistake organized religion ever made. No longer are religious insights that question entrenched dogma permitted for now you are coming up against the bottom line…
One who has had such a personal religious experience has no doubt of the reality of God. – sunburst
========
Four houses away to my left and across the street was the home of Fred F. We went through school together, K through 12. Never once do I recall the F family emerging from their house in their Sunday best and going off to church. Many many decades later I have run into Fred on-line (usually in the context of a High School reunion). And now it’s Jesus Christ this and My Lord and Savior that. Always proselytizing, always selling the faith. There is no fanatic like the recently converted.
There are certain religions that feel they must win over new believers. Certainly Christianity, but not Judaism (to their credit). If they can’t get you into the fold they are somehow threatened. Why is that Sunburst?
So anyway, Fred stole away the wife of another kid up the block, retired to Florida, and has innumerable kids, grandkids and even great grandkids. At occasions such as HS Reunions the Freds of the world are always asked to deliver ‘grace’ before the meal and they always do a bang up job. They luuuuve being asked to do grace so they can strut their stuff. They have done it so often that they have the spiel canned. They can deliver it in their sleep. I’ll bet Sunburst has delivered hundreds of graces.
As the oldest living male in our family I am a kind of patriarch (I have a prominent place at the head of the table) and am often called on to say grace. I have this old Catholic grace that I utter by rote: “Bless us Oh Lord for this food we are about to receive from thy bounty…etc etc.” And then I make the sign of the cross, also by rote. It’s like little kids saying the Pledge of Allegiance. They have no idea what they’re saying or why.
Well I can’t speak for Fred but only for myself. When a person has an overwhelming experience of a ‘religious’ nature they will draw upon whatever tradition or belief system they grew up in to explain it. Perhaps Fred went the born-again Christian route because that was the one he was most familiar with. In my case, not having any religious background to speak of, I took a different path…
Here’s a grace you might try:
Now I sit me down to eat,
I pray this food my stomach keep,
But if I die before I finish
Make sure the kids eat all their spinach…
There are certain religions that feel they must win over new believers. Certainly Christianity, but not Judaism (to their credit). If they can’t get you into the fold they are somehow threatened. Why is that Sunburst?
The experience of having religion shoved down your throat is quite unpleasant I agree. Those who feel the need to ‘preach and teach’ in this manner are usually not the brightest lightbulb in the room.
On the other hand Jesus did call on those who received his teaching and took it to heart to go out into the world and preach the ‘good news’ of everlasting life. He didn’t say for them to be assholes about however…
I think about the first World Made By Hand novel, and how a plague was part of the collapse; how Robert Earle left his computer business, and became a carpenter. As tough as that is, it may be a few of us will be going in that direction.
Being a carpenter, constructing something substantial, and potentially even beautiful, is thousands of times more rewarding than banging away on a keyboard…
Yeah, I’m glad I can do that stuff. Did a mini-barnraising (a big shed!) many years ago with my family. Was a great experience, and I’m glad I’ve got those skill sets. When people ask me what to invest in, I tell them to learn something useful.
Study the shake outs in the computer industry, the wireless industry since their onset. Many college nerds graduate, get a job and become obsolete in ten years. I know, I was one of those. The Law is about to have the same thing happen. If socialized medicine goes into place, the shakeout will hit them. Who will be hit the worst, the wannabes, The paralegals, physician assistants, nurse practitioners.
Are you saying when govt controls all medicine they cannot be sued by medical malpractice lawyers?
Brh
Answer your own question. If this government ever got control of medicine, do you think it will allow itself to be sued. Tort reform will be part of the deal.
Australia has a national (single-desk) health system … it can sue and be sued. No need to jump at shadows.
Sorry to disappoint you, but we have medical negligence lawyers here too (‘ambulance chasers’). My husband has to pay thousands of pounds in medical indemnity every year in order to be able to practise. There are some specialties where litigation is such a risk, owing to the riskiness of the specialty itself, that it’s difficult to get people to do it – the game’s just not worth the candle. Patients don’t accept human error these days – they demand perfection, and all without an invoice.
BTW, GP practices in the UK are private businesses, contracted to provide services to the NHS. They can go out of business too, and many have. They have ‘partners’, including ‘senior partners’ (plenty of hierarchy there!) who had to buy their way into the practice and they retain responsibility for staff, including redundancy payments if the practice goes under. They’re the ones who are still at work well into the evening. You can lose your shirt. They also take on salaried GPs and trainees who are employed by the practice and are the responsibility of the practice.
” they demand perfection, and all without an invoice.”
Alba,
Well said.
“…I don’t care if it doesn’t exist! I want it NOW and I don’t want to pay anything for it….”
Many have to train their Indian replacements in order to get their severance package or any hope of a decent reference.
The humiliation of the working man continues. But the White Collars had no interest or sympathy for Blue Collar guys and their humiliations (since lower class Whites don’t count) so they can’t expect too much sympathy now either. Truly, Capitalism is the War of all against All as Harrington said.
You can’t run the medical system, (see patients and dispense treatments and medications) without physician assistants and nurse practitioners, you’re dreaming. You don’t have enough doctors in this country for that. I changed careers and became a nurse. There are a lot of small town clinics, inner cities, prisons, long term care, assisted living, drug rehab centers, and mental health and public health centers that wouldn’t be open without PA’s and NP’s. They work in places where they may be the only medical resource. A lot of nurse practitioners have several years of nursing before becoming NP’s. I’m not trying to defend them, I just know the roles they fill. I realized after working in the field, that most people don’t need to see a doctor initially, unless you have an undiagnosed chronic condition, which a nurse with experience can asses, take their health history, find out what medications you’re on and either refer you to an MD or send you to an emergency room, that what most doctors would do outside of a hospital. Thats because you are following a protocol, pretty much what the doctor would do. I don’t think we need to be getting rid of the meet and greet folks in healthcare before Buffy and Trevor, the senior vice president and vice president of preparedness and inclusion at some of these HMO’s and healthcare conglomerates
“A lot of nurse practitioners have several years of nursing before becoming NP’s”
woe,
I do not have positive feelings about NP’s. In my experience they are, often, guilty of overreach. I see the NP as a dilution of the medical system, shunting the unwashed away from the MD’s. It may be necessary. It may be cost-effective. It may not be in the best interest of the patient, however.
The clinics in the deep African bush come to mind when NP’s are mentioned…certainly better than nothing, and yet not an optimal experience.
Sorry I meant centripetal force of attraction…
$7 in 1919 = $26 today, what did you say your hospital room costs?
In 2015 I went in for a hip replacement… stayed in St Peter’s Hospital, Albany, for 36 hours.
Line charge was $23,000 “room and board.” — JHK Admin
According to my what is a dollar worth app, $7.00 in 1919 = $103.28 in 2019 dollars.
My little calculator says $141.46 for $7.00 1917 dollars. Anyway – we need to compare against average wages to get an idea of its value.
That’s more like it.
You have to admit, Jim, hip replacement surgery is almost like a miracle. Some of the things Docs can do nowadays simply astonish me.
I can’t believe they kicked you out that fast. I used to work on an othopedic floor where we did lots of hips and knees.
The latest anti-Trump noise is based on the delay from mid-Feb to mid March going for mitigation.
This really shows the incompetence of our government due to politics. Trump finished January closing off travel from China. Wow, now he is a racist and xenophobic against Asians. The first indications of the virulence of the virus started to hit. Our government’s complacency and reluctance to do anything really shown at this time. Trump put Pence in charge of the National Medical team who immediately started trying to contain the virus. It took a month of ineffective haggling between Trump and the scientists whether to shut down the economy. They did. Today mitigation seems to help but death and case rates stay up stubbornly.
The leadership of the world, all countries, did the same thing. China first, then Italy, then Iran then the US. They ignored the issue until they could not ignore it anymore. The hidden carriers by this point were so prevalent that it could not be contained any more. So isolation became the order of the day. The problem is not one person, such as Trump, or Boris or Xi. It is the reluctance of government to do anything. That is why socialism is so negative. Government wants to stay in place, not take risks, do nothing until it is forced to. Interestingly, the Founding Fathers designed a system that encourages ambivalence.
The leadership of the world, all countries, did the same thing. China first, then Italy, then Iran then the US.
No – Australia and New Zealand went hard and went early , and our continuing low numbers demonstrate that was the right call. In fact if some very slack “health authorities” hadn’t let 3,700 passengers leave the Ruby Princess, our numbers could be very low.
The problem is not one person, such as Trump, or Boris or Xi. It is the reluctance of government to do anything. That is why socialism is so negative. Government wants to stay in place, not take risks, do nothing until it is forced to.
Unfortunately, in the case of America it was the fault of one man … everything was seen through the prism of his re-election. In the Senate too. And what has this got to do with socialism being positive or negative?
The inclusion of that sentence in the paragraph is hard to understand. All governments are conservative about risk-taking – capitalist as well as socialist ones.
John AZ,
You act like crippling an economy and millions of lives was a simple and obvious choice.
“American health care, as we call it today, and for all its high-tech miracles, has evolved into one of the most atrocious rackets the world has ever seen.”
How true! This morning as we lay in bed figuring out what to do under our house arrest, my wife read a news story on her phone about how lobbyists kept “surprise billing” for health care providers in the $2 trillion bailout bill. It’s like all of the swamp creatures in Washington are glad we have a crisis they can exploit.
Zekesdad
That is very disappointing to hear. That and lack of price transparency are two things Trump has vowed to get rid of. So that is a big black mark.
Wow JIm. Terrific post replete with historical and architectural comments imbued with the kind of philosophy which illuminated your many books over the past few decades. I am so happy so see all those tiresome screeds about Mueller and the Dems and The FBI gone. I think there is a lot of material here for a mind like yours to come up with more Made by Hand novels or better yet a sequel or a rewrite to The Long Emergency. This could be your new golden age Jim and we await!
Mr.Kunstler,please…
A closed infirmary ?
Who cares ? Why does it matter at all ???
Nowadays medical offices sprout on every corner,ambulances are buzzing around them like bluebottles over the steaming cow pie,delivering half-dead vegetables for a 3 minute treatment,generating multi-$10K bills in the process.
Does anyone remember Joe Magarac the Mythical Steel Worker ?
“The mighty Magarac could do the work of 29 men, because he never slept, working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. He stirred vats of hot steel with his bare hands and twisted horseshoes and pretzels out of iron ingots. He made railroad rails by squeezing molten steel between his fingers. As the steel cooled, he made it into cannon balls as easily as kids make snowballs.”
Those were our heroes 60 years ago…
The portal on the Manchester Bridge in Pittsburgh featured Joe Magarac on one end and another folk figure, the coal miner Jan Volkanik, on the other.This bridge was dismantled in the late 60’s.
Now that Bethlehem Steel is no more (gone in 2003) Pittsburg became a huge city-wide infirmary.Pittsburg U Medical Center runs the whole
show.And they dont feel like paying property taxes because they are non-profit.
On one of those Pittsburg bridges they will soon feature a MD (Medical Deity) with dollar signs in his eyes, with both hands in the pockets of unconscious patient 🙂
Jack London was tricked into doing the work of two men shoveling coal with the promise of a promotion. His resentful fellow workers finally told him that they did the same thing to last young guy and that once you wear out, they’ll dump you too.
Such mythology is natural to the human mind. Evil Capitalist Managers will then exploit it to get the maximum while giving the minimum. Thus we need tales about Workers who use their tools on the such Evil Ones, do we not? Thus Capitalism gave birth to Marxism – and was funded by the Evil ones as well. But we’re already well above your pay grade I’m afraid.
If you live in a human society you will be exploited one way or another.Even if you are a King you might get killed,this happened more than once.
My point is that there is much more dignity to working at the steel mill or auto plant than flipping burgers or making magic passes at the f…ing infirmary.
I just remembered Johnny Cash song “One piece at a time”
“Well, I left Kentucky back in ’49
An’ went to Detroit workin’ on a ‘sembly line
The first year they had me puttin’ wheels on Cadillacs
Every day I’d watch them beauties roll by
And sometimes I’d hang my head and cry
‘Cause I always wanted me one that was long and black
One day I devised myself a plan
That should be the envy of most any man
I’d sneak it out of there in a lunchbox in my hand
Now gettin’ caught meant gettin’ fired
But I figured I’d have it all by the time I retired
I’d have me a car worth at least a hundred grand”
By the wildest stretch of imagination I cannot imagine this happening at McDonalds or some crooked physical therapy medical office.
Like stealing beef patties,buns,cucumber slices,assembling yourself at home one mighty burger then devouring it like hog while watching TV ?
Agree of course, but disagree with your cavalier attitude about exploitation. It is to be fought – now and forever. An eternal war against the corrupt among us and what they do if given a chance.
It’s an intrinsic part of Civilization, John.
” Thus we need tales about Workers who use their tools ”
Janos,
The rise of the Stakhanovites!
Yes, I had read the the main hospital in Pittsburg is the city’s largest employer. The article that I read touted this as a positive development if I recall correctly.
Brh
I am not anti-medics or anti-Docs,in the military they are usually the butt of jokes,you always have something nice to say, starting with “Hey,pecker-checker,you heard the last one about the…” which makes life more interesting.
Also only in the military medics are celebrated in the song “Blood upon the Risers”
“The ambulance was on the spot, the jeeps were running wild,
The medics jumped and screamed with glee, rolled up their sleeves and smiled,
For it had been a week or so since last a ‘chute had failed,
And he ain’t gonna jump no more.”
But,but,but-when Doc is patching you up you better keep your mouth shut.Because your life is no joking matter.
Today’s blog post is refreshing. Welcome back to the architectural and civic design of The Georgraphy of Nowhere. It’s brilliant post. The same should be said about your newest non-fiction article, Living in the Long Emergency. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Long-Emergency-Futurists-Adapters/dp/1948836939
The first 13 chapters show Jim’s analysis in fine form. I think BenBella Books accidentally included an Essay from Nowhere as Chapter 14. I cringed my way through it. I sounded as if Jim was ghostwriting for Rush Limbaugh.
Rick — Fuck you: that chapter was about RussiaGate and the perversion of the FBI, CIA, and DOJ in the service of sedition. If you think that’s unimportant, than you are an idiot. And guess what? It remains unresolved. And guess what else? There’s an excellent chance all that will be resolved before too long, Covid-19 or not, and a bunch of people will be going to jail for it. –JHK Admin
Had I bought a dead tree copy rather than a Kindle and Audible version, I would have torn out Chapter 14. And the next time nature called, I would put it behind me, literally.
Thanks for the epilogue. After reading all of Jim’s NF and several of the World Made by Hand novels, I’ve developed a curiosity about how the author’s life and intellect intersect.
Jim’s one-sided view of politics doesn’t measure up to the depth and breadth of his historical research on a range of topics. Chapter 14 is an anomaly. At best, it doesn’t fit the narrative of the book. At worst, it calls into question the credibility of the facts that inform his other opinions.
Chapter 14 reveals that sometimes Jim is neither fully aware of all the facts nor open to considering other interpretations of events. What’s troubling is that Jim disregards facts that don’t fit his narrative. That’s typical of both MSM and scholarly journals.
Jim’s willing to put himself out there, and sometimes too far out there for this reader. But as a fellow traveler, he’ll always have my ear, no matter how much I may disagree with his interpretation of those facts he conveniently disregards. It’s up to us, his readers, to do or own due-diligence.
We can only hope JHK…
Not jail but prison.
Bet on it.
No screw jail or prison when it should be a firing squad when found guilty as what the did was treason.
The most recent ‘news’ on this investigation in the credible organs is dated October 2019.
And by credible you mean what you agree with.
Hah.
No, benr, just not some nut-job source. You are a believer in Alex Jones tripe. Ha.
You attacked me personally with the ever clever “Eff you” personal attack. This really threw me for a loop. I can’t believe this is really JHK. But I’m afraid it is. I never realized how thin-skinned you are. Your mask if off. You’ve revealed yourself. And in public no less.
I’m shocked I’m disappointed. I am disillusioned.
But I blame myself. And rightly so. I have been a fool for buying into your act for so long. You were wrong about almost every prediction you made, from Y2K, to peak oil, and the collapse of the financial system.
And like an end-time fundamentalist prognosticator, you simply excuse your misjudgment saying that you are right but… you didn’t count on this, or you didn’t expect that to occur. But one day you will be right. You and I might not be alive to see your prediction come true.
Future generations won’t remember you, nor your books. No me your former reader. So I guess I’ll see you in the funny papers.
I was a sucker to buy into your bullsh*t over all these years. I have only myself to blame.
On a related note, I hope you don’t mind that I reprint my post with your profanity. You may be a clever writer. So gifted but in an egotistical way.
That said, I will share my comments along with your ad-hominem attack in the Amazon and Audible reviews for all the books I’ve purchased.
I will be fair to you in my review as I always am. But it will be posted and unless I say f**k you to you, you won’t be able to have it deleted. Despite how many hundreds of thousands of suckers like me bought your fantasy books. By that, I don’t mean the WMBH fantasies.
Enjoy your fantasies. And as always, stay well and best wish in pursuit of your dystopian idea of happiness.
One of your best! For three decades I have traveled Route 22 from NW Vermont to visit family in the Berkshires. That whole stretch is a burned up husk of an early twentieth / late nineteenth century that appeared to make sense and worked. Vacant old mills, delapidated farm buildings, crumbled homes and storefronts. Very sad.
This is grand work James, thank you, I appreciate it. The story of this complex is a typical one of how a nation, a society, or any system evolves and then devolves. Those of us that have dedicated our lives to building structures and systems, like those constructive individuals in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, do so more because we are driven to create than to profit. Once constructed and operational, these institutions and systems not only become less profitable, but harder and therefore more costly to maintain. As those men and women draw profit from these operations rather than maintain them, they deteriorate and are abandoned for it is far more profitable to construct new ones than keep the existing ones in operation.
The “almighty dollar” mentality and those who have been poisoned by the lust for wealth do not construct for purpose, and in our new American paradigm the financial and political cretins that live for increased profit at all cost have condemned our system to destruction.
When and if we come out of this current crisis, probably in the Fall, America will be unrecognizable or will become so a year or two down the line. Far more entertaining than television.
WB
The Fourth Turning says this is cyclical. Every one hundred years or so. Think of the 1920’s which was a economic runaway bubble. What happening next, then, should alert us to what is coming next. History does not repeat, it rhymes.
Yes, it costs a lot to run a good Civilization. Are we willing to pay it?
Thus Libertarianism is revealed to be a Mind Poison, as is Communism of course. Something for Nothing! One poison is for the Capitalists and the other poison for the workers.
Brh
Celebrated Easter with a round of immunological Orange screwdrivers. Boy, were they a hit. Like drinking a delicious liquid orange creamsicle. Definitely in our great drink list Thanks!
JAZ
Congratulations my friend
You are now one of the immortals.
Brh
Civilization begins with, and is built up upon, the shared recognition of a common center. When this center is lost civilization will invariably crumble.
What is the essence of this common center? Ultimately it is faith in that which is inviolable and eternal…
The longevity of any civilization is directly proportional to the longevity of its internal and originating center. If this center is rooted in eternal values and meanings then civilization will continue to prosper throughout the ages…
The center symbolizes our vertical connection to the universe. This vertical connection is primary and serves to organize all horizontal relation into meaningful patterns. When the vertical connection is lost the horizontal (material civilization) will invariably begin to disintegrate…
Recovery of our common center is essential to the rebirth of civilization…
Yes Cult comes before Culture as does Race. Once different ethnes and/or races share the same Cult, things become problematic and the downward spiral begins since people then assume they can share the same Culture – but some ethnes will refuse to do so and some races simply cannot as it is too alien to them.
An amazingly stupid man just fired Dr. Fauci
Evelyn
Fauci made a classic error, he interviewed with CNN. Jake Tappers job was to trap him into saying something negative about Trump. Fauci, no being a politico, got sucked in.
No 1 cardinal rule of any position, do not embarrass your boss, no matter who he is.
You Trump haters relish in this, I know.
Fauci and the Pence gang made very dire predictions on how the virus slaughter was going to happen. Apex at 240000 deaths, 2.2 million at one point. Now it looks like ta bad flu instead.
Fauci and the boys just shut down the economy of the US with their predictions, and therefore the world.
I have not seen the news item that says he has been fired, just a retweet by Trump including that recommendation.
If he has, he probably deserves it.
Though maybe to you, who wants the US relegated to third world status, anything Trump does is bad. So be it. See you in November if Fauci’s debacle doesn’t eliminate election day, and the US mail.
Historians may call it Fauci’s Folly.
It might be a bit early to call it. Most of the country is just starting to get into the meat of the pandemic. Dido for most of the world, especially Africa, Central and South America, Russia, India, etc. Also who says it will end? Unless a vaccine is produced – which may or may not be effective against this type of virus – wave after wave may continue coming – for the indefinite future. That would be a bummer indeed.
It’s the flu, part of the human condition. If you don’t want to take the risk, ask for a sterile cell in a mental home. Morbid fear of disease IS a form of mental illness, you know.
It’s called the Howard Hughes Syndrome.
Yep, that’s the deal…
Fauci and the Pence gang made very dire predictions on how the virus slaughter was going to happen. Apex at 240000 deaths, 2.2 million at one point. Now it looks like ta bad flu instead.
Why all this vitriol directed at Dr Fauci? He got fired for speaking the truth … and I suspect he had had enough, compromising his scientific mind with the never-ending bullshit of the White House.
Trump is an idiot who has fired every person who told the truth … he is riding your country to disaster.
It defies logic to state that it “only looks like a bad flu” … the death toll is low precisely because of the mitigation effort; you can’t them attacked the mitigation effort because it worked!
And because there is so little systematic testing, you have to assume many people are infected, and therefore the whole show has been closed down. What else can you do … let things go and have a hundred New York events?
Trump has been grossly ineffective … he isn’t a man for a crisis. In fact I wouldn’t trust him with my golf cart.
No, you’re fudging. The 2.2 million was the estimate without mitigation and the 240,000 with mitigation. Wildly off base, obviously. He was wrong just as he was wrong about AIDS. Ditch the creep. Let him become a Leftist Loser Hero like so many other failed bureaucrats.
… and the 240,000 with mitigation. Wildly off base, obviously.
It could be too early to call it … we might need to wait to see what happens. With “just” a thousand deaths per day, you get to 240,000 before Christmas.
Anyway – publicising worst-case scenarios is standard procedure for most authorities and agencies, to get people’s attention. Weather forecast warnings do it every other day … it can be annoying, but it’s hardly a hanging offence.
John AZ,
What do you make of Pence?
Good lieutenant. Good manager. Very religious, which makes him a target for the Left. Like Biden, a good soldier for the man in charge, but uncertain about their ability to lead. That may be part of the reason why Obama did not want to endorse Biden right away.
John AZ,
I asked because of a comment above linking him with Fauci. Do you think he is loyal to Trump?
What do you make of Pence?
========
Straight from Central Casting.
“No 1 cardinal rule of any position, do not embarrass your boss, no matter who he is.”
True perhaps but with some bosses, ones with character, they do not expose themselves to be spoiled overly sensitive narcissistic children ready to throw tantrums over any perceived lack of loyalty.
Having an immature childlike caricature in a position of power is a menace to the human race.
When did you start talking about Barry Soetoro?
Please be serious. See “A Second Route of Attack,” a Peak Prosperity video up on YouTube if you’re still (!) stumbling around with the flu meme. Not the flu—it a multiple body systems destroyer that we’re learning more about almost daily. One survivor (and the choice of anecdote is almost gratuitous here) says tat every breath is like breathing in glass. Martenson is a neuropathology PhD.
“Fauci’s debacle”..?
JohnAZ – so now it’s HIS fault?
Geez…you are so deluded in your lionization of the Misleader-in Chief, it’s quantitatively and qualitatively embarrassing.
No, you are the paranoid TDSer. The over conservative nature of the Virus committee just cost this country a significant part of its economy by selling a wildly overstated story. Of course, to you that is a good thing as it reflects on Trump. That is sick!
JohnAZ:
You make your usual paranoid assumptions about what *I* believe.
Your Misleader-in-Cheif is, I see, at again – projecting all his own faults & failing onto the WHO. FFS.
He was Himself, highly praising of China in January – check his tweets of 24th Jan – “China’s doing really well…US appreciates its efforts…it will all work out well”. Now, it’s all WHO’s fault.
What a hypocritical, narcissistic, embarrassingly childish idiot he is. He has no foresight either – cutting off WHO will simply drive it into the arms of China and once again, the USA steps back from its international status.
Thank God. Maybe now there is hope for our Nation. Give the crazies a few more weeks vacation and then open up for God’s sake.
Fauci was part of the Gates, WHO, CDC cabal that wants to keep America closed all summer and then chip us.
Fauci was part of the Gates, WHO, CDC cabal that wants to keep America closed all summer and then chip us.
Lunar right conspiracy theories it seems to me are not very helpful – especially in a situation like this where the grown-ups struggle to get the politicians to listen-focus for more than ten seconds, and to accept the truth no matter how unpalatable.
And why do you hate your country so much? Why do you call the good working-class men and women who are now out of a job “crazies”? How can you call the pressures and stress of lockdown a “vacation”?
You’re filled with venom and disregard for anyone else, it seems. Sad!
Good news!
The source who reported to me the Fauci was fired was mistaken. Sorry I put out the misinformation.
Last night Trump retweeted a tweet that had the hashtag, fire Fauci. So maybe that was the confusion.
TDS strikes again…
JHK’s chatroom… you’re latest & greatest source for fake news, haha!
Now apologize for every other time.
But hasn’t our society and economy overshot or more than one occasion and returned to what you seem to see as the good old days? The panic and depression of 1873. The Great Depression. Yet always we return from the ashes and despair with more innovative and better. Hindsight is 20/20. Always.
Have you read The Fourth Turning?
No, but I read about it and basically know the jist of it. I was a history major in college. Everything always moves in cycles. The thing about historians, they know what has happened but typically have a big blind spot for non-linear innovation. But the one thing that is always true I think is that everyone at the time think they are experiencing the worst thing that ever happened, and that things can only get worse. And that is almost never the case in the longer term view, meaning multiple decades. Certainly the dark ages persisted for centuries, but in the modern era the ship always rights itself.
I’m a big fan of Toynbee. I have the 12 volume set of his Study of History. He was treated as a pariah by the majority of historians but personally I think his work was inspired genius…
Once a Civilization has gone down too far, it is unlikely to recover. A change of form or dynasty is possible: the Roman Republic died but the Empire was born and lasted some centuries. And in the East, it lasted far longer but in a Christian form, so it could be argued that it was a new Civilization.
Toynbee believed the Roman Empire represented a last ditch (and failed) attempt to save Greek Civilization from total collapse. Empires are run by ‘dominant minorities’ while civilizations are run by ‘creative minorities’. The appearance of an Empire (dominant minority) on the world stage signifies the civilization from which it has emerged is already on the path of disintegration…
Chinese Civilization has existed for ages, though dynasties come and go – just like old Egypt. But Egypt’s time came and its Civilization ended. Ours is ending too. That’s much more than one Nation ending or a dynasty ending.
Creativity? Brahma implies Shiva or destruction. For longevity you need Vishnu the Preserver and respect for what is handed down. But yes, to truly pass it down one must have realized it for oneself as you say above anent “experience”. Dead Letters won’t last or preserve a person or a Civilization, nor do they deserve to do so.
Such “realization” is creativity too, although on a higher or hidden plane.
Shiva? Vishnu? Vishnu can kiss my ass!
Janos,
You might get a kick out of this….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNQ_G5uKd18
One of the points in the Fourth Turning was it is the animosity between sequential generations that causes the changes. Adolescence at its finest. That might explain alot of the political animosity going on, maybe the shifting back and forth between the parties.
The linear nature you mentioned would explain the liberalization of the last 30 years. Trump’s election put a real cramp in their style.
Seeing this is like being being transported back to one of those Dr. Kildare movies of the late 1930’s or early `1940’s! Description sounds like the hospital subculture of those movies.
I take Jim’s points and agree with him a) wholeheartedly, on the swinish health care racketeering in the U.S. today, and b) somewhat, on the wholesome functional design of a health care facility in rural America from a hundred years ago. Unlike Jim, I would not wax lyrical about b, because the U.S. even then was not exactly the beacon of progress in health care delivery. Small town hospitals were not really representative of what help one without deep pockets could get from the medicine men. T.G.Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, recounted in his memoirs how his wife Charlotte (nee Garrigue), an American progressive socialite, complained about the pathetic public hospitals in her native New York City, and pushed for establishing in her adopted country the Bismarckian model of public health care system in Germany she admired. It became one of the early legislative breakthroughs of the new republic in 1919, the other two being the redistribution of large rural estates, and the vote for women.
The big box concept has been applied to all things. It is economically efficient, the economy of scale. But here is the main weakness of capitalism, without regulation of some sort, it leads to “too big to fail” and the ambivalence and senility of the big corporate world. Three little Japanese car companies tore up the American scene in the 70’s by being responsive to consumer needs.
Health care did the same. Local hospitals sprang up when localization was needed because transportation was centralized to small locales. Suburbanization and the interstate system made centralization of hospitals possible and the big box took over. in the last 20 years, it has continued with the creation of the mega corporations in health care. More economical, but like everything big, much less responsive to the public.
Excellent piece.
Nietzsche predicted antifoundationalism.
Karen Carr has a more recent take, addressing the attitude that accepts it as an unavoidable part of (post)modern society.
A banality.
Did people trust in institutions because they had to? Surely architecture had a role in expressing the continuity (classicalism), and solidity of society.
Perhaps the era of austere and cheaply made buildings has exacerbated the creep of nihilism, the incredulity towards metanarratives, our lack of faith in our societies, our institutions, ourselves, and even a planet that is now irrevocably damaged.
Part of any government infrastructure bill/boondoggle should be funds for tear downs such as the main buildings on that site. Sorry folks those buildings just won’t pencil out for anything. This ain’t the Washington D.C post office that Donald Trump repurposed at great expense and risk.
Fire Fauci a true swamp rat both in demeanor and looks.
I just had a peek at the latest headlines. “Obesity single biggest factor in New York hospitalizations”. What percentage of the US populace is now obese? What are the root causes of obesity in the US? It’s obvious that our lack of concern regarding architecture is but a part of grand our national grand indifference about anything. But that’s not saying anything new. JHK has oft written of our “culture” as one where anything goes and nothing matters.
What if the measures taken to reduce death by diet mirrored what is going on now?
The meat and processed food shut down must go on through May, through the summer, maybe for ever. There is no vaccine for eating bad food.
Teddy,
What a fabulous idea, but the problem is we don’t agree on what bad food is. For 50 years we were told margarine is a health food, now it is a carcinogen and the daily recommendation for that kind of fat is zero. Which means they quietly acknowledge that they totally fucked up and its bad for you.
Yes, I agree. Five to ten years ago, Dr. John Ionnidis has studied that most medical studies contradict each other.
Not to mention that he has called this a data fiasco.
I have no idea why the medical field is given the mostly blind trust it gets.
People trust authority. I have concluded that the problem with civilization itself is that people are unable to manage their authorities.
“People trust authority”
Sophia,
I stopped listening to the health news regarding food after they mentioned that apples were unhealthy. Yeah, I know, a coating for appearance. Just stopped caring. Eat butter every day. Eggs without exterior limits. Bacon and sausages without consideration. 74…almost 74 years old and only about 5 lbs overweight, considering the body index charts.
Chicken necks. Bought a 40 lb box. If they don’t kill me, nothing will….
Chicken necks…fried in Crisco.
a nice little tour of the the ruins on utube for your viewing pleasure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jY_rVO-YHo
Mr. Kunstler,
Thank you so much for reminding us of what we have lost.
A much more convincing portrayal of what we have lost would be if JHK compared the difference between the kind of president we had back then, ie, Theodore Roosevelt and the shabby excuse for a president we have today.
That would be something to bring on some real tears of grief, despair, and hopelessness.
A building is just a building.
Teddy and Trump share a lot of commonalities, at least to those of us who don’t suffer from TDS…
I notice you were unable to list any favorable ones.
I wasn’t trying to. Nothing personal EvelynV but I don’t bother to debate those stricken with the mental disease you suffer from…
In other words you can’t back up your inane assertion.
I’m guessing you reflexly wrote it before you tried to think of something.
Just like you cannot back up your assertions which drops you into your name calling mode.
Here is one big one, Trump has the guts to call people like you out on a regular basis and expose you for what you are, a bunch of worthless name calling do nothings that your party represents well.
Here is another one. Trump has the guts to do what he thinks is right. Unlike any of the namby pambies we have had during the last 30 years that just go into lock step with the Liberal Deep State.
Trump is more JFK like, IMO.
Trump is more JFK like, IMO.
There is some truth to this – starting of course with the rampant promiscuity and adultery of both of them.
But equally, both were the spawn of very wealthy people who were certified crooks, both had privileged up-bringing, and never held an honest decent job in their lives.
Both won very dubious elections, helped by more than a little skulduggery. Both were full-bore into nepotism. Both had disastrous foreign policy stuff-ups.
Both believe they were royalty – chosen by the gods as much as being there as a result of the consent of the governed. They both believed that they were kings that deserved and demanded worship and adulation.
And in both cases, a disturbingly large percentage of the people did worship them in a cult-like fashion.
JFK has some reputation intact because his reign ended abruptly … I’m not certain DJT will have such a favourable legacy.
BTW Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president in 1917, and he had his issues too – to say the least.
History with Carghoul from Media Matters.
LOL.
Notice it is starting with Biden now.
The odd thing about politics is one of perspective.
Believe me when I tell you I thought Jimmy Carter was the absolute worst President in my life and then Barry got elected.
He then went on an apology tour with a heavy dose of race hustling and cemented the deal.
Worse he actually attacked private citizens with the heavy hand of government while doing 180 on taking out the peoples credit card and ringing up massive bills.
See perspective and opinion.
https://www.amazon.com/Obama-Scandals-Worst-Outrages-Administration-ebook/dp/B0716KX958
Look at all the books about Barry and how he betrayed the trust of the American people.
The odd thing about politics is one of perspective.
It certainly is.
D Team
Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama
R Team
Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, Trump
Don’t know about you, but from my perspective the D Team did far far more for America than the R Team ever did. Or could ever conceive of.
Reagan alone is worth more than all of your guys put together. His courageous stand against the Soviet Union played a big role in its collapse. Reagan won the Cold War almost singlehandedly (with some help from the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher of course)…
Kennedy (wealthy playboy;banging broads behind Jackie’s back);
Johnson (didn’t he have something to do with the Vietnam War);
Carter a micro-managing moron;
Clinton (getting blow jobs from Monica right there in the Oval Office);
Obama (no balls).
Great team Cargill!!
“with some help from the ‘Iron Lady’ Margaret Thatcher of course”
We have so much to thank Margaret Hilda for, not least the castration of organised labour and the destruction of much of British manufacturing, which helped usher in the service economy and its pal the gig economy, but she also let rip the Big Bang, which unleashed the money markets from regulation and gave us the fun and high jinks of 2008 onwards.
What a woman, eh… and a 12% unemployment rate without a virus in sight. And riots in the streets. I also recall that, under her premiership, I took out a mortgage in 1988 or so and within 12 months the interest rate was something like 15 or 17 percent and my repayments had increased by a full 50%.
Indeed – Reagan and Thatcher may not have actually started the mad phase of capitalism (neoliberalism, the destruction of the safety net, the gutting of organised labour, the massive de-regulation of the financial world, huge tax breaks for the wealthy, huge deficits, shipping jobs off-shore … it’s a long list), but they certainly drank greedily from the same trough.
They have a lot to answer for … the legacies of both of them are in the dustbin of history.
Is that sarcasm?
Wonderful post. It made me recall that as a child, our family doctor would come to our house when we were sick. They were real doctors and not businessmen. What a sad world we live in…
our family doctor would come to our house when we were sick. – Just Saying
============
In the summer of ’49 I staggered in through the back door and flopped onto the living room couch. My mother took my temperature and as family lore has it it was 105. Could this be true? I thought people died at 105.
She called our family doctor, a Dr. Fern. He came to our home in a dark colored Packard, either black or dark blue. In the center of the hubcaps was a shape… I think it was a hexagon and it was the same color as the car’s paint job. I remember these details from some OTHER home visit. For this visit I was probably delirious.
I was hauled off to the hospital. I forget how. Ambulance? Taxi? Dr. Fern’s car? Dr. Fern’s intuition/diagnosis was correct, it was polio. In the middle of the night I was transferred from a regular hospital to Municipal Hospital devoted specifically to infectious diseases. The building was U shaped. My parents couldn’t come inside to visit me. They stood in the parking lot within the U and shouted up to me on the third floor.
I don’t know how much Dr. Fern charged for a home visit but I DO remember when you went to his office — a wing on the right side of his home — at the end of his consultation he would say in a barely audible tone, “five dollars.”
A few years ago I became curious about Municipal Hospital and went looking for it. Alas, long gone. Not re-purposed, just gone. I doubt that the structure had any ‘grace-notes’ but I could be wrong.
He was ashamed to be asking for money at all. A good man and a sign of contradiction to this age and to you as well.
“He was ashamed to be asking for money at all.”
Janos,
No shame in asking for money. But sex? The whining, the begging…? (Not me, of course, but some other guys….)
Just askin’.
now their home was India.
Sounds familiar. Mom was born in Weston, WV in 1916 and recalled that their town doc made house calls up to the farm. On horseback. In any weather.
I recall Dr. Earl Pass in west Baltimore whose home was also his office; no reservations, walk in, take a seat, be served in-turn. I last went to him in the late 1960s, he charged me $2.00 for an office visit. He could diagnose anything, and get it right.
When my dad had a stroke and went into a coma, Mom called Dr. Pass on a Saturday afternoon and Dr. Pass came to the house. He couldn’t rouse my father, poked, prodded and when he pinched my father’s stomach he turned to Mom and asked “How much raw meat does this man eat?” Dad like eating raw hamburgers, aka steak tartar. He was in a coma for 18 days, but Dr. Pass got him through it and back home.
Sunburst,
“I think one of the reasons contemporary musicians are unable to compose melodies is because melody is a function of our higher mind which pursues high ideals and eternal values…”
On Greer’s blog we discussed the debasement of all the arts. I am pondering right now, how does a society organize itself around health and how does a society become debased? Is it right to berate ourselves? In the case of western civilization, we can see that it takes leaders and actors with a specific agenda and it has taken decades to bring it about and the people have been bamboozled. Is it right to blame them? Perhaps, but they were out of their depth. So, if you want to go down the entertainment rabbit hole, this sheds a lot of light on the question:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=out+of+shadows+official&docid=13822349348877&mid=59A886BD9A6938E7D1F659A886BD9A6938E7D1F6&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
OUT OF SHADOWS OFFICIAL
I took a look at it Sophia but unfortunately I am having a near-deaf experience (ha ha) and can’t watch anything that doesn’t have captions.
Who is Greer?
Do you agree with my synopsis?
Sunburst,
That’s too bad. It is a pretty good rundown of the long history of how the secret cabal has infiltrated and controlled the entertainment industry and by the very same people as did the MKultra experiments. It does a good job of hopefully breaking through the resistance to really understand that our media is utterly controlled and so also the entertainment we see. I believe it explains the way Americans have become bizarrely complacent. The CIA is probably the biggest large offender. And is it any wonder that President Kennedy said he would destroy the CIA and scatter it to the winds?
Greer has an interesting blog called ecosophia, but it has changed a bit in a direction you might not like. It is less political and more occult.
You should check it out and if you don’t like it this week it might be very different the next week.
I think your synopsis is probably right, but it is such a big idea that I don’t know how to respond quickly. I have many thoughts.
Ecosophia? Is he just echoing you?
Sunburst,
No, the name of his blog was Archdruid Report and he changed it somewhat recently, whereas I have had that name a long time. I doubt he knows my name here, as for years I posted rarely.
Just kidding Sophia. I took a look at it but you are right. Too occult for me…
Sunburst,
Half his blog posts are political and social commentary, and he is reasonably conservative.
Personally I don’t think anyone can invent or make up a melody. It is the one aspect of music that comes to us from an inner source…
“In small institutions like this, everybody knows who is responsible for what.” – BINGO. Back then, your local community hospital was a COMMUNITY hospital. It’s Board of Directors was made up of the local bank president, local industry leaders, and a few senior doctors. If you were concerned about the care your mom was getting, you could go and speak with on of the Directors. And they’d take care of it. Now, your local hospital is owned by a for-profit chain out of Houston, responsible only it its shareholders. If you are concerned about the care your mom is getting, you get voicemail.
Fundamental problem of contemporary society is the loss of ‘human scale’ at all levels…
The architecture is reminiscent of Art Deco era which is my all time favorite era. Moreover, this article speaks to the issue of rebuilding & technological adaptation vis-à-vis environmental degradation and passing of technological eras that are replaced by so-called efficient less reliable technological retrofits that do not last for half a century due to planned obsolescence in Manufacturing & Engineering.
Robert Moses is most synonymous with this argument of replacing the old with the new to circumvent maladaptive living in communities via design & technology in architectural development planning mix.
This hospital in Cambridge is something that I would personally buy myself to retrofit & rebuild into more useful space, but this historical industrial building & staff homes are by no means inexpensive purchases given the overvalued asset inflation era of Real Estate in that particular area of NY State.
Only a multi-millionaire could afford to upgrade & buy this historic property and that renders the whole edifice unusable for most populations due to size, cost of materials, and retrofits.
This case of historic architecture is an excellent example of why these historic places sit idle wasting away decade upon decade with never any resolve development wise.
P.S. This is a really inspiring article this week, Jim. Many levels of knowledge & understanding went into what you wrote today. I appreciate the knowledge base that you speak from very much.
RW
Agree. I’ve toured a lot of old railroad structures which were built to last until “lightning” struck and burned them down. Those not burned have been left to rot, aka Demolition by Neglect. Once the roof goes and rain gets in the rot kicks into high gear.
Wow. This is a powerful post. Thank you Mr. Kunstler for your continued courage and strength as a public intellectual.
Reality is stranger than fiction. The US is subsidizing Chinese bio weapon warfare. Welcome to the theatre of war:
U.S. government gave $3.7million grant to Wuhan lab at center of coronavirus leak scrutiny that was performing experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated
Akmofo,
I came to that conclusion myself yesterday. It isn’t a question of whether if was China or the US. I think it was both.
Yes, I too think so.
The fault of both? Or a Conspiracy involving both Elites?
Jan, it’s also a conspiracy to passively allow the elites to conspire. To hold them in any kind of reverence, which you constantly do, starting with the institution of the Vatican.
I was hoping she would answer. I already knew your answer. You hate the West because we established a World Wide Civilization and you did not. Toynbee just puts the Jews in with “Syrian Civilization” Ouch!
Well, a conspiracy involving both elites. As to who might have been in on it, I don’t think we can know. There’s so much of this crap going on at the top.
Is it true you revere the Vatican?
Oh, wait, I meant both elites were in on the research in these labs. As to its release, it is hard to say if it was accident or purpose.
That’s very different than what he is saying
I’m a Catholic Universality – as the the word Catholic implies. One of the few things Vatican Two got right.
Akmo blames everything on “the Vatican”. He would give you a very strange definition of that if he could define it at all. He thinks “the Vatican” wrote the Talmud – the Law Book of Judaism, one contemptuous of Christ and Christians and indeed all non-Jews.
On this at least, he is clearly quite mad.
meant to say Universalist, one who prefers the older worship, thus making me out of step with everyone – as usual.
Ever consider it has been the coddling the US government has been doing to China to try to make them into good little boys. Now, China may be taking their chance at being number one and prove that their system is superior.
Who is better at chess? Putin, Xi or Trump?
Janos,
So if you are an older rite Roman Catholic – well I am a bit surprised. That makes you a papist?
Jim, who owns the buildings/land now ?
Jim, this entry is like reading a beautifully worded obituary that pays respect for the deceased, conjures up fond memories, and leaves us with an acute awareness of loss, and a strong yearning for what will never again be. I hope somehow we’ll hear a benediction that gives us some glimmer of hope for the future. But that said, I always prefer to hear the truth rather than lies. Thank you for telling it like it is.
like reading a beautifully worded obituary that pays respect for the deceased, conjures up fond memories, and leaves us with an acute awareness of loss, and a strong yearning for what will never again be. – axisbold
===============
Yes, what you describe is the phenomenon known as nostalgia which can’t be experienced by children. You must grow older to experience it. A couple of years ago I took a bike ride to the area where I grew up. Rode by the old high school, parked in front of our former home, rode along Newton ‘Crick.’ And I was overwhelmed with nostalgia. It literally made me cry.
Right on, Q, growing older and older makes us want to put the past before us instead of behind us and to fill our lives with more than now’s ephemeral moment.
‘I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.
Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?
He concluded that a “visual memory” locked deep inside him—a memory associated with the taste of the madeleine—was attempting to surface and manifest itself. Several moments later, the memory emerged—a memory of Sunday mornings at Combray when his Aunt Léonie used to give him a morsel of a madeleine, dipped in lime-flower tea, before he went to mass at a nearby Roman Catholic church. The taste of the madeleine also unlocked many other earlier memories. He could now see his past in vivid detail. He could begin to remember things past; he could begin to recapture lost time.’
Proust
And the title says it all
Remembrance of Things Past.
I have had moments when I was overwhelmed by the sudden intrusion of some past memory, and such moments have an ecstatic, uplifting quality to them. It is as if I am recovering a part of myself that had somehow been lost. Henri Bergson, author of ‘Creative Evolution’, suggests our brain is of necessity a ‘reducing valve’ and the great bulk of our life experiences are relegated to the fringe of awareness so that we may function in the present…
Maybe at the moment of our death all these memories come flooding back and in that instant our entire life stands before us. Perhaps in this same instant we perceive all the good we have done, and all that we should have done but didn’t. This could be what is called the Last Judgement. Only we are not judged by God and ‘His’ angels. We judge ourselves…
“We judge ourselves”.
What happens to those who judge themselves and come up wanting, who review the totality of it all and have no choice to give a thumbs down?
Brh
Good question. Purgatory?
I wonder when the phrase “They don’t make ’em like they used to” finally got aloft for good. More and more I find myself craving older things that were simpler and made well, just to slow the spinning feeling of living these days. Recently I took delivery of a vintage bicycle that was ridden around the block a couple of times in 1986 and stored ever since–a beautiful time capsule made to last. Or maybe I’ll re-read the best parts of a lifetime of journals. But athough turning to the past for sustenance is comforting, that mindset doesn’t exactly help me with envisioning a future. I think I need to work on that.
hey, jeff, that’s really a half baked notion – don’t make ’em like they usta.
To my way of thinkin’, it’s a damn good thing that they don’t make most things the way they usta. I mean, really, how may Titanic’s does it take to convince you that just because it’s old does not necessarily make it good. I do not miss the old tires on my cars from the old days – bald at 10,000 miles of easy-breezy driving in my ’50 Dodge or ’47 Packard or ’57 red Chevy rag-top – and engines nipples-up at 100,000.
But, you “crave” away; I’ll send you some fouled ignition points and shot spark plugs to assuage your cravings.
But we’re yammering about a human society that’s about to become a very brief hiccup in the history of Earth’s biosphere.
or so me thinks
~toktomi~
I didn’t mean it categorically. Clearly SOME things are better than before–dentistry for one thing. Not music, though, or a lot of other things where aesthetics are concerned.
I’ll pass on your spark plug offer. I don’t own a car, anyway.
An excellent article — if only it weren’t true. I’m glad you pointed out that along with the hospital buildings, the practice of medicine has sunk to that of investment banker-ambulance chaser–snake oil pusher.
I’ve been a nurse for a long time and when I took the test it lasted 2 & 1/2 days, had 5 parts with 500 questions each and if you flailed even one test by one point, you had to take the entire test over again. It was given only twice a year. Last year I was talking to a young nurse who told me you now go to a testing center and when you (according to some algorithm) get 83 “core” questions right in a certain period of time, you pass. She did not know the difference between malignant and benign, the classic symptoms of a heart attack and most importantly, was not at all concerned by her lack of knowledge.
I knew a woman who graduated from Lutheran Hospital, Ft Wayne IN in 1938 and worked there till ’42 when he went in the Navy, where she was responsible for one of the wards at Norfolk NH when the wounded from Normandy returned to America. The Navy’s authoritarian hierarchy did not impress her, and she returned to Ft Wayne in ’46.
Lutheran Hospital still functions, and is hiring today. As is Coney Island, where chile dogs in steamed buns and coka cola is sold in a bottle as they were in 1904, which is where my dad took us for a treat. He was in the Army Air Corps, B-29 engineer, and he was also not impressed with authoritarian hierarchy.
Centralized authoritarian hierarchy, imo is exactly and precisely why USA became an empire.
If you want to understand cities, towns and buildings that endure, I recommend Christopher Alexander’s book, “A Pattern Language”.
I’ve built small buildings using traditional Japanese tools and joinery, and A Pattern Language.
My father did not fight for capitalism as Alston Chase once suggested; he fought for freedom. He was a citizen soldier, and to be a citizen soldier, first you have to be a citizen.
Well, the party is over, now it’s time to panic.
Either that, or it’s time for people to learn how to think, and how to be a citizen. How to be a producer, not just a feckless consumer of outdated ideas and cheap plastic and tech.
If the architecture of Cambridge Hospital was so great they would still be in business? or if they were less authoritarian? Less centralized?
You be the judge.
Maybe that’s what he thought he was fighting for, but he was fighting for Capitalism. Hitler was the one fighting Capitalism. Communism and Capitalism united to crush him and his Japanese allies.
I have long been a fan of Christopher Alexander. Have you ever looked into his four volume Nature of Order? One of the great works of our time…
Pattern Language is the best comprehensive study of what an ideal or optimal world would substantially look like. Alexander and his colleagues backup their research with mathematical models and Sociological studies…
Pleasing, quaint architecture can’t compensate for a decreasing patient base and rising medical costs, and even with the following, the facility went under:
‘In addition to paying for the construction of the hospital, Edwin McClellan left a generous endowment to support its ongoing financial needs. This allowed care to be provided to local residents at below its actual cost. After his death in 1924 McClellan’s widow continued this generosity by donating a large addition, the north wing. Other members of the McClellan family also made generous contributions to the hospital.’
Was it all mismanaged?
@Yuri
You be the judge.
I think that it is enough to simply observe the landscape of human society and to recognize the nearly ubiquitous carnage wrought by authoritarian hierarchies.
Everyone needs to have experienced the synergy rush of working in a team that glows. Ya can’t ever go back to supporting dictates. I’ve been struck three times and I have a completely different view of how a “well-run society” operates than our host apparently has.
People are trained to reproduce the right answers and the right behaviors.
Better should we educate ourselves to all the possibilities and learn to be an intellectual creature rather than this emotion-driven beast.
but don’t believe my ravings cuz I know nothing
~toktomi~
Love those old buildings.
We’ve toured a few of them over the years, like the Kirkbride-style mental institutions. More here:
http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/buildings/
We toured the one in Traverse City, MI, various buildings, walked through the tunnels, an outstanding visit. More here:
https://www.thevillagetc.com/tour/
We toured the old Preston School of Industry in Ione, CA, which produced Merle Haggard, Rory Calhoun and others. Operationally, it was a tragic place; the building tour was educational. More here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_School_of_Industry
There are scores of abandoned mental and TB hospitals still dotting the landscape. I wish a lot of them could be saved and repurposed but it won’t happen with the Wall Street crowd interested primarily in extracting as much national wealth as they can for a very few at the top.
“We toured the old Preston School of Industry in Ione, CA,”
MPOV,
I had an uncle by marriage that was the “warden” of Preston in the early 50’s….
Father’s mother was buried in Ione.
We will not recover civilization until we recover our center…
@sunburstsoldier
What’s the “we” shit?
If yer talkin’ about empathy as being the “center” [and god forbid that yer talkin’ about some god shit], then I reckon that I could get on board with ya.
But empathy is, in the main, a genetic thing. There is no “recover” option in that unless yer offing the psychopaths and the heartless ones and encouraging reproduction among the “meek” [not the cowards but the true hearts who must at times turn away from the tragedy of others because it hurts too much].
For a translation of the above ramblings, plug into your nearest AI outlet or whatever
~toktomi~
Empathy is a good start. The point is –and I see you caught it — the center is a psychic state or condition which must be established before one material stone representing a growing civilization is laid upon another…
Sanders endorses Biden.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
Gabbard, too.
Glad to say I called them out as fakes early on.
Excellent piece. Thank you. Nice countryside. Hills! To the westsouthwest of Cambridge is one of my favorite roads, Rt 20, from Guilderland to Cazenovia. Cambridge is not far from Troy. I went to Troy in the late 80’s or 90’s to pick up a rottotiller at the Troy-Bilt factory, where they were made! Imagine that, they once manufactured things there.
Janos, Sunburst, et al
I need to know the code to make italics. I used to know it.
“Golden Age of each, the Priesthood has been male. Maybe things will be different in the next Age and the civilizations it brings forth. Maybe it was different in Old Atlantis,”
Either the loss of a spiritual role for women was due to a fall, or it may be different in different ages. But I in my readings believe that the male coup occurred about 3 or 4 thousand years ago. It may be why priests wear robes. At that time, people were used to seeing women in the role of attending altars or whatever.
You probably mostly misunderstood. I did not say women rule the family. I said the family, the house, the children, the food and the health are the domain of women and no different in any society whether more or less paternalistic. The husband would rarely interfere.
I went to a country hippie potluck party. Mostly men talking out on the porch, got bored of the women who talked about what their kids ate. The men were talking about lawn mowers, engines, repair,…
Men are both interested and talented in structure – how it goes together, how to take it apart, how to invent it and how to repair it. Men are more at home in the outside world which includes the physical and women are more at home with the inner which includes the emotional. Of course a man should not be too far behind in understanding emotion or he becomes an idiot or a brute, and women who do not have an anchor in the real world – well, I think I told you about the women on the schizophrenic ward. Each woman in her own private hell.
In occult explanation of existence, there are 7 planes and the physical is the outermost. Emotion and astral/etheric stuff is next more subtle and more inward. So the heirarchy moves inward. Thus women are not demeaned. Yet feminism is such a sickness, that there is intense suspicion and jealousy toward all things of the male sphere. Likewise, although the Genesis story of creation is indeed a put down of women, nonetheless, the church I grew up in gave the argument for the authority of men over women that Adam was created first. They failed to notice (?) that the progression went from the simple to the complex, and the crown of the entire affair ended with Eve, the most complex creation of all. And perhaps the first creation of Adam does have merit as an idea, but it shows how each is superior in its own way. For this reason, men and women ought not to despise one another, but instead revere.
I’ll post this bit as my computer isn’t acting right. I mean the internet.
Clever. One of my bosses went on about how Black Babies held their heads up first, sat up first, walked before White babies, etc. – as if that meant superiority. But as you say, it just means they were less complicated and would peak sooner. Antelope babies stand up in a few minutes….
In any case, the Occult Tradition of Adam Kadmon is better. He/She was the Divine Androgyne. We split up when we fell. That’s why sex is so much fun.
Once a man turns his intellect to higher things, he is at one step higher than the astral focus of women. But once she turns her heart to higher things, she may well be higher again. The difference between the Occult Path and the Path of the Mystic.
Look at the Tree of LIfe. The Path from Tipphareth to Kether is the quickest path, thus called “the bow shot” or “the straight path”.
Janos,
Yes, I thought of that but how much can you post? In the end, you would want to develop and function well on all levels, and you would want the lower physical level not to run things, and actually you really don’t want the astral in charge either.
But as to the Kabbalah, I seem to have a strange barrier. I’ve tried to penetrate it a couple of times and it just loses me. Have you a remedy?
I need to know the code to make italics. I used to know it.
At the start of the text, less than, then i, then greater than.
At the end of the text, less than, then forward slash then i, then greater than. For bold use “b” instead of “i”. I assume underline is “u” but I’ve not tried it.
I just thought I would try underline.
Cargill, thanks for that,
I recently noticed that someone here was able to write a word and then to line out the word. I’d love to know how this is done.
I’ll try this for ~~strikethrough~~
No good, so I’ll try this:
StrikethroughI recently noticed that someone here was able to write a word and then to line out the word. I’d love to know how this is done.
Okay:
Before the text, less than, then s, then greater than.
After the text, less than, forward slash, then s, then greater than.
I still _haven’t found underline_ yet.
Underline – just use a ‘u’ instead of the ‘i’ you use for italic.
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_formatting.asp
Not that I noticed it in there, but ctrl+U is for underline on your keyboard, so…
You can try stuff out on this website and it shows you what you get.
No good, so I’ll try this: Strikethrough – Cargill
===========
OK, let me give it a try.
fuck you and the horse you rode in onOh, WOW, this strikethrough thing is wonderful. Now I can say nasty shit to people, then cross it out and pretend I didn’t mean it.
I wonder if I can correct people’s grammar and spelling, then cross it out and our host won’t notice and ban my ass. hmm? I think I’ll start with benr’s horrific lack of punctuation. It’s one of my biggest peeves……….. or everybody’s misuse of then for than and vice versa.
Underline – just use a ‘u’ instead of the ‘i’ you use for italic. – GA
=========
OK, I’m going to give it a try.
Underline
@qstick
Im so glad im on yer mind.
Q – oops. It works in the TryitEditor on the website I linked to.
Maybe the site doesn’t take underlining?
Underline – just use a ‘u’ instead of the ‘i’ you use for italic.
Yes I tried “u” instead of “i”, but no go. I read somewhere that underline is not encouraged – or even allowed – in most markdown formatting situations, since underline is generally reserved for URL links embedded in your text.
But that’s a bit old-hat these days – people use lots of different markers to indicate a link, since things like bold, underline, etc, distract the reader too much. Personally I think a slightly different colour is the least annoying / distracting.
thanks
no thanks
bold?
Q Schtick,
or everybody’s misuse of then for than and vice versa.
I think there are a lot of typos. I often switch their and there without noticing it.
Nope, GA, your method for underlining does not work.
Sorry, I tried… as I said if you do it in the HTML TryitEditor on that site it works fine. I’ve just done it.
Thanks
QSchtick,
“Perhaps men are better at recognizing bullshit when they see it?”
I have thought of that but I don’t think it’s that simple. And actually, I think women sense the existence of a creator largely because they have another superior trait over men. Men can lie to themselves much better than women. Men have a type of egotisticalness that women don’t much have. It is easier for men to become atheists, or so it seems to me, because women are much more likely to realize that they don’t know what they don’t know. Maybe it is because men like structure and understanding structure is important to their function as a man. But when men begin to understand something, they quickly become sure that they have got it all. This is repeated over and over in life. Examples are everywhere. Women may buy into it or appear to buy into it, but it is largely because they are listening to men.
One of my disappointments in women is that I see their role as providing a voice of wisdom, a restraining hand, on men’s exuberance when it gets out of hand. I guess that takes wisdom and young women don’t have much of that. I note most societies have revered their elders and also greatly revered the wisdom of elderly women.
A lot of women are annoyed at how much less attention men pay to them once they are no longer attractive. Well, boo hoo. You can get a different kind of attention if you deserve it.
Disagree. Women are consumate liars, both to themselves and others. So are men. Who is worse? I’d say women but both are very bad. Maybe it’s a tie.
You keep coming out with this propaganda nonsense and it remains nonsense. The evidence shows that men lie more than women (not least because narcissism is slightly higher in men than in women – the exception being in celebrity circles, where it’s higher in women, as you’d kind of expect since they’re triaged for fuckability).
Although some women will lie for the same reasons men like, women are more likely to lie for a social purpose (e.g. kindness), like telling their friend she looks nice in that dress when she doesn’t particularly, or telling her husband she thinks his beer gut is sexy (massaging male egos may be less of a requirement of the job than it was 30 years ago, but it’s still something women are socialised into, sometimes only partly consciously). Men are more likely to lie for personal gain, to get money, power or sex.
And of course you’d say women. It kinda goes without saying.
same reasons men *lie*, not ‘like’.
“triaged for fuckability” – the words that come out of this “lady’s” mouth! Or the hands that typed these naughty bits. Do you eat with those defiled digits?
I thought this site was allergic to political correctness. I’m trying to do it justice. That and calling a spade a spade. With an Anglo-Saxon pedigree.
Actually it all comes from being married to an Irishman. You could have taken me anywhere before I met him.
Actually I’m very ladylike in person. 🙂
I’m sure you are. Do you have the trope of the uptight Librarian in the strangely tight dress over there?
You could have taken you anywhere before him and not now? Don’t get it.
I didn’t say uptight – I just going go around effing and blinding in public. Or even in front of family (except his nibs and not that much even then – that’s his speciality).
Don’t you have the idiomatic expression ‘we can’t take you anywhere’ over there?
I like the French version ‘insortable‘ from the verb sortir.
It’s in jest in whichever language.
just *don’t* go…
You could have taken you anywhere before him and not now? Don’t get it.
“I can’t take you anywhere” is a very common expression here Down Under, particularly for punters of a certain vintage.
It’s used when you do something very clumsy, spill a drink down your shirt, etc, or when you make a social faux pas – such as farting in front of the bishop.
BTW “punters” doesn’t literally mean people who have a punt (ie, gamblers) – it is used to mean regular folk, who are just trying as best they can to get through life.
Well, Janos,
I disagree but not sure how to prove it. But I think men’s ability to compartmentalize mentally is the reason for their ability to fool their own selves. Women’s more chaotic and inter-communicative brains makes this feat more difficult. As to lying intentionally, I have not pursued that line of thought. That is a different thing.
Women know and then the next minute they don’t. Double think and rationalization is the common condition. Morality is a male invention. An attempt to control the chaos, at least at the level of observed behavior. And once that is in place, shaming can begin – the big gun that works so well. Women respond very well to this one.
People my remain unrepentant within, but at least a limit is put on the damage they do. And as for hypocrisy, as C.S Lewis said, “It is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”
A lot of women are annoyed at how much less attention men pay to them once they are no longer attractive. – sophia
==========
Gender identity and the pursuit of beauty by the female or her parents, especially the mother, begins nowadays before birth. That is because the baby’s sex is typically known before birth, unlike in the old days.
And so, if it’s going to be a girl the baby’s room is painted pink in advance. Ribbons and little hair do-dads are on the night stand awaiting mother and daughter’s return from the hospital. As Green Alba pointed out there is nothing a mother would like to hear than how pretty her daughter is because physical attractiveness is the key to the future. It will determine who she mates with, who impregnates her.
And the drive for beauty never ends. Every day I would take my 91 year old mother-in-law to a day care program at a nursing home. My wife would pick out her clothes and put on her make up. Mom was demented. Every day she would ask “where are we going? Have I ever been there before?” I’d open the passenger door and strap her in with the seat belt. I’d get in the driver’s seat and ‘mom’ already had the mirror flipped down to check her look. She was on beauty auto-pilot to her dying day. Females’ job number one is beauty. Nobody cares if she gets an A in quantum mechanics on her report card unless she’s ugly.
I wouldn’t go quite that far, Q. It’s clear that being attractive is going to give you a choice from a much bigger pool than if you’re just average – and its often (but not always) going to make your life easier, but there are plenty of women whose personality and sense of humour makes them sexy to men, even when they’re not Salma Hayek.
And the other thing is that the Coolidge effect does its work, even if you’re Salma Hayek or Uma Thurman, so if you’ve got a brain cell in your head you’ll make sure you’ve got some marketable skills in case your hero runs off with one of his junior colleagues.
Everybody likes their kids – male or female – to be good looking, but sensible people never want that to be all they’ve got to offer, because that reflects on their parenting and gives you a narcissistic kid (again, male or female).
C’mon.
Menopause and Andropause both mark the end of hormonal domination in both sexes. The end of sexual domination of the personality occurs halfway through life, not at the end of life. Life is so much better without the domination of the sex hormones.
I agree John. I’m not sure life is better, but at least there are perks for the aging half of life.
One of them is being able to say a lot of things that a younger woman can’t.
It’s also nice to be able to be friendly to young male colleagues or neighbours without it being considered even remotely a possibility that you fancy them or that you might consider they could fancy you.
Doesn’t work quite the same the other way round, of course. Many a 60-year-old man is easily persuaded that a 25-year-old has a thing for him just because she said hello. Men’s fantasy lives are a thing of wonder. 🙂
I wouldn’t go quite that far, Q. – GA
=========
I admit to having exaggerated for the sake of emphasis……… but not by a whole lot.
Look up at your TV screen. If there’s a woman on it she’s covered in makeup, shiny red lip gloss, fake eye lashes… and don’t get me started on hair color… they change hair color as often as they change their panties. This is hardly the case with males, straight males, that is.
Getting back to the anecdote about my aged mother-in-law who was still concerned with her appearance even though she was demented and had lost 75% of her marbles…….. there was an occasion when my wife was away from home for a day or two. Before leaving she laid out two outfits for Mom to wear to the Nursing Home day care program. I, Q Shtik, would help Mom with her makeup. Easy peesy, I had watched the whole routine a hundred times. So, after breakfast me and Mom step into the restroom off our kitchen. Mom powders her nose and applies her lipstick with a shaky hand. I use a tissue to correct the mistakes. I ask Mom to hold still while I draw on her eyebrows. I’m proud of my handiwork and turn to go back into the kitchen. I glance back and see Mom leaning toward the mirror and wiping off one of the eyebrows. “MOM,” I yell, “what are you doing? Why are you destroying that eyebrow?” “I don’t like it, you gave me a surprised look.”
Haha!
Re your second para, of course!
The point of made-up, glamorous women on TV, billboards, magazines etc. is to make women hate themselves and spend endless amounts of cash to try not to hate themselves.
Warning their daughters about this is one of the prime duties of parenthood.
I remember the Aussie comedian, Adam Hills, at a gig in the Edinburgh Fringe before he was on TV over here, telling women not to be taken in by it.
He said ‘all most blokes want is that you have a favourite episode of the Simpson’s’! 🙂
If only…
The thing you have to remember, as a woman, is that whichever way you go – glam make up or no make-up – you will be criticised for it. My daughter had an argument with some male colleagues, in the lead-up to a meeting, who were criticising an absent young female colleague, behind her back, for coming to work without make-up. They said it was unprofessional, like them coming to work without shaving. You can’t win.
Well screw them. She should stop shaving her legs, that’ll learn um…
Q,
Woman’s beauty is like a lovely flower that attracts the bee…
Then the petals fall off…
And the bee dies.~A. Bundy
Janos,
I’m gonna have to really think about your second post on turning the other cheek.
Sunburst,
I agree that personal experience is the crux of true spirituality and that is the tragedy of it. Whenever a person of whatever tradition or no tradition has a breakthrough experience all they want to do is to give it away. Yet how can it be done?
The Christian example is Jesus taught that one must be born of the Holy Spirit. And that is the true core of his teachings, the pearl of great price, the way to put God and his Kingdom first so that all else may be added unto you, yet how can that be imparted?
The priests try to pretend that they can use chrismation to anoint with the holy oil, that God or Jesus gave them the authority to do so, but that does nothing, and no person can be made to have the ability to dispense the Holy Spirit to another because of their title.
Q probably confuses evangelical fundamentalism with religion in general…
“Whenever a person of whatever tradition or no tradition has a breakthrough experience all they want to do is to give it away. Yet how can it be done? ”
Yes indeed. How can it be done? I certainly wish there was a way to communicate such a profoundly personal experience to another human being in such a way that would convince them of the reality of God, but apparently this is a journey each of us must make on our own. “The flight of the alone to the alone” was the way I believe Plotinus phrased it…
Sunburst,
It is the experience itself that needs to be transmitted. You might have success in getting them to believe in God because you described your experience well, but that still leaves them in the position of the religious, who believe but have not tasted.
I have noticed some enlightened people end up teaching some sort of method, some type of meditation or what-have-you, but if you read the story of how it came to them, it isn’t something they can impart. So they want to give it, but there is no way, so they do the next best thing and try to teach and talk about it, with very limited success.
Sure. Ekhart Tolle is a good example of this. If you read the preface to his book The Power of Now he gives a brief testimony at one point of his experience of permanently losing his ego (which is tantamount to Enlightenment). There is no doubt what he is describing is a real experience. Yet the path by which he came to this experience was through intense, unbearable suffering which he never asked for, and, had he been given the opportunity, would have chosen otherwise. Although Ekhart has been teaching for well over twenty years those who follow him appear to remain as distant from their personal enlightenment as ever. His experience of intense suffering which led him to voluntarily relinquish his ego cannot be transmitted…
he gives a brief testimony at one point of his experience of permanently losing his ego (which is tantamount to Enlightenment).
During the 3-4 million years of hominid evolution, if our ancestors had the “experience of permanently losing his ego” they would have personally and permanently lost their capacity to survive and reproduce.
We are all here only because we are (and were) clever apes, not because we were new-age hippies seeking enlightenment. Hubris indeed. LOL
It’s called evolution Cargill remember? Perhaps loss of ego (enlightenment) is the next stage of our collective journey. A permanent shift to higher consciousness may be the only cure for Western civilization’s ongoing demise. But I suppose you want to stay an ape forever…
I would like you a lot better if you would cut out the smart ass LOL bullshit and just talk like a man…
Instead of an elitist with a cob stuck up his ass…
LOL!
It’s called evolution Cargill remember? Perhaps loss of ego (enlightenment) is the next stage of our collective journey.
Yes – I know it’s evolution … it’s others I have doubts about.
Sadly, there is no collective journey, there is only individual survivability and therefore reproduction. Enough individuals survive at the expense of others, and very very slowly you get a shift in the the gene pool, and then a new species or genus or family.
Hence a butterfly becomes an elephant – it takes a while but we got there. Being an ape is all we got – we can’t pray our way out of it.
“Sadly, there is no collective journey, there is only individual survivability and therefore reproduction.”
It would be sad if it were true.
Why should human evolution terminate upon the lofty plateau of “intelligent ape”? Perhaps we are meant (literally) for greater things. You assume we have reached our evolutionary terminus as a species, is it not conceivable human evolution is still in the process of unfolding, with deeper levels of human potential yet to be actualized? Who knows what we are capable of? Keep your options open comrade. Don’t close the book on us as yet…
Why should human evolution terminate upon the lofty plateau of “intelligent ape”? Perhaps we are meant (literally) for greater things. You assume we have reached our evolutionary terminus as a species, is it not conceivable human evolution is still in the process of unfolding, with deeper levels of human potential yet to be actualized? Who knows what we are capable of? Keep your options open comrade. Don’t close the book on us as yet…
The evolution of new species via natural selection – particularly mammals, and large mammals at that – is very rare and takes millions of years. Human beings have only been literate and very self-aware for a couple of hundred thousand years … a tiny speck of time.
Even with the huge amounts of artificial selection over the last ten millennia, with food animals, pets, birds, food plants, and flowers, we don’t really create many new species. A poodle can still successfully mate with a labrador, for example.
In fact with so many things that we do wish to control the reproduction of, the problem is getting anything to breed true – life is prolific and wildly promiscuous … and of course if it weren’t it wouldn’t be here.
THe science says that it is very unlikely that human beings will evolve to something else (higher or lower, take your pick), for two reasons:
1. there are so many of us that it’s virtually impossible to meaningfully affect the gene pool, and
2. we have a lot of control over the environment / ecology in which we operate, and we have altered it to suit us, rather than us adapting to what is out there.
Sunburst,
Sure. Ekhart Tolle is a good example of this. If you read the preface to his book The Power of Now he gives a brief testimony at one point of his experience of permanently losing his ego (which is tantamount to Enlightenment). There is no doubt what he is describing is a real experience. Yet the path by which he came to this experience was through intense, unbearable suffering which he never asked for, and, had he been given the opportunity, would have chosen otherwise. Although Ekhart has been teaching for well over twenty years those who follow him appear to remain as distant from their personal enlightenment as ever. His experience of intense suffering which led him to voluntarily relinquish his ego cannot be transmitted…
Exactly. I think there was a bit more to it than the suffering. I think there was also a surrender. You gotta say yes to God.
But last year at the library (remember those?) I picked up one of his later books, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. I generally find that while he does say profound things, he is sleepy and not easy to stay focused upon. But Chapter 5 on the pain body and chapter 6, they did change me. I must have been ready. I saw, not so much myself as all of us, in a different light. And, to the extent I follow Christianity, it was quite a boost because total forgiveness makes a lot more sense in light of it.
If you watch his videos he is sleepy in them as well. Is sleepiness a characteristic of enlightenment I wonder…
The more you will think, the less you will know. Use you buddhi and SEE the Truth.
Yes. Ekhart teaches the only path to enlightenment is by shutting down the thinking process (the ongoing talking to one’s self which in most people operates nonstop). The problem is how to do this…
Yes. Ekhart teaches the only path to enlightenment is by shutting down the thinking process (the ongoing talking to one’s self which in most people operates nonstop).
Some people recently have found that the path to the presidency.
The more you will think, the less you will know.
Dialectical materialism is a cure for this.
Thank you for admitting to others what I already divined. Devil, you have revealed yourself!
It’s a sacrament or an outer sign instituted by Christ that confers grace. It’s a mystery that even the unworthy priests can be instruments of.
I don’t understand it either, but it is so. It runs counter to your pagan occultic ethos of personal attainment. I sympathize completely since I think that way myself most of the time.
Of course they absolutize it so everyone outside the Church is going to Hell. Thank God he isn’t as the Church doctrines teach.
But no, Janos, that is the dogma and it is false. The priests are not instruments in control of grace. In fact, I find that almost blasphemous.
If they were, our whole world would not be in this condition. Priests cannot confer on an assembly line the gift of the Holy Spirit. And the Roman church demoted the Holy Spirit anyway.
Hmm, maybe I can rethink that a little. It may very well be that these sacraments are able to transmit a little bit, and that people are better off for it. But not the big transmission, not the life changing ones.
The Tide has gone out but the Tidal Pool remains. He left a bit of Himself here. What people do with that is up to them. But it doesn’t depend on the Priest per se. Even a bad Priest who doesn’t believe or is a hardened sinner can give the Sacrament – as long as he has done the ritual correctly. Mind blowing (to me as well) but it is true. This is Grace indeed!
Christianity has no Gurus, only Fathers and Elder Brothers and Sisters. Obviously grace does flow from them but the Tradition doesn’t talk about it in those terms.
I’ve found a power spot in a local church – a statue of Mary giving the rosary to St Dominic (it’s a Dominican Priory). I can feel the energy flowing down from her into my head and then into my heart. In the paths of self effort, the attempt is to make the energy rise, typically.
I had to spend decades doing psychedelics and meditating before I was able to return home and find grace in Church. He who knows only England, knows not England.
Janos,
I maintain that dogma is incorrect and is why so few people make real breakthroughs. Some people do make real breakthroughs, and it is due to their own merit and faith. I note that the Protestants do not produce saints, but the Romans do, even though I am, shall I say, disappointed in both.
I would have thought you too wise in your understanding to fall for that convenient dogma.
As if God’s grace is on tap for men to decide where it goes and who can and can’t access it. They announce that they have the authority to do so!
I recently finished a book that was about a Catholic woman saint. The book is called Prison Angel. I suppose you would take exception to her stance on forgiveness. It was a very inspiring book I must say. I mean, she only died about 5 years ago, she hasn’t been canonized, but I have canonized her.
If priests could dispense grace, it would have changed the world.
Grace doesn’t obey authority and is a cat, not a dog.
I really enjoyed today’s post. It’s kinda funny — there are people so shocked by classic architecture and quality building materials that there is an entire conspiracy theory based around the idea that many older buildings could not have been built by humans (Mud Flood/Tartaria). Philly City Hall, for example.
I live in Europe now, but grew up in the States and went to college in Richmond, VA. I lived with some other student friends in a house in the Fan district, where there were a lot of beautiful old Civil War era row houses.
Our house was refurbished before we moved in for my sophomore year, and I remember one of the workers being fascinated by the fireplace, as he claimed it was “slate over marble.” He said we needed to be careful around it as the knowledge needed to reproduce or reapair it was lost.
No idea if that was true. But I always thought it was interesting.
It’s probably true. The kind of prefab materials that most builders have been compelled to use for the last 50 or so years would mean the techniques for working with materials prior to this period are lost to all but a few oldtimers. See the book by Jane Jacobs ‘Dark Age Ahead’ which Dr. Tom mentions upthread….
SBS
If you will, discuss briefly your walks around the City of Detroit. I’ve never been there. Not to impugn your hometown, but its reputation is not the greatest, and I say that as a longtime Tiger fan (I remember Gates Brown) Video exists on YouTube of nighttime drives thru Detroit neighborhoods, and it is truly hair raising. I don’t doubt signs remain from halcyon days of past greatness, and there are architectural treasures to be found … but is it reasonably safe? From what I’ve heard Detroit is just not the place for a carefree afternoon stroll.
BRH
Brh,
There is a large swath of Detroit which borders the downtown area to the west that is quite safe to walk around in. There are many formerly beautiful historical buildings in various stages of decline located here like the Michigan Central Train Station (now owned by Ford). Much of the area has been reclaimed by nature, a lot of open fields where all memory of former human habitation has been erased. If I want to walk in the country I go here which is 15 minutes from where I live, instead of driving for an hour and a half to get to a metropark. There are also little ethnic communities scattered about like Corktown (Irish) and Mexican Village that are interesting to walk through…
I use to ride a bike around the city, but now I prefer to walk as you get a better sense of the texture of the urban environment when you’ve got boots on the ground.
Nice post SBS. Thanks.
Yes, but I think this is true more in the States than in Europe. We had some work done on our house here in Germany recently and I was chatting a bit with the foreman.
He and his team are from Poland, and the guys who have been properly trained learn all the old-world techniques, as they need them to keep up the older buildings. He and his team do plenty of work on old villas, and he said all the young guys he brings in from Poland know how to work on just about anything.
So you’re OK with globalism and EU migrant labour after all, then, when it suits you?
Interesting. I voted against Brexit but I’ve always employed local tradesmen.
Cute.
Is it true that Milan was using cheap Chinese labor and that is what slowed the cut off that was needed to slow the virus. Did China threaten them as was reported?
Don’t know about that at all, JohnAZ, sorry.
I have nothing against controlled migration, particularly when said migrants integrate, learn the language, etc.
I am an immigrant myself.
Have I injured the narcissist again?
So you just whine about EU migrant labour when it’s ‘other’ migrant labour. You’re a hoot. But then you would be, wouldn’t you, being a nightowl?
From your post upthread:
“Gabbard, too.
Glad to say I called them out as fakes early on.”
We’re all glad, Nightowl. Your narcissism is a national treasure that needs to be nurtured. We couldn’t have coped if you couldn’t.
You’re a happy EU globalist, with all the perks that allows you. Forgive yourself.
All you’ve injured is your credibility. 🙂
Akmofo,
This you will like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XObk07uabLI
Simcha got a lot of things right, but the route and therefore the location of Mt Sinai he got wrong. The location of Mt Sinai is outside Egypt, and is in the Land of Midian where Jethro the father-in-law of Moses lived. The TaNAKh is very explicit about that. Today’s Sinai Peninsula wasn’t named so until almost 2000 years later by the Romans. Mt Sinai (jabal al lawz) is in Northwestern Saudia, across the Gulf of Eilat. The crossing occurred at what is known today as the Straits of Tiran:
https://www.bible.ca/archeology/maps-bible-archeology-exodus-route-overview.jpg
https://www.bible.ca/archeology/bible-archeology-exodus-route2-old.htm
Wonderful presentation, Jim, festooned with grace notes.
‘This one is a ghost story, not just of the bygone souls who came and went here, but of an entire society, the nation that we used to be and stopped being not so long ago.’
Given enough of it, time will make ghosts of all us and all that we’ve made. Inexorably, things change. In 1920 we had about 106 million people. The world is now too complex, too non-linear, getting harder and harder to handle.
I don’t mean to shatter the rose colored glasses, but just to point out that we wear them all too often.
Hats off to the nurses and doctors in NYC, and everywhere else, putting their lives on the line.
‘Ruin Nation’ must not become our ruination.
Iceland finds that half its citizens with corona virus have shown no symptoms. The island has tested more of its population for COVID-19 than any other country. Let’s permanently shutdown Iceland!
Iceland finds that half its citizens with corona virus have shown no symptoms. The island has tested more of its population for COVID-19 than any other country. Let’s permanently shutdown Iceland!
Iceland
Cases per million: 5014
Deaths per million: 23
Australia
Cases per million: 251
Deaths per million: 2
Australia went hard and went early – looks like that strategy has paid off.
All bullshit numbers taken by bullshit artists using bullshit criteria for bullshit political and economic agenda like overpopulation, global warming, and world government.
There are other more eloquent adjectives available to you, but if you prefer that one – so be it.
Would you rather I explain things to you in eloquent commie Chinese, you disgusting commie Chinese tool and foreign agent.
“Would you rather I explain things to you in eloquent commie Chinese, you disgusting commie Chinese tool and foreign agent.”
Mofo,
Again, where is the deference and kindness? Where is the humanity that the Son’s of the Levant are universally known to possess?
Cargill is Australian, not Palestinian.
There’s nothing Australian about her. Cargill is a commie Chinese! She made that very plain if you cared to read her commie propaganda.
I deliberately misspelled Surfer’s Paradise to see if she would spot the mistake and correct it. She didn’t, because she’s not Australian. She’s just another of Asoka’s many pen personalities, along with Majella.
Jeez…calm the fuck down!
I guess your meds must be Chinese-made and the supply line may have collapsed…what else could explain such unbridled wankerism?
Where is the humanity that the Son’s of the Levant are universally known to possess?
==
What the hell is wrong with you Ely? What the fsck did I do? I told the truth by calling a commie a commie?
Where is your humanity, Ely? When are going to stand up for what’s right? Or have you gotten so feeble minded in your old age that you can no longer tell right from wrong, let alone fight for it?
I deliberately misspelled Surfer’s Paradise to see if she would spot the mistake
Firstly, you have just misspelled Surfers – there is no apostrophe (they were stripped from all Aussie place names and street names decades ago).
And secondly, I don’t make a habit of addressing the poor spelling or poor grammar of others – to do so would be a full-time job. Occasionally an error is so egregious or misleading that a gently correction call is required.
“Where is your humanity, Ely? When are going to stand up for what’s right? Or have you gotten so feeble minded in your old age that you can no longer tell right from wrong, let alone fight for it?”
Mofo,
Enfeeblement will come soon enough. Insofar as fighting for right against wrong…this is a site of adults who discuss the issues, there is no fighting in the Nation of Clusterfuck. Destroy your adversary with intelligent discourse, logic and wit. Consider any response involving the Ad Hominem to be a failed attempt
You know, in the ghetto culture of the US, politeness and educated discourse is seen as weakness, or even as tinged with homosexuality. It is, of course, an ignorant mistake. Don’t make that mistake.
https://www.amren.com/blog/2020/04/the-great-replacement-new-york-city/
Even the feared and hated squeegee men are back. Typically Blacks who clean your windshield without permission and then demand money for it.
The foreign equivalent? Black Africans at the Eiffel Tower who weaved a “friendship bracelet” around your wrist and their own, and won’t let you go until you pay up.
Only Staten Island remains mostly White and Conservative. An island of sanity and goodness in a dark sea of criminality, chaos, leftist treason, and despair.
Only Staten Island remains mostly White and Conservative. An island of sanity and goodness in a dark sea of criminality, chaos, leftist treason, and despair.
And clearly the most boring borough in the city!
You love that diversity! Nothing is more exciting than crack and ho’s, eh Cargill? You a “Great White Hunter”, bro?
You love that diversity!
Have always liked chocolate ice cream more than plain vanilla!
But vanilla is the exotic for those who have only known chocolate. And as Burton and other explorers have said, How tired one grows of the endless dark hair and eyes of the alien women, no matter how beautiful.
The real Diversity is among our own People with their endless shades of skin, hair, and eyes. We have need of no other.
How easily I defeat you! But of course I have a friend on my side: Truth.
The real Diversity is among our own People with their endless shades of skin, hair, and eyes. We have need of no other.
And you know why? Because of diversity comrade! I’m sure even you have a wide range of mongrel ancestors going back a few layers.
Hybrid vigour has made the world. And I still love the Crazy Caps.
No, put in a Black or East Asian and much of the diversity of appearance is lost at one stroke.
Whites, the Northern Caucasians, are simply very diverse in appearance more so than the Southern Caucasians, East Asians, etc.
There’s a lot of diversity among the Negroes as well.
Janos:
“How easily I defeat you! But of course I have a friend on my side: Truth”
How easily you DELUDE yourself, more like. And, like the Misleader-in-Cheif, you’re the only one awarding ‘victory’ – to yourself. Your narcissism would compete with the Fat Orange Bastard’s.
And clearly the most boring borough in the city! – Cargill
===========
Staten Islanders’ greatest source of pride is that they have a landfill so HUGE it can be seen from space with the naked eye. Seriously!
Wait till they see the mountains of medical waste that are coming down the line with Covid19. China has cities that have no idea what to do with it.
mountains of medical waste – China has cities that have no idea what to do with it. – GA
==========
Oh, no problemo. Dump it in the ocean and before you know it there will be a floating undulating island the size of Australia… full of ‘hypodemic nerdles.’
I got the chance to surf on club gitmo Cuba once and was chased out of the water by Cuban medical waste including those damn needles by the base security.
That is already a problem good thing that metal does not last very long.
Green Alba,
This is the kind of crap they feed you and you believe. Will Covid cause extra medical waste? Well, due to use of ppe, quite likely, but it will not surmount the fact that the hospitals are dead zones without patients. The mass graves were an obvious lie but you believed it.
You saw the footage of the Resting Place of Multiple Occupancy. If you prefer to filter your own truth, that’s your business.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-17/How-Wuhan-copes-with-its-mountains-of-medical-waste–OUxhr4jW1i/index.html
Seriously, why would anyone waste their time making up a story about medical waste disposal? Who the heck would care?
From someone credulous enough to believe that drivel about the 31,000 ‘scientists’, you’re hilarious.
And I didn’t see the medical waste story either on the telly or under some explosive headline in an online newspaper. It was a throwaway point at the tail end of something – the kind of thing that only people like me who have an interest in how we deal with our crap generally would have the slightest interest in.
I can assure you the public here hasn’t the slightest interest in where the waste is going at the moment – they just want to get a mild dose of the virus or none, along with their families.
Currently we have an uprising among UK Care Home managers. They’re livid that they’ve been sent recovering Covid patients from hospital, who they were assured would present no risk ‘if guidelines were followed’ and now hundreds of care homes in England are being battered by the virus – and not just the residents but the carers too. £14/hour to risk your life, with inadequate PPE, because it’s needed for the NHS, who haven’t got enough either. So they’re refusing to take any more, unless they’ve tested negative.
I’m glad it’s quiet over your way though. I guess it would be in the country.
Green Alba,
You saw the footage of the Resting Place of Multiple Occupancy.
No, I must have missed that.
/How-Wuhan-copes-with-its-mountains-of-medical-waste–
OK, I read that. Odd, that they would sterilize a bunch of waste and then incinerate it. Seems like an extra step. Don’t know if the Wuhan situation will translate to Europe and US, where our hospitals are empty.
From someone credulous enough to believe that drivel about the 31,000 ‘scientists’, you’re hilarious.
You doubt the list exists? We should look it up then. Why call something drivel when you don’t know?
Currently we have an uprising among UK Care Home managers. They’re livid that they’ve been sent recovering Covid patients from hospital, who they were assured would present no risk ‘if guidelines were followed’ and now hundreds of care homes in England are being battered by the virus – and not just the residents but the carers too. £14/hour to risk your life, with inadequate PPE, because it’s needed for the NHS, who haven’t got enough either. So they’re refusing to take any more, unless they’ve tested negative.
Rightly so if they don’t have PPE. I believe workers do need PPE because a very likely reason a few have died too young is that they might get repeated doses, which is high exposure.
Are they discharging them too soon or what? If they are recovering, they shouldn’t be very contagious. I wonder what the guidelines were. Separation from other residents? That would mean they’re contagious.
I’m glad it’s quiet over your way though. I guess it would be in the country.
Green Alba,
Oh, speaking of quiet, how busy is your husband’s local hospital?
I really enjoyed today’s essay as well.
As an Architecture student of the early 1970s, we were right at the peak of the destruction of much of beautiful sandstone Sydney, and the imposition of a pre stressed or post-stressed concrete slab Modernism.
Fortunately there were a lot of passionate people who loved their city, and some absolute Victorian & Edwardian masterpieces were saved … and today they are re-purposed delights. The old Custom House became a city museum, beautiful bond stores have become a hive of markets, small stores, and cafes.
It’s a wonderful city in many ways – but too much of the ugliness of the 1970s and 1980s is still there.
Here in Melbourne I live in a pretty wealthy area that was the product of the massive Gold Rush of the 1850-1880 period. The main drag along the eastern edge was literally the dirt road that the thousands of “diggers” used to get to the goldfields within 200 miles of the city.
Those who struck it returned and build fabulous houses, and while their estates have been carved up from five acres to a quarter-acre, the houses remain magnificent. There is also a good smattering of 1920s Californian bungalows, with the big verandahs and long horizontal lines that evoke modest Frank Lloyd Wright.
Occasionally there is a startling and impressive Art Deco beauty. And a lot of solid “Federation” properties of the 1930-1950 era – clad with clapboard, but with enough architectural design and class to make them still wonderful.
Move a little further west however, and you find small suburban dog-boxes – brick veneer, aluminium window frames, low pitch roofs, and as plain as it is possible to be featureless. I understand that post-war economics is mostly responsible for this – population was booming, materials were in short supply, craftsmen had become tradesman, and labour costs were high.
But notwithstanding the genuine reasons, they do not reflect progress in the world of design and build. And in fact many of these brick veneer boxes are now being demolished, and stark modern glass and silver cladded angular boxes are going up. Some are beautiful and well-designed, but too many look like a wannabe Apple Store from a small Midwest city.
We’ve driven many miles through New England (in fact from Atlanta Georgia to Halifax Nova Scotia), and many of its towns (landscape and streetscape) are stunningly beautiful. But there are many places where it is really clear that it is all about the past .. that the very best years are behind it rather than in front of it.
And if I were king I would ban those dreadful tilt-wall factories and warehouses and muffler joints that encircle just about every town. I know they are essential in modern life – especially to service the automobile and truck businesses, but gosh they are ugly. In Australia’s broad landscape they are especially ugly.
We’re not building civilisations any more – we’re building Lego boxes.
Generic humans will be perfect for those Lego boxes no? One big happy world of lego boxes and generic humans who are all of the cultures of the world at one and the same time. The apex of boredom and sameness. Building civilization is wildly racist and discriminatory on the other hand. Not your cup of tea huh?
Whatever you say.
Great retrospective. Much of southern “development” occurred after WWII and was predominately car centric. Ubiquitous parking lots, cheap buildings. It therefore grew “ugly”. The pretty antebellum structures that remained were unsuited to modern a/c and there weren’t that many of them. My town was 4 square miles in 1950 surrounded by cotton fields and today the city limits encompass 216 square miles of 1/2 acre suburban lots and the usual big box shopping. I always wondered why we couldn’t do better. Taxes are low and it is easy and cheap to live as long as you can afford a car….
I had always admired the timeless European villages but have had a number of long time immigrant residents report that they liked it here better because there were too many laws in their homeland. They appreciated the freedom.
Young people now prefer living downtown and things are slowly changing, perhaps the in-fill can be managed better than the build out.
Yeah, in apartment complexes that are breeding grounds for the diseases.
Downtown Denver has become the home of thousands of cheaply made and thrown up apartment buildings that make it look like the projects of the 60’s. It is no wonder that the millennials that have moved there have been bit so hard by the coronavirus. Colorado has 2/3 the population of Arizona and much less centralized population. its cases rate has been twice that of Arizona. Lifestyle is aggravating this disease.
Ironically, the ski areas that have drawn in so many of the younger set are all closed.
BTW, Denver is a big time hub of the airline industry. Could Denver be an argument that the airlines have brought this disease down on us?
Its the bong and pipe sharing when smoking that sticky icky.
Breitbart
On Saturday, the Economist reported that the fact that the illness caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread across the United States could be “good news.”
“If millions of people were infected weeks ago without dying, the virus must be less deadly than official data suggest,” the magazine determined, using graphs to suggest the faster the disease spreads and hits its peak, the fewer people will die.
The Economist article cited a new study by Justin Silverman and Alex Washburne that used data on influenza-like illness (ili) to show that the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) is now widespread in America.
Silverman and Washburne found that the coronavirus mortality rate could be as low as 0.1 percent, “similar to that of flu.”…
The new study’s coronavirus death rate estimate is much lower than what Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and member of the White House Coronavirus Taskforce, predicted in early March.
“If you look at the cases that have come to the attention of the medical authorities in China, and you just do the math, the math is about two percent,” Fauci said.
A study from Britain published at the end of last month in the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases also found that fewer people are dying from the novel coronavirus than previously estimated.
That study estimated the coronavirus death rate could be as low as 0.66 percent and as high as 1.38 percent. Fauci’s estimate is higher than both figures.
JS: Recent data from Iceland suggests that the death rate is closer to 0.004 percent. Now I’m just a country doctor, but I’d believe a nation that kicked out its bankers before any of these others. I felt bad a couple of weeks ago – maybe I got it then. David Icke felt bad last month, maybe that’s when he got it. It’s not the “flu” per se, but it may be no worse than the flu, at least for most. Is it worse once you get it – maybe, don’t know. Sophia said that it seems to present differently. Such technical information is vital for doctors, but the focus for our Leaders should be how it presents for the majority, both in terms of how many get it and how many of those have any real difficulty. Once that is ascertained, I don’t think there will be any question of remaining closes much less letting our freedoms be taken away from us like sheep.
This is still a very dangerous virus, where – unlike with flu – there is as yet no vaccine, and no cure either. Antibody treatments are still at extremely early stages.
And until there is some widespread “random” testing, it’s very difficult to determine death rates. Asserting “death-rates” down to three decimal points are beyond ridiculously precise. If the virus is wide-spread that is an argument for more testing, not less.
Good scientists recognise and work with what they do not know.
And of course death rates vary enormously with age, socio-economic status, and a range of other medical conditions.
There are no doubt large numbers of people (in both the US and elsewhere) who have died from Covid-19 but would not have died from a normal flu. And also equally important, it appears that Covid-19 can be transmitted from people – including children and young adults – even though they are totally asymptomatic.
The comparison with flu doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. Plus there is the undeniable reality that the mitigation strategies (self-isolation, social distancing, and intense cleaning), have reduced the case-load dramatically.
One of America’s largest pork producers in South Dakota has had to close because of the widespread infection among its workforce. This virus seems very contagious human to human.
Any steps to “loosen” restrictions need to be done very carefully, and starting with tiny steps. Plus you need to have significant testing, and you need to resource the health system adequately. It requires a sophisticated science-led plan – something way beyond the capability of the president and his administration.
Once [the death-rate] is ascertained, I don’t think there will be any question of remaining closes much less letting our freedoms be taken away from us like sheep.
Nobody is taken away your freedoms for one day longer than is necessary – I think mature people understand this, and accept that lock-down conditions are necessary for as long as it takes, to protect many thousands of people in the community.
No, mature people don’t take our freedom for granted. They know how rare it is. They obey little and question much as Whitman said. Of their own accord, they will never give us our full Freedom back, just as they didn’t after 9/11. This time they obviously intent to take far more though – as is obvious from their words.
In contrast, the Commonwealth Countries like Australia were cowed and guilt tripped into allowing themselves to be disarmed. What could be more shameful than that?
Blacks do seem weaker against this disease than Whites, but that’s true about many conditions. The outer strength of their bodies makes a tremendous demand on their inner organs. In contrast, the moderate musculature of the East Asian lends itself towards a greater health than either Whites or Blacks.
Why the endless comparison of Whites and Blacks? Compare them to someone else too. And of course, if you even care to, compare us to other groups as well. According to some, Hispanics are healthier than Whites. They tend towards diabetes under modern conditions, but in more benign form.
Every day, more and more people are going bankrupt and their businesses ruined and themselves headed for the street. Is this what you want?
In contrast, the Commonwealth Countries like Australia were cowed and guilt tripped into allowing themselves to be disarmed. What could be more shameful than that?
Excuse me? We have the total freedom to decide that we want to have very strict gun control – the benefits of doing so are enormous. We are not a cowed people – we’re feisty and basically anti-authoritarian (we do have a long & proud convict and Irish history after all).
If you equate being armed with being free – that is the effect of NRA Kool Aid. The sole purpose of the NRA is as a front for the arms manufacturers to maximise sales and profits.
Every day, more and more people are going bankrupt and their businesses ruined and themselves headed for the street. Is this what you want?
Everybody want the restrictions to be reduced and then removed the very day it is safe to do so. But politicians cannot get ahead of the science and the medical advice … to do so would be disastrous, and more to the point, would lead to worse medium- and long-term economic outcomes.
Science? The fake science of of medical media “personalities” like Fauci and Scarf Woman.
How easily you are fooled? No, you know better methinks – and in that lies a tale no doubt.
If you don’t believe the science that comes from the professional medical establishment, you only have the witch-doctors left (or Breitbart and Fox News – which amounts to the same thing).
Good luck sorting out the messages in the gazelle bones you’ve found.
“Excuse me? We have the total freedom to decide that we want to have very strict gun control”
Cargill,
Yet, there were those that had the total freedom to decide otherwise. What happened to their choice? Was there a referendum on gun control (Or a knee-jerk reaction to an untoward incident?)
Do you feel safer with your gun control? Do you trust your fellow citizens? Please explain.
Yet, there were those that had the total freedom to decide otherwise. What happened to their choice? Was there a referendum on gun control (Or a knee-jerk reaction to an untoward incident?)
We have parliamentary liberal democracy, with an election every three years for the entire house of representatives and half the senate. We have no need for a president.
Gun laws are passed by the parliament elected by the people, and polling shows overwhelming support for strict gun laws.
We have a good solid Constitution (which like the US one spends time outlining states powers versus federal powers), but we definitely do not have a Bill of Rights. We choose not to have one for very good reasons:
• the Constitution covers many rights
• each State has its own constitution with embedded rights
• one you try to list a set of rights, it gets hard to stop
• a Bill of Rights winds up as a lawyers picnic (see the US)
• it gives the courts far too much political influence (see the US)
• various amendments thwart the will of parliament
• various amendments are misused and abused (see 1st, 2nd, 5th)
• it allows minorities to scoff at majority decisions
• the Australian (English) common law is strong and respected
I could go on and on, but you get he idea – the Second Amendment “right” to bear arms is (to my mind) one of the major tragedies of US life, along with enthusiasm for capital punishment in the more primitive states.
So we have no “rights” embedded in a document that is squabbled over every day in your courts. What we have is a liberal democracy where the people’s house (not the senate, not any president) is sacrosanct, and the supreme power.
The High Court does very occasionally sit in judgement to consider the constitutionality of a law, but not in a political way.
If the Australian public wanted to abolish gun laws they can vote in candidates who would do that for them. No-one gets to hide behind their favourite amendment, or run off squealing to the daddies and mommies on the Supreme Court.
So we don’t like guns, we don’t need a Bill of Rights, and we are a free people.
And if you want to own a high-performance weapon so you can kill 60 people in two minutes, that’s tough – you’re SOL and have to go live someplace else.
You don’t have a “right” to such a thing, any more than a “right” to drive fast on busy streets, and many other things we consider dangerous.
hahaha you are so full of it.
You have given up the right to defend yourself and are so dense you don’t even understand it.
You have given up the right to defend yourself and are so dense you don’t even understand it.
Another one I see who has drunk the NRA Kool Aid … Smith & Wesson and Remington just luuuurves all you suckers! We do not need guns, we don’t need capital punishment, and we get on just fine without a Bill of Rights.
Check the deaths and injuries by guns in the US versus Australia … warning, it will make you cringe with envy!
“Nobody is taken away your freedoms for one day longer than is necessary” – bullshit.
Please explain to me why any ruling class in the world wants what is happening now. The ruthless money-making machines can’t stand the lockdown – it’s carving into their profits.
Your conspiracy theories are not only totally fruit-loop (LOL!) – they actually are wrong in terms of the money trail. The reality is that no-one with any clout likes this Covid-19 stuff … from Trump (the baby) up to the real boys, this really is a pisser.
They have enough money – they’re worried about resources. Plus they know that their funny money is going to fail so they have to get rid of a bunch of it to prop up the System until they are ready to collapse it on their own.
Marxism was their creation. Surely you don’t believe they take it seriously? Or Capitalist competition? The latter is a sin…..
Believing in the Capitalist ethos is for the other guy, the little guy, the sucker. And Marxism is just for angry losers, tools to be used and discarded, just like the Antifa.
They have enough money – they’re worried about resources. Plus they know that their funny money is going to fail so they have to get rid of a bunch of it to prop up the System until they are ready to collapse it on their own.
Who are this “‘they”, who are these bogeymen that seen to scare the little panties off you? Did you suffer nightmares as a kid? Scared of the dark?
How exactly do “they” collapse “the system” (as if there were only one), and how do “they” benefit from it? What is the point of world domination if it’s not for the money?
Inquiring minds would like to know.
They = the uber wealthy and super connected. The richest and most powerful people on the planet. The dominant forces and factions in politics, media, business, entertainment. The lust of power goes far beyond money. They want to control life itself as well as the cosmos.
I’ve been wondering about Cargill and I think I have figured it out. A friend of mine tells me about how AI is making huge strides and they’ve got programs that get better and better at talking like a real human.
Nah. He’s a real person warts and all. If you want to understand the Left just study Cargill, he perfectly embodies it. Yet oddly enough I think Cargill and I would find a lot to agree with if we limited our discussions to architecture, city/regional planning, environmental issues, sustainability, etc. I am an idealist who believes in a sustainable civilization. I also believe Minimalism is the way to go as a personal lifestyle…
Yeah, you’re right. We AI ‘bots make a lot more sense than you ‘meatbags’ manage, for sure.
…also, we don’t require ‘government cheques’ like the paid trolls do.
During the daily Wuhan coronavirus task force briefing Monday evening, President Trump played a series of video clips featuring reporters, anchors and pundits downplaying the threat of Wuhan coronavirus.
The press is quite upset about it. Fox News was the only channel to carry it. CNN and MSNBC cut away.
Trump said he has “hundreds” of clips, but didn’t want the briefing to take too long. (from Townhall).
TRUMP HITS BACK AT TWO-FACED MEDIA PUNDITS. LOL!!
And they could play clips of him downplaying it. He’s no worse and no better than they are. That’s a bitter pill for you I’m sure, just as it is for the Anti-Trump Cultists.
It’s interesting because it was downplayed almost universally in January and into February. Perhaps the initial and prevalent opinion was correct in hindsight. The minority undercurrent of thinking that it was a more serious phenomenon seems to have suddenly catapulted to accepted truth mid-March.
It gave CEO’s time to resign and stockholders time to cash out and/or short their positions. All this is in the Capstone (the higher Elite) which is separated from the rest of the Pyramid. See the back of the dollar bill.
SSL,
Good point. Did the game plan get changed? Did the secret cabal see an opportunity?
Unless the disease spread far and wide, there would be no crisis and thus no opportunity to gain control of Global Society.
*yawn…*
There’s so much idiotic contradiction in this ‘elite’ take-over theory of you RWNJs.
On the one hand, these mysterious ‘elites’ already run the planet, yet on the other hand, they’re desperately trying to take over “Global Society”. Which is it, for pity’s sake?
Duh. They have enormous power and they want even more. All if they can get it. The Chinese might have something to say about that, but no doubt some of the Chinese are in with them. And therein lies a tale I’m sure.
The Muslims? Ditto. The Jews? Ditto. The Russians? Ditto.
On the one hand, these mysterious ‘elites’ already run the planet, yet on the other hand, they’re desperately trying to take over “Global Society”.
They can’t answer the question Majella … if you have so many RWNJ conspiracy theories running together – sometimes amplifying each other, sometimes cancelling each other, like an orchestra without a conductor – that it just becomes an inchoate miasma of shit drizzle.
The founding fathers added the eye – they were Masons. FDR added the pyramid – secret symbol of the New World Order. The RWNJ have been trying to dismantle the New Deal for generations.
Trump could play the views from Feb-Mar of a hundred anchors, if very carefully selected, and get a lot of stuff.
But all of this matters not the slightest. The president is the president – and everything he has said since about 8 January has been utterly and totally wrong.
He only speaks in terms of what helps his re-election, which of course means he lies every time his lips move.
Roll on 3 November – remove this scum from the bottom of the shower.
What totally amuses me SBS is that you as a hard-core Christianista, can actually vote for the adulterous lying scumbag called Trump. Your hypocrisy knows no bounds it seems!
This is just TDS talking. I can’t take Trump bashing seriously comrade…
You don’t know what I believe Cargill. I can tell you straight out however it doesn’t fall into any clear cut category like “hard core Christianista”…
Eh, soldier, is it true you are a female soldier?
Is it true I am a female soldier? Where is that coming from?
Ask Brh. He’s a manly man. He would know…
Hahaha….this ‘TDS” response is so common now.
It translates to “I have no actual answer for you”.
Re TDS.
No, Majella, I believe it is my fault and I have decided to try to do a bit of deprogramming. You lefties have been so aggressive for so long and the sane ones have been quietly (ever so quietly) aghast, and plus one should be a bit gentle in the face of mental breakdown, but its time to just call out the TDS over and over, just like you spout TDS nonsense over and over.
And you gotta realize that it does fall on deaf ears at this point. Once it became obvious that you have been taught by your media owners to despise Trump no matter what he does or says, once is becomes obvious that if he does A he should have done B, but if and when he does B, he is reviled for not doing A, well, how can we take you seriously?
“Once it became obvious that you have been taught by your media owners to despise Trump no matter what he does or says…”
I’m not ‘owned’ by a ‘media master’, you idiot. I loathed this joke o a human being long before he was dubiously elected in 2016. I think the only one more surprised than me at his electoral fluke was Himself.
Deaf ears – yes, I’m perfectly aware that you and your ilk won’t change your mind based on facts put in front of you, but that won’t stop sane, rational people from calling out his immeasurable idiocy, demonstrated daily now, with his press conferences substituting for his Hillbilly Nuremberg Rallies.
One day, you’ll wake up to the fact that you’ve been so DUPED…perhaps you’ll publically admit to it, but that doesn’t matter, as long as you come to the realisation eventually.
Sunburst,
Is it true I am a female soldier? Where is that coming from?
The computer program called you Christianista.
Is this the video you are talking about?
https://youtu.be/bkMwvmJLnc0
@JHK
“The truth is, it [hierarchy] is absolutely required if you expect to live in a well-run society…”
I can imagine some inferred correlation between the existence of a hierarchy and an ordered [not well-run] society but I cannot imagine any cause-and-effect relationship.
To infer further that a “well-run” society is dependent upon a set of inter-personal relationships modeled after the relationships among all the beasts of the Earth rings as thin as ducking cover [ie when ducking is the only cover available].
Indeed, the incredible fucked-upedness of industrial human society is surely a testament in progress of how well that hierarchy shit works.
Well, I could go on for days about this one but I’ll spare ya the heartache.
In closing, in case you haven’t had your wtf pudding today…
Act I : The CoV Thing
Act II : Empty Shelves
Act III: Pando Number Two Goes Number Two
Act IV: sorry, it’s only a three-act play
~toktomi~
Even apes have social hierarchy. It’s a natural human instinct and behavior.
“The truth is, it [hierarchy] is absolutely required if you expect to live in a well-run society…”
This is complete bullshit – the only people who spout this conservative nonsense are those at the top of the food chain.
Hierarchies are there to be torn down – and the more that are the merrier. Viva la revolución!
Until you lefties take charge. Then a hard and fast hierarchy is established, nearly impenetrable, “where some people are more equal than others”, so well described in Orwell’s Animal Farm, and so well illustrated in Venezuela and Cuba (where the Castro family has a net worth of about $5 billion, and a Castro grandson cruises the world on a luxury yacht)
Brh
Indeed.
There is no such thing as a truly non-hierarchical organization, much less society. Whether that hierarchy is visible or invisible, it exists and the members of the group fall in line as needed.
Marlin
What Orwell describes is the Russian version of communism which was actually State Capitalism.
“…where some people are more equal than others” sure looks a lot more like the USA of today than anything else since.
Bullshit Cargill! You tear down the hierarchies you don’t agree with on the one hand while establishing your own hierarchy on the other through attempting to impose your godless totalitarian state on us all.
Nightowl is right — “there is no such thing as a truly non-hierarchical organization (or society)”. There must always be an elite or managerial class to keep the trains running on time…
Likewise about guns. The Left has no problem with guns – they just don’t like the idea of the People having them.
I love the birds eye view. The buildings stand out with confidence and strength against a serene, rural landscape. And yet at the same time those same buildings complement and or complemented by the landscape. Order and revered authority. It seems that a society cannot be confident and strong without both. And what could be more humane than a place and a role for everyone? We aren’t that advanced and humane now it seems.
He is Risen and gives life to those in the tombs, be they in the ground or ambulatory. We are dead compared to what we shall be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4A5ep5KGng&list=RDj4A5ep5KGng&start_radio=1
In other words, Happy Easter!
Happy Easter to you too and thank you! This is the Best News of all. For He will cast death and hell into the lake of fire so they are never more. I’m thankful for the reminder.
Not related to hospitals or buildings, but shale oil is one thing you often talk about, and…
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-twitter/troll-no-more-energy-twitter-groups-big-short-on-shale-comes-good-idUSKCN21W0E7
That building has a haunted, “ghosty” vibe to it?
Black people are really scared of ghosts, especially white ghosts.
Puck,
Ever been called “Casper”?
That’s why the Klan wore white sheets. One early Klansman terrified Blacks by seeming to drink an entire gourd of water saying “I haven’t had a drop to drink since the battle of Shiloh.” In other words, not just any ghosts, but those of Confederate Soldiers.
And snakes! Any and all attempts to get them interested in hiking and camping will Fail!
For comrade Cargill:
Secularism is not atheism at all. Secularism recognises that that there are organised religions and people who are religious, however secularism – in preserving freedoms and an open society – is all about ensuring that the institutions and laws of the state are separate from and superior to those of any religions. ”
The state should be separate from ORGANIZED religion I agree but its laws and institutions are not superior to the teachings of Jesus (or the Buddha for that matter). The laws of the secular state are naturally transcended by those individuals who live Christ-like or Buddha-like lives…
“Freedom from religion is one of the most important freedoms that can exist. If you disagree, perhaps go and live under the Taliban, or under the mullahs in Iran, and caliphates elsewhere.”
Interesting how you bring up the Taliban when speaking of religion. The Taliban are not ‘religious’, they are terrorists…
“We’ve covered this previously, pretty well. The Modern Synthesis – the beautiful marriage between Darwinism and genetic science leads to the scientific facts of evolution.”
There is no ‘ beautiful marriage between Darwinism and genetic science ‘ . The secular scientist begins with the unproven assumption that God doesn’t exist and then tries to explain the origin of life without reference to ‘Him’. However the secular scientist’s theory concerning the origin of life is just that, a theory and nothing more. Anyone who wasn’t blinded with an anti-god bias and had a lick of common sense realizes intuitively the unbelievable complexity of the earth’s biosphere with its welter of living things COULD NEVER HAVE EVOLVED RANDOMLY. When will you get this through your thick head?
“why don’t all you happy-clapping evangelistas form your own little chatroom somewhere? It is necessary to clog a forum about architecture, design, resource depletion, landscape, history, and politics, with all this stuff?”
A. I am not an evangelical. You like to assume all religionists are evangelicals because their colorful antics make religion look bad. Personally I don’t hold with most of the dogmas of institutionalized Christianity…
B. Hypocrite! How many of your posts are about architecture, design, resource management, etc? You spend most of your time attacking others in an insolent and haughty manner because they don’t support your drive to establish a godless totalitarian state.
Note for you and Sophia. None of the Mystical Traditions accept evolution in any form. They say men fell from a higher position, from a subtle state to a grosser one, thus the Fall of Man or the Myth of the different Ages, going from gold to our current one, that of iron.
A few unusual mystics like Aurobindo accept it and try to understand it. The rest just reject it. In any case, even they accept a prior involution. Where could the higher come from if it wasn’t already “implicit”?
The difference between them and the Traditionalists is that their involution isn’t personal or the result of sin. It’s simply a cosmic process. One Indian Sufi had an interesting position that somewhat reconciles the two: Souls chose to involute or fall in order that they could rise even higher in the end, there being a cosmic energy (kundalini) that can only be attained in the physical worlds. Not a sin in other words, but a choice that entails cosmic suffering of long duration.
Janos,
A big topic I have been thinking a lot about. What was the fall. Although I lean toward it having been catastrophic, it may very well be that on a deeper level is was planned for that very reason.
I must have signed up for that…
Aurobindo claimed to be ‘fighting Hitler [via meditation?] in the 30s
or 40s….did he also fight Stalin?
Sunburst,
Personally, I think feeding trolls or computer programs are a waste.
What do you mean Sophia?
I mean that it is a waste of your energies to try to get anything through to Cargill.
We may have really Screwed-the-Pooch with Neoliberalism and Globalism just to exploit the cheap third world labor? Now, would you order an Uber Eats food delivery knowing that the food was cooked and delivered by some illegal (or legal) third world migrants living in small urban one room apartments shared with 10 other people without masks? The formerly desirable cheap, compliant workers are now walking virus bo…mbs….
Anyone who looks at the current American political landscape with an objective eye can not help but ascertain the Left is desperately striving to impose its ideal of the godless totalitarian state upon the country, while the right is just as desperate to safeguard our basic rights (freedom of speech, assembly, religion, etc.) as guaranteed by the Constitution…
Anyone with an objective eye who reads through all of your thin gruel realizes you are a weak minded self-deluded tool with barely any understanding of the full content and purpose of the US contitution.
Are you Lefties EVER going to put a thought together without name calling or Anti-Trump rhetoric in it. Talk about being single minded.
Question for all three of you, if there was no Trump, what would you have to bitch about?
If being against what you three espouse is being pro-Trump, bring it on in November.
John AZ,
There is a war on, it is the very one SBS just mentioned, as we and the lefties re foot soldiers. Much of it is an information war, thus the left’s recent activities on censorship.
We know for what we fight, but they carry water for those whom they know not. They do not even know that they carry water, for that matter.
They think they are expressing their own opinions.
It’s quite funny, really.
the godless totalitarian state – sunburst
==============
Just once, sunburst, try not thinking of the word godless in a pejorative sense. I’m kinda godless and I haven’t murdered anyone in, I don’t know, YEARS. 🙂
BUT it is a pejorative so deal with it.
Try and think of it as a Godless badge of honor.
How can I do that Q? Seriously. In my world view our collective disconnect from the Original Source and Center (fancy phrase for God) is the source of all of our problems. I don’t mean to infringe on anyone’s rights as far as being ‘godless’ goes, especially when they are not flagrantly arrogant about it, but how can I keep silent on an issue of such critical importance (to me at least)…
“Hierarchy must be fit to scale to function successfully. In small institutions like this, everybody knows who is responsible for what. That’s what makes authority credible.”
NO Sir.
THAT is NOT what makes authority CREDIBLE.
In small groups, where it is possible for those in the group to observe for themselves the behavior and performance of those who hold positions of authority over them, the actions of that person(s) in a position of authority may be rationally evaluated by the group members, if such members are capable and motivated to do so.
However, the situation changes dramatically when the “group” is enlarged well beyond the size which permit such first hand experience and evaluation.
Once the group is enlarged to a size which makes that “first hand experience” no longer possible, the group must rely on other forms of information to assist them in making such evaluations.
And in our “modern” society, the MSM has been used to not only report the “facts”, but to shape opinion.
With only 6 MEGA corporations owning more then 98% of the MSM, we are approaching a time which Eric Blair forecast in his novel, 1984.
And the goy being what they are, will march together towards their annihilation.
Ah, we have another Knower among us. Welcome.
The Media should have been broken up via anti-trust laws decades ago. Any attempt to stop it should have been dealt with via the Rico Act. Now we’re too far gone to even use such measures as the FBI has gone over to the dark side. And any politician who votes for such measures would lose the next election, if he survived that long that is.
You can thank Bill Clinton for it.
Sleek,
It seems to me you did not comprehend the very sentence you quoted.
And will the Jews then resist?
Eric Blair???
Turns out that the Corona Virus really was created in a lab in China. It was during a drunken New Years Eve party that got a little out of hand. Apparently there were a few of the older scientists who were bragging about their creation of communicable diseases, such as Ebola, and Kennel Cough. They were lording it over some of the new hires, who really hadn’t come up with anything on their own.
After some drunken arguing, and placing of bets, they all went down to the Level Four containment lab, and the new guys proceeded to whip up a batch of what came to be called Covid 19. When everybody came back to work that next Monday, they were a little embarrassed and hushed everything up, but it was too late, the virus had gotten loose and was, as the Canadians say: “Oot and aboot”. Unfortunately, one of the new lab guys had a copy of the virus in his pocket, and when he went shopping, the vial fell out, with some unfortunate results.
Do you have a credible source for this theory?
The National Enquirer, it’s not like all of those other fake newspapers.
I saw that story in the ‘Weekly World News’. Sadly the print edition has ceased publication. But it is available on-line! Batboy still lives, and Kim Kardashian is having Bigfoot’s baby.
I recently learned a popular singer from the 60s was a main contributor and roving editor for WWN. Gale Garnett or Barry McGuire I think. I forget which.
Brh
It was Rick Derringer of “Hang on Sloopy” fame.
-brh
Do you have a credible source for this theory?
So you really don’t believe the world’s wealthiest people could have initiated the pandemic? Strange since many support depopulating the planet. Once you have billions upon billions and also literal wealth in land, etc., you will probably be ok in an economic collapse. The Elite have been preparing for years and years. Remember all the various stories over the years about the posh bunkers and getaways being built by the uber wealthy in far flung places just for this sort of thing? It’s the majority of people living pay check to pay check that will suffer most from the shutdown. And that is exactly who the Elite want to die. According to certain theories.
It was a joke, SSL. Curiously, there is almost always somebody who will believe what you say regardless of how outlandish you make it. Look at the history of the founding of the Mormons or read up on the beginnings of Scientology, it’s no wonder that we wind up in so much trouble. Having said that, however, I was surprised to read the other day that Jim Henson was only dead for ten minutes, before Kermit the frog started eating him.
What’s long and green and smells like a pig’s asshole?
Kermit the Frog’s finger…
It was a joke, SSL. Curiously, there is almost always somebody who will believe what you say regardless of how outlandish you make it.
Sadly your joke wasn’t as outlandish as 90% of the nut-fudge conspiracy nuttery that is spouted on here by the Gang of Four (they know who they are). LOL.
“Remember all the various stories…”
SSL,
Stories? STORIES!? What about history? Books? Even famous ones, some of which don’t even have pictures….
“…It was the best of times…it was the worst of times….”
Why would the rich upset the apple cart and put themselves at risk? They have it all now. Only the truly ignorant would take a chance on survival during the obvious dystopia they could generate, but not control.
If I were a billionaire, I would want everyone else to be sated, fat and happy.
Happy Passover!
Why are Trump, Bernie, Biden, and Pelosi work’n during Passover?!
Happy Passover! I hope that the Angel-of-Death passes you by….
Captain Kirk, who is a Canadian J..ew, used to celebrate Passover, which Mr. Spock mocked by eating pulled pork BBQ sandwiches with a glass of milk in front of Captain Kirk during Passover.
hahaha aaaah ha ha
I especially like the glass of milk part.
This Je…wish woman, Melissa Reubel Jacobson, was kind enough to share her delicious BBQ pulled pork sandwich recipe for Passover.
https://www.google.com.hk/amp/s/www.foodandwine.com/recipes/slow-cooker-barbecued-pulled-pork%3famp=true
A Je…wish Prepper would be a bloke wearing camouflage who chews tobacco and who stockpiles his bunker with Kosher survival food, right?
A Mus…lim Prepper would stockpile his bunker with Halal food?
Do you remember the stories about how the US Army mess halls in Iraq always made a point of serving the US soldiers a lot of bacon and pork? I thought that this was a bit weird. I guess that the Pentagon was worried about the US kids converting to Is…Lam?
Look at meat prices pork is almost always the cheapest.
Except meat candy called bacon!
A sharped piece of bacon can be used as a knife some say.
I think you have confused the fastest way to a mans heart is through his stomach with what you said.
I once ate bbq lamb in a big Mus..lim restaurant in China. The Mus…lim men dine at tables separate from the women. The Separation of the sexes seems to avoid a lot of troublesome mischief in the society and cuts down on the social anxiety and chaos. The Mus..lim women in China cover their hair and their legs, but not their faces in contrast to the A-rabs who basically just throw a big sheet over their women and then poke a hole in the top for the woman to breathe out of.
“A-rabs who basically just throw a big sheet over their women and then poke a hole in the top for the woman to breathe out of.”
Puck,
The sheet-with-a-hole-in-it seems to be common to the Middle-East.
Ely, I know that across the pond you modern Greeks prefer sheep-with-a-hole-in-it, but that’s just gross.
Good news lies ahead.
When Trump inevitably prematurely announces it is safe the clutter the streets again with people there will be an urgent need for guinea pigs to find out how astute his judgement is.
MAGAts and bible thumpers will be the first to heed his call. Like the first wave of infantry leaving the trenches attempting to overrun the entrenched huns with their well supplied rapid fire weapons.
https://youtu.be/bkMwvmJLnc0
Luckily Evelyn, Trump has put Jared Kushner and Mike Pence on it, so if you get the OK, you can rush right out there. Jared has a track record of having solved the Opioid crisis, he sorted out the problems in the Middle East, and once he’s stopped this pandemic, he’s gonna put us all back to work. Problem solved. I’ll bet Trump would put him in charge of solving climate change too, if it wasn’t so fake.
nepotism always leaves a bad taste.
I am going to use your technique. You are full of s**t!
“You are full of salt”. Not really that full, the average human body has about 200 grams of salt, about 40 tsp. By the way, the average human skin weighs about 9 lbs.
MAGAts and bible thumpers will be the first to heed his call.
If MAGAs, bible-thumpers, and Republican voters get bumped off in goodly numbers – taking one for the team – the average IQ of Murricans should shoot up quite a bit. LOL.
Not as high as your IQ however.
You showed up on campus in 1970, a freshman wet behind the ears but knowing more than your senior professors. Or so you say.
This is a small clip from a newspaper article this morning. Writer is a farmer and agri-biz author. I wonder if his comment about ‘supply chains’ changing will come to pass after this crisis. (Domestic Food Security versus North American or Pan American food security). It references Canada, but would of course have a similar application in the USA.
Many farms in British Columbia and Ontario and elsewhere in Canada are set up to be dependent on temporary foreign workers. According to a Financial Post article published last week, the 14-day isolation measures surrounding COVID-19 have affected the ready-to-work dates of at least some of the 60,000 temporary foreign workers on which Canadian farms rely.
Agriculture has become a market that rewards and services high-volume and international orders. A bulk vessel may travel overseas to a Canadian port and the customer may be a Canadian company, but that doesn’t mean all of that product is destined to stay in the country. The marketplace hasn’t needed to properly distinguish domestic food security from, say, North American or Pan American food security. That will likely change.
I was asked by a podcast host a few weeks ago if I thought there’d be an increase in farmers growing vegetables and other non-commodity plants because of this pandemic. I predicted no. I don’t know if that’s true, though. Take the 15-acre field in front my house. If I decided to grow vegetables on it, how would I do that? It’s the direction my thoughts bend these days.
Smithfield Foods closed one of their meat processing plants today, in SDakota. Apparently this one plant provides 5% of the meat consumed in the entire US.
One of those food warehouses that provides logistics for area restaurants is boxing up food and making home deliveries out here in the burbs. Not prepared meals, but dairy, frozen meats, fresh vegetables etc. So I ordered a sh#tload not knowing what to expect. I’m happy to report they arrived on time and delivered just what we ordered. People are self organizing, finding their own ways to get what they need. And some will be making money out of this disaster.
And this is a strange lockdown. Still have hot water and plenty to eat. Lights are on. Wife is on phone talking to relatives in Spain, Nevada, Cannes, Barritz, Sweden, Barcelona, Bilbao and Laredo (all of whom are in lockdowns too) Women seem to have taken charge now that most activity is home centered, haha. As for me I don’t mind living like this at all as it reminds me of the way we lived when I was a kid, finding stuff to to around the house and neighborhood, living local. Getting a lot of stuff done around the property too.
Brh
How many acres you got Brh?
3
This was the apple orchard high ground of a 600 acre farm that was in the same family 1656-1956. A few apple trees left, but mostly sugar maples and oaks now. I lucked out getting this place, was in the right place at the right time.
I lucked out on just about everything my whole life.
Brh
Good things come to good people…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0tivnr2GS0
Question?
My Ipad has developed the jitters while viewing CFN. It is jumping in both the x direction and the Y. It is unreadable. The cursors are jumping too.
Any body ever seen this? Solutions?
Computer works fine.
Probably the ads causing the issue.
Get an ad blocker or stop using safari use chrome, opera, or firefox
Also what IOS you on if your on one of the sierra’s upgrade to at least Mojave.
got an ad blocker and chrome still jittering, noticed it is changing fonts too. small and large.
Only JHK too.
Then look at the IOS as suspect.
I would also consider downloading and installing of the free anti-virus software out there.
Might be viral or worse someone has a backdoor on that ipad.
My I pad is doing the same thing, JAZ. If you figure it out, let me know.
Yes, same issue – and only on CFN. Other sites, not an issue. K-Dog may have a theory as to why it might be so specific?
There is a lot of flea infestation going around these days. The capacity of the system is being tested. Scratching and itching is to be expected.
We control the vertical. We control the horizontal. We can put things into a sharp focus or a soft blur.
Most people prefer the blur.
Janos AKA Rod Serling
Beware the early blur.
JAZ, I’m using the iPad Air with no issues. Safari on iPad OS 13.4.1 w AdGuard.
This is weird.
Per benr suggestions. I put an ad blocker on, no change. Then I tried to use chrome no change. Then I checked for updates, it told me I was up to date. Then I put in a norton anti-virus and it told me I needed an update, so I did the update. So I tried it, no change. So then I noticed that is is changing fonts from very large to tiny over and over. I noticed on the entry line on Safari was a font setter set at 100%. So what the heck, I set it at 85%. The site started working sorta. Not flickering, but extremely slow. And chrome is still flickering. My cell phone and computer both work normally. And it stops periodically, just stops, cannot input, cannot read beyond certain limits where it goes blank.
1/ Go to AdBlocker settings and make sure all the filters are turned on. You’ll see enabled filters, go to each category and turn them all on. You’ll see the count to confirm this. Eg: Enabled filters 4/4 etc.
2/ Go to General setting app and then the Safari section and then to content lockers and make sure all 6 are turned on.
3/ Again at General setting app and the Safari section make sure Request Desktop Website is turned on.
content blockers
Do you remember the black American bloke in the Hong Kong bar who gave the Filipina strippers $1 dollar tips? The first girl got all excited until she realized that the bill was just $1 dollar. He gave each girl US$1 dollar. At least, he was “fair”. This is about the way that I feel about the one-time $1,200 emergency stimulus payment. And, Hell, I don’t even qualify for the measly $1,200 bucks. What a Rip Off….
“I’ve never met an easy person.” – Rudi
JS: But some are more difficult than others…..
Joe Rudi, outfielder for the Oakland Athletics and Boston Red Sox?
Close. Swami Rudrananda of Qyeens, NY
a Jewish Homosexual who [presumably] warned Franklin Jones about Franks future.
I knew a rich Jew in NY who knew Rudi when Rudi went to Gurdjieff classes.
One story is that part of Rudis book was stolen by Frank and was put in Franks first book.
Albert Rudolph was born January 24, 1928, to impoverished Jewish parents in Brooklyn, New York.[2] His father abandoned the family when he was young.[3]
According to his autobiography, Rudolph’s first spiritual experience occurred at age 6 in a park. Two Tibetan Buddhist lamas appeared out of the air and stood before him. They told him they represented the heads of the “Red Hat” and “Yellow Hat” sects, and they were going to place within him the energy and wisdom of Tibetan Buddhism. Several clay jars appeared, which they said they would put inside his solar plexus. The lamas said these jars would stay in him and begin to open at age 31. He would then begin the process of assimilating their contents, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life.[4]
Rudi disavowed Jones and told his close disciples that he was dangerous. I’ve never heard anything bad about Rudi, have you?
He probably shouldn’t have become a Swami because he didn’t feel comfortable with the whole thing, and may not have not have kept his vows, etc. But he was still with Baba and that’s what Baba wanted. Broke with Muktananda after many years of tension and what he termed, subtle and gross abuse. Apparently the last straw was when he was in India for the dedication of a statue of Nityananda and it was done when he was absent – an act he considered one of calculated cruelty.
He said, I can’t have sex with anyone but I can get them off. Ridiculous. But that’s what happens if you get into things you shouldn’t get into and make vows you’re not serious about.
Amazing. 3 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adYqbucF8M4&feature=youtu.be
I took out a mortgage in 1988 or so and within 12 months the interest rate was something like 15 or 17 percent and my repayments had increased by a full 50%. – GA
===========
What the heck kind of mortgage is this? The rate varies as market interest rates fluctuate?
I bought a home in June 1978 and took out a 30-year mortgage at a fixed 9.25% interest. It was kind of unbearable paying all that interest but on the plus side, in those early months and years nearly ALL of a monthly payment was interest (hardly any was principal) and thus deductible on my taxes.
Not sure how things work in Scotland.
Eventually, mortgage rates came down and I was able to re-finance the mortgage.
Mort – death. gage – date. Thus a date with death.