JHK’s Three-Act Play
Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won — for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).
The chain stores won not only because they flung money around — sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials — but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. “We Want Bargain Shopping” was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn’t that a bargain, though?
Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.
The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn’t groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the “warehouse on wheels” distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.
Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can’t print their own money, and they can’t bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.
The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.
What we’re on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It’s already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.
The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people’s place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won’t be a bargain.
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This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
New Paintings from the 2022 Season
Barrel Racers, Cambridge, NY
The Jeff Greenaway series of novellas. These rollicking, short books depict the misadventures of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in New York City in the early 1960s
Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:
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Not to worry Jim. Between high fast foods,high fructose corn syrup and cable TV, America is too dumbed down to realize what is going on. The nation of useless eaters: http://youtu.be/TUYza-FLaMY
We’re already seeing the “implosion” in this “jobless recovery,” when people have lost jobs that are gone forever and not coming back. Same for the business that grew on the scene after WW2 like slime mold after a rainy season. Each “recovery” is just a leveling off after taking another step down the stairs to economic collapse.
Visit the Leibowitz Society at http://leibowitzsociety.blogspot.com/2013/02/upslope.html for more information and commentary relating to our coming collapse and new Dark Age.
Implosion is a nice word, James… what about RAPE?
Just inordinately sad. From our destroyed Gulf Coast, we are in complete agreement Cousin Jim.
The bulk of U.S. consumers may not realize that the ongoing economic decline is threatening Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart is starting to get worried that its customers are already getting squeezed. They’re mostly sounding the warning in the context of the fiscal bluff in Washington leading to a new recession, but they do see bad times coming. That’s not the only threat to Wal-Mart’s spread in the U.S. Local communities have been organizing to keep Wal-Mart out. They’ve had enough of the “High Cost of Low Price.”
It’s been a while since I’ve written about Wal-Mart over at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News. I guess that’s because, while I blog about shopping more than most blogs on the subject of collapse, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. I’ll make up for it by posting something about the partisan politics of grocery shopping. Yes, there is such a thing.
As for the big story this past week, it’s been the space-object double feature of a predicted fly by of an asteroid preceded by the surprise explosion of a large meteor over Russia (In Russia, space explores you!). There are more ways for civilization to end than resource depletion and pollution, and an asteroid impact is one of them. Just in case modern technological civilization does survive the Long Emergency, preparing for such an event might be a good idea.
I’ve also been continuing my coverage of the science of sex and love, the ongoing skirmishes in the gas war (prices are rising and costumers are losing), and the Michigan Democratic Party’s leadership struggle. I’m going to the state convention on Saturday not only to vote, but to watch the drama. I expect every penny I spend on the event will be worth it!
Happy Motoring–for now–from Detroit!
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/
Oops, that should be “customers” not “costumers.” Once again, spell check has let me down!
Damned optimistic James; for my children’s sake I hope you’re even near right on these dreams of a smooth transition into the world made by hand. I just can’t see anything close to peaceful or smooth. Perhaps I spent too much time in Bosnia, the Middle East and Sarajevo where smooth and peaceful transitions don’t seem to occur, and people are the same everywhere, pretty much.
Kunstler you dick, you write as if we should all burst out into tears. Is there no middle ground between the hell you anticipate and the Heaven you have known? Look up and trust in Purgatory, ye mad prophet.
The fork in the road is different than the fork yr. eating with at the “Big Country Buffet”. The nourishment you require is different from the food you crave, and will not bring you to satiety even if you ate the whole goddam pan of chicken gravy-soaked biscuits and chicken-fried steak. As Tom Waits observed, it’s time to “Get Behind the Mule — and plough, boy. Get behind the mule and plough.
Nice timing JHK. From Bloomberg:
“Wal-Mart Stores Inc. had the worst sales start to a month in seven years as payroll-tax increases hit shoppers already battling a slow economy, according to internal e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-15/wal-mart-executives-sweat-slow-february-start-in-e-mails.html
The list for solar installs is a long one this year already, a very encouraging feeling despite the dismal times.
We’re going to start selling electric bikes this Spring too.
I keep seeing graphics of beautiful gardens in the front yards of homes with the slogan “Grow Food, Not Lawns” on the FaceBooks… I like that too.
Why no mention of the 40,000+ Climate Rally in DC yesterday?
Cheers Clusterfuckers!
PUSH ON. DO GOOD. KEEP SMILING.
Great post, JHK
Glad to be home today to read and respond for a change.
Yes, this speaks to the idea of globalism, that tradeoff of cheap electronic goods at the expense of American manufacturing.
Yep, we sold our souls to the devil, but had no idea what the price would be. Somehow we never ask, yeah, but what do we lose in exchange? Why do we forget that there are no free lunches?
Today we find ourselves in a strange economic reality where luxury electronic goods are relatively cheap and the necessities of life are getting more and more expensive.
You have to pay a fortune today to eat, or pay for medical insurance. An overly expensive medical industry for profit. Don’t get me started with dental costs. And don’t get me started with privatized prisons in the war against drugs. Meanwhile the double standard continues as we find our TBTF banks can do money laundering in the drug trad and get a slap on the wrists.
I look forward to seeing this implosion happen from the sidelines—I would certainly hit a bag of Cheese Doodles if only I liked junk food.
They might get smaller and die, but first they’re going to get bigger cannibalizing each others’ remains. Look at Amrican Airlines finally gobbling up U.S. Airways. It looks bigger at first, but when it sacks workers and cancels routes (especially to smaller cities) soon there will be an airline that’s 1.2 or so times the size of the 2 it used to be.
Here in Canada, Zeller’s was a chain that used to be like a Canuck K-Mart. It’s been bought by Target, as that corporation’s way into this country, but I expect many of the remaining stores to be downsized. And what OF K-Mart? Acquired by Sears, now they’re sinking together. As is Sears in Canada, and its local “everything for everyone” equivalent, “The Bay” i.e. the descendant of The Hudson’s Bay Corporation. All dwindling in the face of Internet sales and the fact that everyone who has enough money to afford anything has all the cheap plastic Chinese crap they need.
I predict a big future for garage sales! Can I get some venture capitalists to start a corporation for those, and float an IPO for the Junk Sale Clearinghouse?
Brother Kunstler, you really nailed the reality of my Great Lakes small town. Wow.
“In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide.”
The few remaining family businesses that have held on in my town are well poised to thrive as the collapse continues. And I emphasize “few”.
djc
The myth of sustainability is wide.
So last night I go to Bartells Drug Store for Ms-Dog and while I’m there I notice a Magazine.
I bought the last copy.
And last week a new member of the lets cause a clusterefuck community arrived. An aspiring writer, Julian Curtis Lee.
The interesting thing is that Writers Digest has an interview with Jamie Lee Curtis of Hollywood fame. She writes Childrens Books. The lead in to the article on page 44 says she has been an acclaimed author for decades.
So Julian Curtis Lee and Jamie Lee Curtis. Hmmmmmmmm could there be a connection?
Is it just me or is there something strange about this place. The geometry just doesn’t seem quite right sometimes.
Page 8 is about writing from the perspective of a teen age character. The lead in says: “Here’s how to keep it real.”
I think I’ll find it interesting reading. I might even start grading clusterfuck comments when the endless writhing bacchanale of aimless chanting begins. On a pad of paper for my own amusement, not here. I’m back next week maybe.
I’ve only glanced at the magazine as I desired to finish a book I’ve been reading. I noticed the advice on one page of the magazine flipping through said read a lot and suggested three books a week. I can’t agree. I just finished “The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad, written 106 years ago. It builds to a very exciting conclusion. While parallels to our time are very relevant the book must be read slowly to capture the emotional state of the characters. Reading a book like this only to develop style and for no other purpose would be grotesque. Took me a few days for this one.
This implosion of long distance retail is, along with housing prices, what the new immigration legislation is intended to prevent. What the boxes sell is the illusion of middle class prosperity. Most working class folks I know, black and white alike, have long since given up on pretending to look and act richer than they are, but the notion that stuff can confer respectability is still believed in immigrant communities.
Reestablishing local retail can happen only after restablishment of domestic manufacturing and local supply chains. This is a lot more complicated than reestablishing localized farming, which, remember, is under serious legal threat in many places. AG Holder conducted hearings across the farming areas of the country, many of which he attended himself, to look into consolidation of agribiz and seed companies. The DOJ did in fact prepare an anti-trust suit against some of the biggest ag companies AND THEN those companies paid for stooges in Congress stepped in and stopped the suit.
Part of the problem with reestablishing local retail is high housing, utility and insurance costs. This is why seamstresses and tailors, whose skills and efficiency are frequently far ahead of the skills of the wage slaves working in overseas sweatshops, can’t make enough money to cover their living expenses, in spite of the excellence of their work. Skilled woodworkers. weavers, iron workers, etc., are cought in the same bind.
I remember in the CA central valley town where I used to live, that every downtown block had storefronts empty. The out of town owners preferred to keep them empty rather than accept any less than the tousands per month rent they had been charging.
Maybe you, Mr, Kunstler, with your standing as an eminent author, might want to inspire and organize a local group which could pressure local governing councils to seize vacant commercial properties and make the properties available to local folks of good character with good business plans in return for reasonable rents, commitment to local hiring and compliance with local environmental regs., revenue to go directly into the city or county treasury, not to be used to hire yet another specimen of overpaid and nonproductive sellfone babbler/keebord tapper.
I am enjoying the weeekly Kunstler Cast once again. You are doing a terrific job with the technical stuff. I sounds Real Good and I certainly do not misss your youthful sidekick Crary.
John Michael Greer seemed like quite a pompous fellow during the cast. Especially annoying were his uh huhs’ after each of your sentences like your thoughts met with his approval.
Maybe because I just finished my copy of Too MUCH MAGIC the day before (excellent update/follow-up) and I tend, for better-or-worse to agree with your factual and sometimes blunt (I especially Like that)appraisal of the landscape and future, I felt compelled to click the interview off completely when Greer said he ‘didn’t do cars – at all’ or was it when he said he believed it would take longer than 20 years to wind down the current idiocy we find ourselves surrounded by.
Anyone that truly believes that has No Idea how Fragile and un-resilient a time and place we are in and doesn’t deserve any more of my attention.
Blankfein just needs to have the cappuchino machine go on-the-fritz or one of the various Grandpa money-junkies to miss a vacation (or free money) for all manner of Bad Things to begin.
20 years to unwind ? How about 20 minutes of Wall Street implosion to push Joe & Jane Nascar towards starvation, destitution and finaly immolation. . .
Thanks again for the Kast. Polite and respectful, more realistic guests would be Great !
One More Thing. Fuck Wal-Mart.
Perhaps even you are subject to the irony of trinkets available on this very web site. We are all part of the scam until its over.
Even my nearby upscale town of Boulder is subject to the lure of Wal Mart in that they now apparently moving into Boulder. It is just one of their so called neighborhood stores. But still.
There is a route that our family used to take from Oklahoma City to Colorado in the summers. Those small towns were destroyed decades ago by Wal Mart. Some would argue that they were doomed regardless as they always had very little to offer.
Frankly, I don’t see the demise of WM anytime soon. Five dollar a gallon diesel won’t be sufficient.
I live in a town that has avoided the big box stores although it does have some of the usual chains. But even the truly local businesses get all their goods from China. So at the end of the day, what is the solution to the “China” problem. I don’t see locals willing to pay much of a premium for more locally produced goods even if they were available.
I would like to know what are the tremendous opportunities for local young people. So, probably, would they. Please spell it out. Because there a lot of young people around here with either low paying service jobs or not jobs that would like to know what their opportunities are.
Sorry James, It will be a slowww grinding trend downward. I’ll bet on cheap semi-slave labor in China and other desperate worker populations, efficient container ships running for the next 20+ years (even at $10 diesel), and Americans addictions to cheese doodles and TV more than your perpetual wishful obsession with small town revival.
Enjoy your writing though–very entertaining.
I regret to report that ‘Dollar Store’ is currently building a 1 million sq.ft. distribution warehouse outside Bradley Airport in Windsor, CT. It is being built with funds provided by our (bankrupt) State Govt., in an ‘economic stimulus’ program, on some of the choicest farmland on the east coast.
And the big box booksellers: Borders went belly up last year after being a dead man walking for at lest the two previous years. 500-some stores, gone. Barnes & Noble reported a terrible holiday season, sales-wise, and announced it’s going to begin closing stores. They say a few every year, but I bet it ends up being more, much more, and quicker.
What will replace these? Will higher fuel costs for shipping kill the bargain online book sellers that will compete with the few remaining independent new book sellers? I predict local, independent USED BOOK stores will flourish.
I grew up in a small town-125 population and it was nothing like Jim’s fantasy town. I remember low wages, hard work and high prices. I remember a town dominated by a local family driving very nice cars and living in very nice houses. I remember a mix of people ie successful, drunks, chasers, mentally ill, etc. Just like today.
Most of all I remember my dad, working at the lumber yard, hurting his back and unable to work. He was unable to draw Workman’s Comp for some reason so things got very poor. Years later we learned the lumber yard owner would simply throw away any requests re dad’s injury on the job. I grew up associating with the “poor folks”.
I understand it’s wonderful to bury ourselves in nostalgia when things aren’t as we like. I see the flaws of Walmart but I haven’t the memories of the “good old days” when we all cared about each other, looked after each other and the world was filled with “nice”. Small towns are/were just a smaller version of today. Same people, same crap.
JHK sez:
“But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless.”
Meestair Jeem (said the Pakistani bellhop looking for a tip),
Aye, right there be the rub!
Do the lumpen-youngfolk realize they’ve been living in a de facto fascist system for all their comfortable little lives? …Will they awaken in time to determine their own futures, or will they flock to follow powerful frauds of the totalitarian bent who promise a continuation of comforts, video games and cheezy snacks? (Following the “necessary” orgy of blood, drained from the “other”, of course.)
Every time I read Jimbo bragging about his village home, I get a chuckle thinking about how he DOESN’T make his living there. And what about Amazon and online shopping. I see this eventually ousting the big boxes with potentially unlimited choice and scale pricing i.e. low.
If big box goes, doesn’t that just mean there are many things that just won’t be available anymore, as there is no local manufacturing capacity, and if there were, the loss of scale would surely make many things prohibitively expensive?
And as for the $5/gal death knell of moved goods: it is happening here in southern California, where the “local” (60 miles from San Diego) mountain communities are starting to fade: their local businesses don’t get the customer flow and suddenly there is no way to afford living there; on some streets, most of the houses are for sale. And there are million dollar homes out there; all gonna be worthless as these places become a ghost towns…
Makes one wonder about WHERE the “World Made by Hand” will be…
A child’s car seat? I live in the town that never wakes up. The local businesses in a town of approximately 6000, the hub of the county, as the local business groups like to phrase it. Not a single store in the entire town has a child’s car seat. If you want one you need to drive 40 miles to the big boxes. What local economy? Merchants here are barely able to make commerce here profitable, in the town that never wakes up, worth having anything except the basic necessities available. It is a good thing we have clean water here or it would be a ghost town. It is enough to make a wood worker like me look forward to, “A World Made by Hand”!
The problem is that while the current form of economic organization is unsustainable, a more local and sustainable economy will only be able to support a small fraction of the current human population.
What a grand and wondrous scheme!
I’m certain “growth” will follow in short order, providing solid upper-middle-class salaries faaaar into the shiny future.
Long live wishful thinking!
;o)
It seems a lot of folks recognize the value of small-scale Main Street commercial and community-building enterprise. Here in Northeast Minneapolis, the Central Avenue business district has been struggling for decades, since the streetcar lines were scuttled in favor of a Central Suburban Speedway. The main intersection has had a vacant corner for nearly a decade, since a none-too-solid building burned.
But in the past year, a group of Nordeasters has organized an “investment co-op” to pool money to buy/renovate/incubate unoccupied properties. (See neic.coop.) It’s now partnering with an established bike shop on project 1. And while many can’t afford to put money into it, interest and moral support seem high, and other groups elsewhere are studying this model. I see paying work and purpose in such projects for young folks.
The big boxes have always been doomed. From their beginning. It is a matter of science. “Two things can’t occupy the same space at the same time.” “Growth” in anything can’t continue forever. Sooner or later you run out of room. Or stuff like oil, water, iron, copper, etc. The big boxes depend on Mass markets, mass production, mass distribution, and massive growing populations. Those factors can’t be sustained. It is not because of politics, monetary systems, governmental structures, cultures, or what ever. It is because of the absolute limits of growth. It is such a simple concept that one wonders why so few individuals seem to be aware of it. Many of the “Prius people” and other like-minded individuals don’t seem to get it either. For example, driving a Prius to save money on fuel costs makes sense. But driving one for conservation reasons does not. “Conserving” gasoline by getting better mileage or driving less is a drop in the bucket. It simply delays the day of reckoning. Does it really matter in the long run, if the oil runs out in 2030 or not until 2032? It WILL run out. We will leave the “oil age” in the not too distant future. Our way of life is going to change drastically. There is nothing we can do to stop it. Depressing to think about? Yes. But, we must acknowledge it and start to deal with it.
Good blog, Jim.
Good to “see” you, K.
Howl on, howl on…
…..more like scales exploding, from all the stupid, lazy, fat ass pigs in this sorry excuse of western culture.
What has been interesting is that many of the proverbial offshored jobs, and the companies that made that happen, are reshoring or attempting to do so. Unfortunately while this all sounds wonderfully patriotic and pro-American, it will never happen at anything near former levels of activity. So don’t get too excited when the local GE factory opens its doors once again, they won’t be hiring you. I know that many of the workers I once slaved along beside in the Fortune 500 company world have long been involuntarily retired, laid off, gone by by anyway. With them, the skills, devotion to ‘the company’ and healthy local communities that supported said companies left town for good, too. The irreversible damage has been done and all the presty digitation of fake money in the world will not restore it.
When does the military implode? Surely it must, right? How could it possibly continue unabated with dwindling tax revenue to fuel its expansion? Once it implodes, what fills the power vacuum that is created, if anything? What does the village do with all those nuclear weapons left over from another era? What of all the nuclear power plants? They don’t fit with the concept of a world made by hand. If they’re decommissioned, it’s a long and arduous process to do it properly, otherwise the new villages will be swimming in radiation. Are the young ones up to the task? Or will they listen to the likes of Wanda and live a celibate life charting the stars and looking down their noses at the inferior races that they believe have destroyed the planet?
http://dotsub.com/view/8e40ebda-5966-4212-9b96-6abbce3c6577
An interesting thing has happened in my neck of the woods. A supermarket chain has been expanding into the area successfully. The big draw is that food prices are VERY low;the store is constantly mobbed.
I wondered how come the other supermarket chains didn’t lower their own prices. Then I learned that this company is non-union. Maybe this is a trend that will occur more and more.
While one could argue that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from American-born citizens, what about the very high prices the average person has to pay for food – prices they can barely afford, if at all?
In an economic contraction, lower prices are probably inevitable, maybe at the cost of union protection of workers. It seems that our economy is a zero sum game in which someone always loses and someone always wins. A long time ago it was a win-win situation.
Don’t mistake me for someone who wishes to prop up Big Boxes and the blight they have brought. I do wonder why a small-stores operation like Radio Shack can’t morph. It used to be a place to buy materials to build things and repair electronics–remember that?
Imagine Radio Shack as a distributor to locally owned business in the age of decline and contraction, given that most of our cheap electronics could be fixed with some ingenuity, a soldering iron, and some resistors.
I built a crappy little AM radio in the 1970s with parts from my local Radio Shack. It seems that the chain primarily sells radio-controlled cars and smart-phone accessories now. I’ve seen the stuff I recall from my days of tinkering, but the selection is scant. Who repairs old radios or builds their own computers?
I’d love to see that sort of hobbyist tinkering return some ingenuity to our use of machines.
As for Wal-Mart? Won’t be missed in any form.
Hey BTBill, long time no ‘see’. Good hear from you again. Hope everything is OK.
CD (your friend in CT)
Jim your descriptor: “phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy.” really only scratches the surface of the fiendish fraud perpetrated on a global scale on 99% of the people. It is time for a neologism, something that includes the viral, cancerous and hemorrhagic aspects of the economic and finance systems. CFNers, time to put on your thinking caps.
The argument that the global supply chain is too long, particularly when considering Wal-Mart, I think is not always correct. The Canadian model and experience of The Hudson’s Bay Company (over 300 years in business) has proved that a far-flung, monopoly merchandiser, does not have to be a cancer to civilization; can not only be a viable enterprise but also provide downright immense benefits to a neighborhood, society, nation and empire.
Wal-Mart differs in its basic philospohy: it has none other than the essential Hypercapitalism creed of the bottom line. With apologies to Vince Lombardy: Profit isn’t everything – it’s the ONLY thing.
As for anecdotal evidence from the golden shores of the evirons of Boca Raton, Fl. that we are approaching the inflection point in this mess, is the weekend’s dumpster diving find is a three-dimensional, signed and numbered lithograph of Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, Ca. by noted, recently deceased, California artist, Richard Danskin. It was in the garbage. Saved it from the landfill and took it home.
Even if Sears, K-Mart and Targets go under, there is still that other behemoth, Amazon. Walmart will probably stick around because they sell groceries. Personally I have never set foot in Walmart and never intend to. Young people are drowning themselves in debt due to college tuition skyrocketing when most of them ought to be researching what jobs need to be filled in the future. Read welding was a highly paid skill that no one is learning anymore. Also I don’t see nurses or doctors ever going without work. As long as people get sick, there will be a need nurses and doctors. Even China is suffering from a glut of over-educated college grads who have no jobs to fill.
Economic survival is all about learning useful skills that can be used directly (like gardening) or indirectly (traded for wages). The only thing that is really worrying me is the advent of 3-D printers which some anarchist types are using to make working plastic guns. Imagine a world where anybody can make unlimited numbers of guns without permits, without registration, without reprisal. 3-D printers are expensive but with a credit card stolen off the Internet, they are FREE. Currently its actually illegal to make or possess plastic guns (the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 signed into effect by Ronald Reagan) but that law is about to expire. The anarchists say it will even up the playing field when any mentally ill psycho can make guns.
Looking at the YouTube videos of these anarchists I notice that they are all young white men who are arrogant and over-confident. Wonder how those arrogant young anarchists would feel if it was the Black Panthers who started downloading their CAD files and made arsenals of unlimited plastic guns. We live in interesting times.
Here’s something a “likely young entrepreneur” might get up to if sufficiently awake (and while there is still some wherewithal to make it happen).
http://www.motherearthnews.com/do-it-yourself/solar-furnace-plans-zmaz74jazhol.aspx#axzz2LGbbLlAX
Let’s look at what we actually have. One of those things would be mountains of scrap metal. (Uh, shitheels? You might want to stop shipping all of that overseas.) We are going to need to smelt that into useful items. A possible avenue to the continuance of youman beans is boning up on “old” skills and proven technologies that are not necessarily dependent on fossil fuels and gi-normous scales. Population collapse is a forgone conclusion; the only thing in question is how that will come about. Pay close attention to the power-hungry puppets for clues.
You’re right about the merger. The assurance that American will maintain the combined airline’s network fully intact, presumably hubs and all, is preposterous.
Philadelphia’s city fathers must either be sweating bullets or getting ready to lay some serious graft down on the regulators right now, because there’s no way that the US Airways PHL hub won’t shrivel after the merger. Either it shrinks or the AA hub at Kennedy shrinks, and New York is a much bigger market. The two airports are close enough together and have good enough train connections that most claims of passenger hardship would be pathetic whining. This is especially true of the large volume of traffic at these airports that consists of leisure travelers who have a snit at the least interruption of their beach vacations in Florida or the Caribbean. In terms of air traffic control and on-time performance, cutting traffic volume would be a huge improvement, but Philadelphia’s politicians never think in such magnanimous terms. They’re far too parochial not to pull whatever shady tricks they can conjure up to stop the deal. Even if they don’t succeed, I’ll be surprised if they don’t try. They’d rather keep their airport overbooked.
Everytime I hear it,”The campaign to sustain the unsustainable” it just keeps ringing truer and clearer.
I agree completely with the previous poster (Eugene?) who remembers life in pre-big box, small town USA as being very,very different than that wished for by many.
My experience was the same. The town was run really by 2 or 3 families.They lived very large while others didn’t,unless they were employed in the newly emerging, often defence related industries. If something went wrong, extremely little or usually NOTHING was done about it. Concern for the customer? Please,you must be joking. We had little to no choice in where to shop, and they knew this.That is why we so willing took our business to the chain places when they came to town. They paid better wages. The local mom and pop places wouldn’t even hire you if they didn’t know AND like you. If something went wrong on the job, the experience Eugene had is what happened to others in our town. The local owner of a biz would just toss the paperwork out, or deny that anything went wrong.
Life was absolutely not a Norman Rockwell painting come to life!
In The Long Drawdown, I suspect the Walmarts will come in handy as human processing centers, something akin to a scene from Soylent Green. Ever notice how many check-out lines they have? More than they ever come close to using. Ever. And Walmart is not one to waste money, so why would they build unused capacity like this into every one of their stores? What is the purpose for all this excess capacity, if not for something foreseeable to which the rest of us are not privy, especially their current patrons.
An excellent movie that captures and reflects the essence and sentiment of your comments is The Chase starring Marlin Brando.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060232/reviews?ref_=tt_urv
Marlon, not Marlin. Not a name you run across too often. It’s Marlon like the fish, but with an o in lieu of the i.
Fuck Wal-Mart ! Roger that ! People need to wake up and start price checking anywhere they shop. You will be suprized at what you will find right under your nose.
I live in a very rural town of 157 people. The nearest Wal-Mart is 35 miles away and I gave up that habit when gasoline prices went over the $4 a gallon mark in 2008. Now I shop in a small town 10 miles up the road – small grocery store, small independent dry goods store and various other small businesses – as well as on line for the kinds of things not available there. The latter, however, will trend downward if postage continues to rise.
When my dishwasher broke I began washing dishes by hand. When the dryer died I began hanging clothes outdoors on the line. I have no intention of replacing these “convenience” appliances. My garden is bigger each year and I put away food by canning. I’m beginning to see others doing similar things.
Here in this community the first stage of The Long Emergency is an established fact.
The signs of destruction are becoming more widespread. Being a small business owner, I know what indirect costs can do to a business model with shrinking revenue. Just wait until the rats figure out the ship is sinking, they will grab what they can on the way out the door.
Hi Jim, BRAVO for encouraging our young folks to take the path of sole proprietor and “market maker”. Look what farmers markets and the micro-brew industry did for Downtowns over the last decade or so… In Providence two young women are breathing new life into the old jewelry industry that once thrived here -many start-ups in alternative energy, etc. Conscientious young people: take on the rapacious chain-store beasts -reject the petrol-chemical lifestyle… FREE enterprise from the treasonous blood suckers in Arkansas, Wall St., and Washington D.C.!!!
We should all burst into tears for the many wrong turns this nation has taken and continues to take.
-Phut
Not that it changes the final outcome of the merger; however, as I recall being surprised by the realities of, Sears did not buy out K-Mart as Bukko contends, in actuality K-Mart bought Sears. When it happened I recall assuming the same, that Sears bought K-Mart, but, upon closer inspection I discovered that K-Mart had been sitting upon vast quantities of real estate resources acquired back when she was King of cheap. K-Mart sold off much of this excess real estate and was sitting with a pot full of cash whilst Sears was emulating Montgomery Ward, via self immolation, apparently a deal too good to pass up. When I lived in Maryland (87-02) there existed a semi big box building supply retail outlet called Hechinger which went the way we can hope Wal-Mart proceeds. Apparently founded in 1911 she foundered in 1999 as a physical entity, likely because of the Home Depot and Lowes competition with somewhat larger stores.
Small town USA is not immune to similar frivolities, a local hardware and upscale clothing establishment more than 100 years in existence, with stores in several local villages, started to stumble and was scooped up by a local potential “White Knight” who owned various restaurants and similar retail businesses. He did so with the inevitable borrowed money and intended to capitalize on the prestige of the older establishments name by renaming all of the stores the same. These activities began about a year prior to the economic good times initiated in 2007/8. Nothing exists today with the exception of the inevitable litigation activities.
“But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies.”
For the time being what you are talking about is Mission Impossible. The business infrastructure/networks that supported Main St back in the day are as dead as the Dodo. It’s easy to say, “Hey, guys let’s rent an empty store front on Main St and go into business!”, but the reality is very different.
A NYT article reports on the recent Census numbers that shows a reverse immigration of young, working age people to urban areas. Coastal cities like New York, Boston and Philly will see there fortunes improve as fossil fuel get more dear. It’s the suburbs that are going to die….already are dying. A report from the Star Ledger: http://www.nj.com/bergen/index.ssf/2013/02/more_parents_choosing_new_york_city_over_bergen_county_data_shows.html#incart_river
I’ve never stepped foot inside a Walmart either, CCM. We do not have many in Los Angeles. I drove to Palm Springs this weekend. I saw one alongside the freeway in beautiful downtown West Covina. My first thought was “Oh fkkk, here they come”. Palm Springs was a guilty pleasure, paradise on Earth nature-wise, but despite all the hotels being booked solid there were a lot of empty shuttered storefronts. Gas was $4.59 a gallon, but when it hits $5 citywide forget it. I’ll stick to my bike.
Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack.
==========
Jim has a way of pulling out a couple of unusual words from his vast reservoir, or in this case odd sounding place names, that make me burst out laughing. Picking a town in Joisey doesn’t hurt either.
As usual, thanks for a well drafted piece, Jim. “Scale implosion” is a brilliant term to describe what’s happening out there now; I shall use it in future conversations-giving due credit to its originator, of course – as I’ve had a real hard time getting others to understand the manifestations of that very phenomenon. Some never will and instead hold on dearly to cherished, albeit outmoded ideas and institutions that will perish without recognizing the sea change of scale implosion will foist upon our lives.
Aren’t human beings just the best??????
If You See A Turtle In The Road, Run It Over!
Requires no explanation. The more interesting question, which is unanswerable, is what percentage of drivers whonoticed the turtle in the road tried to run it over.
CLEMSON, S.C. (AP) — Clemson University student Nathan Weaver set out to determine how to help turtles cross the road. He ended up getting a glimpse into the dark souls of some humans.
Weaver put a realistic rubber turtle in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and watched over the next hour as seven drivers swerved and deliberately ran over the animal. Several more apparently tried to hit it but missed.
“I’ve heard of people and from friends who knew people that ran over turtles. But to see it out here like this was a bit shocking,” said Weaver, a 22-year-old senior in Clemson’s School of Agricultural, Forest and Environmental Sciences.
To seasoned researchers, the practice wasn’t surprising.
The number of box turtles [image above] is in slow decline, and one big reason is that many wind up as roadkill while crossing the asphalt, a slow-and-steady trip that can take several minutes.
Sometimes humans feel a need to prove they are the dominant species on this planet by taking a two-ton metal vehicle and squishing a defenseless creature under the tires, said Hal Herzog, a Western Carolina University psychology professor.
“They aren’t thinking, really. It is not something people think about. It just seems fun at the time,” Herzog said. “It is the dark side of human nature.”
Herzog asked a class of about 110 students getting ready to take a final whether they had intentionally run over a turtle, or been in a car with someone who did. Thirty-four students raised their hands, about two-thirds of them male, said Herzog, author of a book about humans’ relationships with animals, called “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.”
The Obligatory Hope
Weaver, who became interested in animals and conservation through the Boy Scouts and TV’s “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, wants to figure out the best way to get turtles safely across the road and keep the population from dwindling further.
Among the possible solutions: turtle underpasses or an education campaign aimed at teenagers on why drivers shouldn’t mow turtles down.
The first time Weaver went out to collect data on turtles, he chose a spot down the road from a big apartment complex that caters to students. He counted 267 vehicles that passed by, seven of them intentionally hitting his rubber reptile.
He went back out about a week later, choosing a road in a more residential area. He followed the same procedure, putting the fake turtle in the middle of the lane, facing the far side of the road, as if it was early in its journey across. The second of the 50 cars to pass by that day swerved over the center line, its right tires pulverizing the plastic shell.
“Wow! That didn’t take long,” Weaver said.
Other cars during the hour missed the turtle. But right after his observation period was up, before Weaver could retrieve the model, another car moved to the right to hit the animal as he stood less than 20 feet away.
“One hit in 50 cars is pretty significant when you consider it might take a turtle 10 minutes to cross the road,” Weaver said.
Running over turtles even has a place in Southern lore.
In South Carolina author Pat Conroy’s semi-autobiographical novel “The Great Santini,” a fighter-pilot father squishes turtles during a late-night drive when he thinks his wife and kids are asleep. His wife confronts him, saying: “It takes a mighty brave man to run over turtles.”
The father denies it at first, then claims he hits them because they are a road hazard. “It’s my only sport when I’m traveling,” he says. “My only hobby.”
That hobby has been costly to turtles.
It takes a turtle seven or eight years to become mature enough to reproduce, and in that time, it might make several trips across the road to get from one pond to another, looking for food or a place to lay eggs. A female turtle that lives 50 years might lay over 100 eggs, but just two or three are likely to survive to reproduce, said Weaver’s professor, Rob Baldwin.
Snakes also get run over deliberately. Baldwin wishes that weren’t the case, but he understands, considering the widespread fear and loathing of snakes. But why anyone would want to run over turtles is a mystery to the professor.
“They seem so helpless and cute,” he said. “I want to stop and help them. My kids want to stop and help them. My wife will stop and help turtles no matter how much traffic there is on the road. I can’t understand the idea why you would swerve to hit something so helpless as a turtle.”
I hope you now fully understand my interest in exoplanets
Reminds me of stories about setting a turtle on a fence post. Stranding them until they dry out, starve, and die. Haw haw.
WTF is wrong with so many examples of the human species????
Some friends sent their son a few years ago to a christian summer camp. The kid loved animals and nature. The first day, some kids were catching frogs and killing them. He was really traumatized.
Was at Walmart looking for staples
Apears to have been ransacked
No ammo
Men’s clothes no sweatshirts few underwear
and socks Is it because of high transportation
or what? Store has looked like this after Christmas
The former diversified domestic manufacturing economy and decentralized distribution network was abandoned in favor of an offshored and centralized version. This system was more conducive to the refining of wealth into a much smaller number of hands. Now all the remaining brick and mortar retail, including the big box stores are being usurped by an even more centralized model that uses the Internet as its operating system.
As virtually everything migrates to the web we have put all our eggs in one not particularly robust basket. In doing so we have eliminated any slack in the supply chain so that when the internet dies, whether from overload, power blackouts or sabotage, we will really be up the creek and the paddles will all be a thousand miles away.
So the motto for the future will be “Learn to whittle”. You’ll have plenty of time on your hands to do so.
Hello K-DOG!
Have you noticed [newtroll] Carole [I prefer to add
the ‘e’]?
KD, where does Carole post from?
Is Carole P-A-I-D to muck up the conversation here?
Folks, was Asoka paid by DoD to muck this site up?
“What we’re on the brink of is scale implosion.”
This includes populations.
“Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die.”
Or be killed off.
“Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality.”
Many of us will not be around to make that journey. Myself included I believe.
“The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy.”
Not only is it their official policy, it is their ONLY policy as of now–sustain the unsustainable. This way their goal of population control can be achieved.
And I only had to look at the dictionary twice this time James.
Picking a town in Joisey doesn’t hurt either.
============
In the early ’70s the US was trying desperately to find a way out of Vietnam without a total loss of face. At endless issue was where to hold the Peace Talks and even the shape of the negotiating table. Eventually they settled on Paris. Comedian Alan King said they were nuts… “hold the talks in Secaucus and the war will be over in a week.”
Thank you for this comment – such an important point to make. Capitalism is, always has been and always will be ruthless, brutal and lacking any altruism by its nature.
Small and/or rural communities have always paid the price for their lack of “scale” and have also always been petri dishes for class hierarchial abuse (often referred to as “the old boys club”). Where I live (SC) the local (and state) “leaders” remain like relics out of some Tennessee Williams story except now “Big Daddy”, though still controlling the local economy, has a MUCH smaller local economy to exploit. To drive any state highway in most any part of the South (or most other rural parts of the country) is to see the empty and deserted remains of our “nostalgic past” where every town, whether a county seat or (former) factory or agricultural community, is like a Pompeiian ruin/relic of a distant and long-failed past. Every “Main Street” and biz district stand COMPLETELY deserted and rapidly decaying – often with their last occupants’ signs dangling from sagging storefronts that often still have the fixtures and cobwebbed obsolete merchandise covered in dust and cobwebs still inside. These town centers are ALWAYS surrounded by a ring of outrageously grand but deserted and decayed (falling down) mansions of the long gone local merchant class who apparently lived outrageously “LARGE” lifestyles. These rings of wealth are then ALWAYS surrounded by a much wider ring of also deserted an decayed (fallen down), but obviously ALWAY squalid workers’ “shacks” often accompanied by rusty kudzu-covered mobile homes (also deserted) in their overgrown junk riddled yards.
A resurrection of this “nostalgic” community life could very easily turn out to be just as bad, or even worse, than the present if the paradigm of crony capitalism isn’t voted down to a size where it can be “drowned in a bathtub.”
Life is full of surprises.
There is a real cost to ‘free things’ and [gulp]
cheap labor.
THE COST OF THE LATTER IS ASTRONOMICAL.
Check the YouTube link and let us know yr thoughts.
IF it is true, well what can I say?
California…Stanford study
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr4ar1M32D0
From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Califor…
…………………………………………
“Small towns are/were just a smaller version of today. Same people, same crap.”
Growing up in my little town there were plenty of poor people, but we didn’t realize we were poor. We had clothes, a bicycle, food, a house and car, and the security of an extended-blood relation family.
Not that it was Paradise, but it was close (especially compared to the world as it is now). Some years ago I visited a friend who lives in a small Nebraska farm town and he described the conditions that existed there. It was then that I realized my small American town had vanished and would not return in my lifetime. People have changed a lot in the 50 years since I was a kid.
Is that you, Marlin?
I’ve been shut out of the site for the past 2 months or so. One day I got a “permission denied” message and just couldn’t post a comment. I tried a lot of stuff, but nothing worked. I’ve read JFK’s weekly post, but I didn’t want to read the comments because I thought I’d get real frustrated if I saw something I wanted to reply to, and couldn’t. For the past several weeks I’ve been reading a lot of other sites – interesting stuff.
Then yesterday I thought maybe I should re-set my internet explorer defaults. I did, and I re-signed up at CFN, and WTF, I got on, no problem.
I see a number of new user names for old posters, and several new ones. I read last night that Asoka is gone. Strange. What happened?
I don’t think I was banned, but this website’s underlying structure is kind of screwed up.
Anyway,nice to hear from you.
Yes, the suburbs are toast and, in the short term, coastal cities will benefit.
In the medium to long term the sea levels in the New York City area are expected to rise about twice as quickly as sea levels around the world. Flooding is just one of the symptoms New York will suffer.
Science Daily says that :
Eventually NYC will be flooded and will be slowly washed out to sea.
“a local and sustainable economy will only be able to support a small fraction of the current human population.”
Choosing which fraction survives is what TPTB are constantly occupied with.
Kdog went to the ‘stats counter’ and posted that Asoka works for DoD.
see my post earlier today and Kdogs from 2-3 weeks ago.
Someone had mentioned China over the weekend and I attempted to post [cut paste] but was denied..
I will try again.
The Chinese government is building giant ghost cities in Africa for future colonization:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2168507/Footage-shows-brand-new-Angolan-city-designed-500-000-lying-empty.html
5th attempt to do a cut and paste………..
It certainly didn’t take long this morning for the curses and insults to start flying. Why do you bother reading this blog if you find it so annoying? Just so you can make nasty comments about it?
Correct; ’tis he.
As to browsers, try Firefox instead of IE; I think you’ll be happier with it. I find its’ much more stable and less “intrusive”, open-sourced platform (designed by hackers) to be easier to “fix” as well as use.
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
(If you download it and like it, don’t forget to indicate it as your “default” browser.)
To live somewhere like that and to live how you live has now become my only goal in life.
It’s true. I went thru it as a young man working in retail. You’d get close to a group of co-workers and then one by one you’d never see them again. And when you left, you’d never see the group again. They were just “work friends”. Some of this is the natural order of life of course. But the radical severing on a regular basis was part and parcel of the Corporate order. It conrolled the rhythm and structure of life – and it was obviously destructive to me even back then. But others couldn’t imagine any other way and would have found them boring. Or so they thought anyway.
Folks, was Asoka paid by DoD to muck this site up?
==========
“New” poster, Adaquatio, who appeared near the end of last week’s thread, I am virtually certain is Asoka… same concerns, same voice.
I was amazed when it came out how poorly Pilots were treated. They were like Gods in the early days of the Aviation Industry. But Capitalism has no use for the gifted people who only produce – it rewards the Owners and the Managers. As for the workers, even the most gifted – they better keep their uniforms clean and keep being good cigar store indians.
Very prescient Jim, from today’s examiner
“Some leaked Walmart emails show that the giant retailer is struggling with sales in early 2013, in what apparently some chain executives feel is a “total disaster.”…
The Walmart leaked emails indicate that February sales have been termed a disaster by some executives and it was the worst month the email sender had seen in his seven years with the company. Other details that were leaked indicate there is a significant amount of apprehension within the chain’s executives regarding how the year is beginning.”
http://tinyurl.com/b6agacq
Julian is a well known Portland, Oregon person. But if you could help figure out who Carol is, that would be great.
I don’t know about this one, JHK.
You do have an admirable numbers who have signed in to mutter some version of, “Die Wal-Mart!”
But it is hard for me to visualize the economics of scale that made our modern Wal-Mart America, simply reversing and disappearing. And yeah, walmart depends on trucks – but your envisioned small scale main street merchants, would require MANY more trucks – because of the vastly distributed network required to service them
It is all about scale – and our US scale will NOT reverse itself until forced by extreme events. And all of ThosePTB are fighting hard to keep things growing, Forevermore. Which is why Chamber of Commerce Republicans are uniting with irrational Lefies – to pack the US more and more full with people, to FAR past the point of disaster. (Nastarana nailed this idea, upthread!)
This growth in population should be fought by all who understand the basic premise of Peak Everything. https://www.numbersusa.com/content/nusablog/jenksr/february-13-2013/obama-gang-eight-duck-hardest-question.html
==================
On another topic, also related to too many people in too small a space – Eugene, and the posters who have seconded him are correct. Small town life before prosperity and motor-car mobility hit, were often much LESS than pleasant for the majority or residents. And that was with much more socially homogenous populations. Excessive “diversity” makes things worse, possibly disastrously worse – absent prosperity and mobility.
And “lucky13,” SSSHHHHH!
Let’s all enjoy the absence of RI and hope it lasts. And let’s enjoy the new posters and new thoughts that that absence seems to be allowing a toehold – around this CFNation.
Welcome back, beantownbill. We don’t always agree, but often we do. And I’ve missed your posts.
“The reality of the never-ending War on Terror is that it is integrally bound up with an imperialistic drive for resources.”
Noooooo; say it ain’t so, Joe, say it ain’t so!
(I’m shocked I tell you, shocked…)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33987.htm
Sustaining the unsustainable is getting more complicated and expensive by the hour.
I remember talking with a friend working on a T shirt cart. He thought it was so cool that prices on goods could fall because made in China. That a few pennies less on luxury items like tourist T-shirts was worth our industrial base, the livelihood of millions, and our very soul, was lost on him. I tried to explain but he just couldn’t get it. He was lost in Libertarian and Neo-Con thinking. Even the example he gave of T-shirts I later found when skimming one of Tom Friedman’s books.
Implosion? Not everywhere. The modern model for living goes on,thanks to fiat money. Dubai: mega project announced with world’s largest ferris wheel; London: Huge Battersea power plant luxury condo project sold out in minutes; NYC: up and up with luxury condos; Florida: housing stock lowest since 2005; Singapore: gov’t plans to import more foreign workers; Seattle: housing building boom; Wash. DC area: average income highest in country; Toronto: condo boom continues; Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane: condo boom continues; Germany: housing rents spiral ever upward; Spain: Billionaire Sheldon Adleson to build mega casino project. World airports: setting new passenger records; Vienna: mid Jan.: a dozen new skyscrapers going up; large shopping mall packed mid-week! Despite superb transport system, roads, autobahns busy. Peak oil? For now that’s history as the pumps keep going. High gas prices? Who cares. SNAP card and Obamaphone holders don’t count in the globalised economic party that continues with a ferocity that boggles the mind. Prognostications of the doom of the current model are premature, but one day it’ll happen. With 7 billion population and growing when and how will it all end?
cccp989 sed, “Even if Sears, K-Mart and Targets go under, there is still that other behemoth, Amazon.”
…Which relies on end-user distro model which includes good old USPS.
“Walmart will probably stick around because they sell groceries. ”
No, Walmart will stick around because as Jim mentioned, in many locations, its is the ONLY place where you can buy groceries (with your federal food stamps).
“Personally I have never set foot in Walmart and never intend to.”
How can anyone be so ignorant. You cannot claim to know anything about the zeitgeist without:
1. Eating a Happy meal or similar item from McD’s.
2. Watching a Hollywood blockbuster in a modern theater (including previews & commercials)
and
3. Attending Sunday services at one of the “trending” evangelical churches.
*. Substitute one for an afternoon at a bar watching the entire Super Bowl.
cccp said, “(Young people) … ought to be researching what jobs need to be filled in the future.”
As if they are not? No one under 25 that is looking for skilled work doesn’t know about the DOC’s job outlook, which gives projections a whole year into the future (so hazy that crystal ball is).
“As long as people get sick, there will be a need nurses and doctors.”
There will be an extreme Doctor shortage in the future.
“Even China is suffering from a glut of over-educated college grads who have no jobs to fill.”
Which points to a global, endemic problem, prophesied succinctly (?) by our own Oldsmobile69, namely, that the modern industrial economy is making work and workers completely unnecessary.
The good old day model was probably before you were born. It ended in the mid 20th century. And 125 people would hardly be enough to provide all the services and social energy anyway. There were ghost towns ever since there have been towns.
And Buddha’s birth, death, old age, and disease are always present, good times and bad.
reading the name tom freidman makes me want to go fill a large sock with horse manure.
ccdp sed “The only thing that is really worrying me is the advent of 3-D printers which some anarchist types are using to make working plastic guns.”
You’re another fear monger. Working plastic guns are already on the market (see Glock).
You’re a fear monger because the last time I checked you were about 10 times more likely to get bashed to death by a car than shot. E.g. you should be about 10 times more afraid of a car hitting you on your starlit stroll with your honey than a stray bullet. But this country is not; it is driven by its reptilian hind-brain and normalized to idiocy. (I digress)
in add., “Imagine a world where anybody can make unlimited numbers of guns without permits, without registration, without reprisal.”
When there are already 99 guns for every 100 people, there is no difference. There is a terrific amount of guns out there without papers already. And, further, since when does a person deserve “reprisal” for making an instrument without which we would all be speaking the Queen’s English, the Southern dialect, or German?
Serious futurists must take into account in their scenarios the concept of 3D printing or admit pretending. If and when our just-in-time distribution system becomes untenable moving finished goods- if and when we unilaterally retreat from the international Dollar Store trade- it will be temporally provident that we can make, on demand, objects to exact specification, with little material waste (and perhaps substantial recycling) and convert the system of distribution and delivery over a raw materials economy.
What I fear most is the world drowning in redundancy as the little biddies of the world press “print” repeatedly until they are ankle-deep it kitsch.
If You See A Turtle In The Road, Run It Over!
===============
All very interesting and sad Kling, but what the hell does it have to do with Scale Implosion? Jesus H. Christ, next thing you’ll be correcting our spelling or sumthin. ;o)
I am upset, pissed off, and disgusted with this culture of money grubbing business school mutant robots that have been fucking us in the form of big business, corporations and their greedy investors, and wall street and their purchasing the lying politicians that only represent the top percent of the world. They now spend all their time lying to us as how the world is going to get better if we just listen and do what they say is the only way. Globalization, continual growth, higher consumption and to make sure we get the message we pay them for the right to put a salesman in each living room. Pathetic and stupid is what capitalism has become. Now maybe just maybe it is time to fuck them. Drop out, turn on and watch them suffer.
My experience with small town (about 20,000 people) does jibe with the “good old days” stories. I suspect this is because my town was built on high paying, high benefits union jobs in the iron mines. Strangely, the fact that the owners/managers of the companies living half the country away may have actually contributed to the relative stability.
fecklinger said, “humans’ relationships with animals, called “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.” and “He counted 267 vehicles that passed by, seven of them intentionally hitting his rubber reptile.”
This brings to mind Jensen’s axiom on contemporary culture:
“The culture has a death urge, an urge to destroy all life.”
Its there in front of us all the time. Its there, being inculcated into children’s minds. It’s there, in women’s heads. Its here, in the male mind.
To destroy is easy; to create, difficult.
Consumption is a catabolic process, and we are calibrated to consumption. Unconsciously we are destroyers, subconsciously, we are just a pack within a pack of blood-thirtsy apes.
This country was built by creators, poisoned by destroyers, and what they say about the sins of the fathers is being visited on its sons and by extension, the planet itself.
For all those who visit this site and are dumbfounded by the comments section, your WTF is warranted. It’s not you. It’s purposeful, and it’s meant to discredit JHK. Most of the posts you see are by four to five people posting as twenty to thirty people. It’s not a real conversation. It’s a Clusterfuck. What it’s meant to convey is that if you are concerned with collapse, or you are beckoning it, you are a racist.
Here is a piece I wrote in 2006. It touches upon some of the themes found in this excellent blog/essay:
American commerce is counting on you to fall in line with the following conventional wisdom. To legislators: everyone accepts bribes in exchange for supporting certain issues, you’d be a fool not to. Everybody saves money by shopping at Walmart, it would be foolish not to. Everyone uses the latest pharmaceuticals, only a fool wouldn’t. Everyone drinks sodas and eats processed foods, it would be weird, expensive and inconvenient not to. Everyone’s getting an SUV to protect themselves and their loved ones, it would be stupid not to–it is dangerous out on the road. Everyone is serving their own self-interest, how would they get ahead otherwise. Everyone buys stuff on credit, if they are going to offer it to you, you’d be foolish not to take it.
One more “letter” to share from 2008 this time:
Concerns are being seriously expressed by both major presidential campaigns as to the importance of a candidate’s experience. Experience is defined as having held a certain type of position (executive, legislative, organizer, etc.); the longer it was held the greater the experience. Now look at the heart of the problems we face in our country and world. You will not find lack of this so-called experience even close to being among the important contributing factors. Incompetence, yes; corruption, yes; selfishness, cronyism, and arrogance, yes, yes, yes.
Our culture is feeding on ignorance and is starved for learning; feeding on the values of materialism and starved for spiritual meaning; feeding on satisfying wants and starved for contentment. Thus, peace and plenty eludes us. Watch, listen and think critically when our politicians talk about change. Unless the changes require, promote and provoke a radical change of heart from all engaged and responsible citizens, no lasting solutions shall be forth coming.
Estimated closings from Yahoo Financial News:
Best Buy – Forecast store closings: 200 to 250
Sears Holding Corp – Forecast store closings: Kmart 175 to 225, Sears 100 to 125
J.C. Penney – Forecast store closings: 300 to 350
Office Depot – Forecast store closings: 125 to 150
Barnes & Noble – Forecast store closings: 190 to 240, per company comments
Gamestop – Forecast store closings: 500 to 600
OfficeMax – Forecast store closings: 150 to 175
RadioShack – Forecast store closings: 450 to 550
My critique of these stores:
Best Buy persuaded the City of Richfield, MN to use emiment domain to condem 40 some homes and two car dealerships, just so they could build their ‘corporate campus’. Now Best Buy has nothing to sell – CD’s and DVD’s are now downloads, computers and electronics can be purchased more cheaply on line. As for the Geek Squad – with software like PC Anywhere, a tech can upgrade or fix software problems without ever being on-site. Best Buy has $14 billion of lease obligations on all those ‘big box stores’.
Sears. Went there for the first time in years – there were about 3 customers in the store.
Office Depot & Office Max – always sad places to visit, sorta like an Eastern European movie. Never can buy the same pens twice. If these go – where will the Somail’s work?
Barnes & Nobel – Just how many ‘junk’ coffee table books can one buy? Remember when the owner of the book store had actually read many books, and could give you some advice on a purchase.
Radio Trash – these stores have been turned in cell phone kiosks for Mexicans.
It’s sad to see how stupid people are, without the ability to see the real consequences of “the new.” I dreamed a word some years ago, sencha. Having sencha would mean that you have instincts about the negative possibilities of new technology, or “the new” in general. The Amish had a lot of sencha. Jim has a great deal of sencha. It’s skepticism about the claims of the Cat and the Hat (that duality/troubles can be ended by invention instead of simply made more complex and insidious). I can’t think of a more stark symbol of the lack of sencha than the continual widening of roads in towns and cities. This has to be hell. But through self-purification the hell can certainly ugrade itself.
” Capitalism is, always has been and always will be ruthless, brutal and lacking any altruism by its nature.”
What a load of rubbish. The following definition of capitalism is from wiki.
“Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of capital goods and the means of production, with the creation of goods and services for profit.”
For one, capitalism by its very definition, cannot exist within a dictatorial form of government. That fact, in and of itself, gives credence to the validity of capitalism. The definition of capitalism does not suggest that those practicing it may not be rogues, thieves or scoundrels but these are certainly not requirements.
A person who makes an item or provides a service for others will not do so unless there is a profit at the end of the finish line. For you not to agree with their expectation of a profit is your problem not theirs. You are more than welcome to give away any damn thing you wish. But to label their expectation of a profit as “ruthless, brutal and lacking in any form of altruism” is moronically myopic.
“The interesting thing is that Writers Digest has an interview with Jamie Lee Curtis of Hollywood fame. She writes Childrens Books. The lead in to the article on page 44 says she has been an acclaimed author for decades. So Julian Curtis Lee and Jamie Lee Curtis. Hmmmmmmmm could there be a connection?
I have heard her name and seen her face on tabloids waiting in checkoutlines, and I believe she is some Hollywood trash. (An actress.) A Jew? Be my guess. Never seen her in a movie. Unless she was that woman in “Brazil.” The face was similar. I couldn’t care less about actors or the subject of actors. And most people writing children’s books these days are just people trying to propagandize and engineer peoples’ kids by stealth. (To fuck up the children’s heads.) My view is that actors and actresses are not mentioned in polite company.
Puzzled what you are referring to. It seems like most posters here share Kunstler’s pessimism about where our society is headed.
” I read last night that Asoka is gone. Strange. What happened?”
I think the simple bastard finally came to the conclusion that he too couldn’t believe the bullshit he was spreading. The manurer spreader finally just broke down.
Kunstler’s topic certainly struck a chord for me. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my neighborhood will soon be invaded by a giant “Bass Pro Shop.” I read the following letter from Andrea Mackenzie,General Manager, Santa Clara County Open Space Authority, in support of the new building (which is on the last farmland I know of in San Jose).
“BASS PRO SHIP SHOWS OUR REGARD FOR NATURE–The budiness decision by mega-outdoor retailer Bass Pro Shops to locate in Silicon Valley (Page iD, Feb.13) is a welcome indicator that our broader economy is on the rebound. No doubt, the outdoor retailer’s market analysis showed that our residents are highly educated and have incomes to spend on outdoor equipment. But Bass Pro’s decision to locate here is also indicative of how much our region’s diverse population values clean water, healthy natural areas, and accessible prks and open space. The majority of our residents have consistently supported the protection and stewardship of our natural areas, parks and open space which are all vital to the region’s health, quality of life and ultimately to its economic vitality and sustainability.”
San Jose Mercury News, 2/15/13
Is Andrea on Bass Pro Shop’s payroll or what? I’ve enjoyed our county’s open space areas with a pair of sneakers and a canteen. It’s not like we have vast lakes around here? The Guadalupe watershed is no place to fish because of the mercury mines that were big business here during the gold rush. The fish are still inedible because of the quicksilver tailings. I might add that the mega store and mega parking lot are smack dab in the river’s riparian zone.
Oy vey!
Jen
” But Capitalism has no use for the gifted people who only produce…”
Riiight. Owners of cabinet making shops, restaurants, accounting firms, etc. etc. etc. see no value in hiring “gifted people.” They would much rather have their businesses filled with the “ungifted” among us. (Fucking moron.)
“Why do you bother reading this blog if you find it so annoying? Just so you can make nasty comments about it?”
So, Helen is bitching about someone bitching? BWA, HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA,HA…FUCKING…HA!
In Jamie Lee Curtis’s defense, her children’s books were very well written and I bought several for my kids when they were young. She is married to Christopher Guest, who seems smart to me because he wrote some really fun movies such as, “Spinal Tap” and “Best in Show.”
That sounds like the wishful thinking of someone who is probably stuck in a soon to be dead suburb.
Rural areas that produce useful things….food, minerals, fuel, timber and the like will still function, but the people who live there will be people who are employed in those rural type industries. Living out in the country will no longer be possible for anyone who doesn’t have a real reason to be out in the country.
Certain cities, mostly coastal cities that have functioning port facilities, will survive.
First ring suburbs, especially those suburbs that have rail links to liable cities may survive. Everything else is toast.
Funny thing is, unlike lost civilizations of the past, their won’t even be any ruins of America’s suburbs left in a few years. Ancient civilizations built with stone….the ruins exist to this day, some of which are thousands of years old. How long will the particle board last after it’s abandoned?
I remember JL Curtis from Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086465/?ref_=sr_1
I find it interesting that you are a solar enthusiast and yet seem to also be a Kunstler fan.
You are aware that he sees little hope for alternative energy, are you not?
And I agree with him, to a point. Solar appears to be of very limited value at its present state of development. It has very little potential to displace fossil fuel use, on account of its intermittency.
Where I somewhat differ with Kunstler is that I don’t rule out the possibility that scientific breakthroughs may lead to alternatives that could address the functions that fossil fuels currently serve. But to me it is an open question whether or not that will happen. If I were to bet, my guess would be that for the most part that will not happen, or at least not soon enough to prevent a post fossil fuel “dark age”, although barring thermonuclear war or something along those lines I do believe that mankind would eventually once again see better days.
In Jamie Lee Curtis’s defense …
==========
…not to mention, Jamie Lee has a great bod, on the slender side and with big real knockers.
“Yes, the suburbs are toast and, in the short term, coastal cities will benefit.”
This is moronic yet an oft repeated mantra on this site. The suburbs contain roughly 50% of our population. You cannot abandon the shelters of 50 of our population and assume that the coastal cities will pick up the slack. That is the belief of an imbecile.
The suburbs will have to be retrofitted. There is no other alternative. Too much has been invested in their creation and our economy is too fragile to suggest otherwise. What probably lies not too far in the future are the creation of smaller schools, stores, service providers, etc. that will be tucked into every third cul-de-sac in our current series of suburbs.
People will still have to feed and educate their families and go to work but in an age of increasing commodity prices the geographical area in which they do so will have to shrink. The giant big boxes they now drive to will be exploded into hundreds of suburban bodegas that they will walk to.
They will be no sudden mass migration of suburban zombies heading for the cities for the simple reason that there will not be enough beds to accommodate them.
” I read last night that Asoka is gone. Strange. What happened?”
I think the simple bastard finally came to the conclusion that he too couldn’t believe the bullshit he was spreading.
===========
SOMEBODY MUST HAVE TURNED ON THE INVISIBLE COMMENT MACHINE SO I’LL TRY IT ONCE MORE:
ASOKA IS BACK WITH THE HANDLE ADEQUATIO
They are no longer their own men – just employees no better than stockboys or drivers, dummy. It’s an existential point and I don’t expect someone focused on mere Adam Smith type supply/demand fantasy to get it.
As somebody who grew up in a little town in upstate New York, I can’t understand anyone with a nostalgia for “mom and pop” stores. Are they crazy? Are they urbanites who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground? The Mom and Pop stores where I grew up sold a limited assortment of overpriced crap. And they weren’t too quick to wait on you if they didn’t know you, didn’t like the looks of you, you weren’t in their specific cult church, or if you weren’t white. I hate to be a heretic among the trendy yuppies, but I prefer Walmart.
And the gifted cabinet maker will be out of a job in a heartbeat once Management can hire cheaper non-White labor either here or overseas. That’s Capitalism, fan boy. People like you hide under a system to avoid doing the right thing or to have to admit that a great wrong has been done.
You are assuming that Capitalism and Free Enterprise are the same thing – a very basic mistake.
“It’s an existential point…”
Oh and so, so complex. I’ll bet you you can fit you existential head up your actual ass and still have room left for your actual head. Go ahead…prove me wrong. (Moron.)
I once talked to a pharmacist who had raised a family with his own store. He said it had been a nightmare of overwork. He envied your pharmacists who could work sensible hours for the big stores. Reality is complex. Mr Gower in Bedford Falls wasn’t overworked because it was a small town.
“And the gifted cabinet maker will be out of a job in a heartbeat once Management can hire cheaper non-White labor either here or overseas.”
Now how moronic. The cabinet maker has been given the assignation of “gifted.” There is a value, both artistic and numerical, that accompanies a “gifted” worker. Evil management recognizes this. Evil management will try and retain “gifted” over non-gifted any day of the week. (And what the fuck does non-White labor have the fuck to do with anything you stupid bastard?)
You have no real response in other words – thus your insults are an existential admission of defeat.
Ya dont miss a beat..as Tonys daughter she is tribe, or 1/2.
And rumored to be, well you guess by looking at her picture!
“believed it would take longer than 20 years to wind down the current idiocy we find ourselves surrounded by.”
Twenty years is not a long time. Why would the next financial calamity be much different from ’08? A new magician will come out from behind the curtain and announce new “solutions” to fix the economy and life will continue to function similarly to today. Right?
Those 5 artists I mentioned were all junk artists,
IMO. except Stella, and he did his best circa 1960-1975.
If someone wants to pay 4M$ for a photo, let them.
Yes, but more people will become poor, homeless and more of the sovereign public domain will be owned by private individuals or corporations.
Perhaps one of the Koch Brothers will own a city near you.
K-DOG, where does this ‘aqadato’ post from?
Dod?
What does non-White have to do with it? Because that’s what is actually happening. I admit I departed from the existential there. It could just as well be poor Whites replacing Americans. But America doesn’t want poor Whites anymore since that would upset the racial racket they have going. England has brought in about half a million Poles to upset their economy.
“You have no real response …”
Oh I think not. I have responded quite intelligently as well as trotting out some rather appropriate descriptions of you which you have taken as insulting.
And I didn’t think a pig had the ability to know it was a pig. Guess I was wrong.
Was she the six million dollar woman? Six million, where have I heard that before?
“I admit I departed from the existential there.”
Well now is your opportunity to admit that you have departed from reality, moron. Now be quiet for a bit. You stupidity is showing.
Always good to see a post from a fellow Canadian. Our town of 15,000 has had a Zellers since 1968. It closes next month. They’ve hired a guy who wears a big sign to stand at a big intersection to remind us that “everything must go”.
The goods left on their shelves, still with high prices, are a testament to when the Hudson’s Bay Company bought it, then was bought itself by a USA company. They went high-end just when the economy began to stall and people needed bargains.
We got ourselves a Wal Mart nearly 10 years ago after a bitter fight and of course they won. Our downtown is almost empty. Now Wal Mart will be all that’s left except for two small Canadian discount chains. One of them is in the town next door. I’m already shopping there, at least the profits (if any) stay here.
It has been no comfort to be right after all these years of losing fight after fight with the corporate interests and clueless citizens. Our little, formerly beautiful town is hollowed out but has excellent four lane roads to take us to the edge of town and Wal Mart.
O no! Its Adequatio!
A literal translation of “adaequatio intellectus ad rem” from the Latin gives us “The intellect is adaquate to a/the thing.”
What this means depends on the context of where you got it. It’s a statement that usually comes up in regard to epistemology, the study of knowledge. [yahoo]
Thanks….RI returns.
Aha, usually I can count on at least one excuse to look at the dictionary, but there had been a few weeks’ lull. So thanks for coming through with “scrofula.”
I tend to agre with a few of the criticisms here. First, JHK does not survive on his farm money alone or another, but that isn’t to say he wouldn’t be able to find a way after things implode.
Second, I’m sort of baffled why JHK thinks that people will ‘return’ to being congenial and convivial friends once an economic depression has had its way. In recorded history (but maybe in unrecorded or forgotten civilizations and tribal arrangements), there hasn’t been a period like the one JHK appears to describe, in fact the past was full of a great deal of misery and violence, mostly from parents against their children.
We have made some – maybe coincidental with economic growth and therefore unintentional – moral progress in modernity, but I suspect it also would fail away as soon as the trucks stop coming, primarily because we haven’t internalized the lessons on how to act civil from an internalized moral code (and I’m not talking about Bushido). I certainly would like a PEACEFUL world made by hand but it seems jHK and some others do not want to tread into that realm because it belies their wishful fantasies about a mysteriously non-horrendous world made by hand.
I have become best friends with my shovel.
copyright protected.
Capitalist don’t believe in Capitalism. You know that, right? Right? To them, Capitialism is for the other guy, the sucker. “Competition is a sin” is their motto. Read Atlas Shrugged about Crony Capitalism. Try to educate yourself.
In other words, it’s not enough to just look through a microscope. You have to know what to look for. So this union of the Eye of Flesh with the a proper mind is what produces physical knowledge. The Eye of Mind likewise needs education to see properly. Hamlet is not about Ophelia’s madness. Deconstructionism or pretending books mean what you want them to, is a disease of the Eye of Mind. The Eye of Spirit complete the triad and is the most difficult to educate, both on its own level and because it includes the previous two.
“Read Atlas Shrugged about Crony Capitalism.”
Crony Capitalism is not Capitalism. Crony Capitalism is nothing less than the bastardization of capitalism. I suggest you re-read Atlas Shrugged as you didn’t understand THE underlying premiss of the novel.
On second thought, don’t waste your precious time. Go dig a hole and fill it in instead.
Canada should have surrendered sovereignty to US long ago. We have now done it thru Wal Mart. It’s a moot conflict now in any case. Just as in Northern Ireland: both sides are crazy about Africans and Muslims. Or Scotland: what does it matter if Scotland becomes its own Nation if it is filled up with Non Whites?
Neither the United States nor Canada exist anymore. We are just part of the North American Union which is filling up with non North Americans. Negroes and Muslims are the secret weapon. They will breed and fill the whole White World until it is no longer White. Asia will not allow this and will triumph over the hapless Whites who conquered the World but forgot to love themselves. Instead they got to feel better than other Whites. The booby prize, eh Grog?
Doug,
Thanks for pointing out the other “big box” operations that are imploding — I was going to but you beat me to it. Here’s an article:
http://retailindustry.about.com/b/2013/02/14/2013-store-openings-and-closings-roundup-update-2500-store-closings-by-gamestop-best-buy-sears-office-depot-not-happening-despite-cyber-speculation-reports-bby-shld-jcp-od-gme.htm
(If this “link” isn’t a link it’s cuz I don’t know how to make it into one… Sorry.
SJM,
Andrea should be removed from her fake “job”, as she obviously has no respect for open spaces whatsoever.
The true owners supply/appoint their carefully-managed mouthpieces. The puzzling part is that the gen’al public accepts these puppets as their guardians. (Stupid is as stupid does, I guess.)
Doug,
Thanks for pointing out the other “big box” operations that are imploding — I was going to but you beat me to it. Here’s an article:
http://retailindustry.about.com/b/2013/02/14/2013-store-openings-and-closings-roundup-update-2500-store-closings-by-gamestop-best-buy-sears-office-depot-not-happening-despite-cyber-speculation-reports-bby-shld-jcp-od-gme.htm
(If this “link” isn’t a link it’s cuz I don’t know how to make it into one… Sorry.
Doug,
Thanks for pointing out the other “big box” operations that are imploding — I was going to but you beat me to it. Here’s an article:
http://retailindustry.about.com/b/2013/02/14/2013-store-openings-and-closings-roundup-update-2500-store-closings-by-gamestop-best-buy-sears-office-depot-not-happening-despite-cyber-speculation-reports-bby-shld-jcp-od-gme.htm
(If this “link” isn’t a link it’s cuz I don’t know how to make it into one… Sorry.
Sorry about multiple postings…
I HATE this cheap-ass blog software.
Please do not feed the dead and dying; it’s a waste of calories (and bandwidth).
“Real” Capitalism becomes Crony Capitalism as soon as they get big enough to buy the Goverment. They don’t believe in “fair play” – they believe in winning. Competition is a sin. Adam Smith was wrong: there is no invisible hand that will keep them honest. There is no System that substitutes for Morality. Our’s is the Hand that keeps them honest – or none.
Japan has it right. When they got big enough to buy the Goverment, the Goverment invited them in saying: You work for Japan now. It’s subtle – certainly not a Humiliation but an Honor. And they keep their personal wealth. But they are not just working for a Company or for themelves anymore.
You can’t have a huge slew of geniuses working against a Nation and still have a viable Nation. It’s not Communism by any means. If you want to call it Fascism, do so. It works. It’s better than the Corporations and Banks running the Goverment like they do here in our Plutocracy.
How yogic of you, but not like you. I prefer the Jim who raises up visions of natural human life, Jim. Besides, these people didn’t even expect these visions of natural human life. I think all Americans, long before 1965, should have had been given trips to their European homelands starting in childhood, to spend time in the old European pedestrian streets and squares, to imbibe the natural village life of their ancestors. Then these Wal-Mart victims would have had the ability to “expect” something else. Americans no longer even know what a natural, human, or loveable community would look like.
I love Jim’s Shiva mode best. Yes, let’s meet duality directly and squarely with the bee sting in the wood, the cut in the woodshop, and the labor hoisting water and grain. Not try to pave and wifi it away — all to create hells nobody can love.
” (And what the fuck does non-White labor have the fuck to do with anything you stupid bastard?)
Because Whites have racial and ethnic interests, too, thy are presently under genocidal pressures, and Janos is white. (And did you think this was a Costa Rican blog?) He’s also speaking, largely, to a board here that includes many whites, and he is personally concerned about the phenomenon of White racial and national suicide. I thought all that was obvious.
Seems you should get oriented to the blog.
Kunstler doesn’t think ethnicity is a non-issue. Though he’s lived a magnificently bohemian life he still is known to defend his blood people, even if it’s Israel. Have you written any hate-male to Jim yet about “what to Jews have to do with anything?”
People who think race is a non-issue are, to me, both boring and shallow at the very least. Obsequious to an alien zeitgeist and racially disloyal at worst.
Just sayin.’
You said a mouthful! lol
Seriously JHK, you’re in fine form with a great post and a high neuron firing rate though it does make me wonder if it’s past the synapse speed limit of the majority of Americans.
Hudson’s Bay Company no longer exists in all its former “glory”. from Wikipedia: “In July 2008, the company after a series of change of ownership was eventually acquired by the American private equity firm, NRDC Equity Partners, which also owned department store chain Lord & Taylor. From 2008 to 2012, HBC was run through a holding company of NRDC, Hudson’s Bay Trading Company, which was dissolved on 23 January 2012. HBC is now directly managed by NRDC and it oversees the operations of Lord & Taylor in the United States in addition to its Canadian subsidiaries the Bay, Zellers and Home Outfitters.”
And now Zellers is gone, bought out by Target. HBC also has a long history of exploitation of native people of Canada. Not such a good example.
Good for you, Horsewoman. Some of us have been voluntarily living without modern “conveniences” ever since the sixties, when we saw that the consumer society was just a trap to keep us working at jobs we hated. I’ve never had a dishwasher or microwave, I don’t even have a TV, and I’ve never been inside a WalMart. I am well regarded in my community because I teach people how to grow food, for themselves and for sale.
But somehow the computer and the phone made the cut? They’re not modern “conveniences?”
For those dead set on the village concept, may I suggest the movie The Village on how to keep the kiddies obedient and in place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq_B_ukrGKo
Janos, are you actually Vlad? You certainly share the same racist opinions.
He is Vlad and he’s not the only White fellow left who has ethnic identity and who has not been deracinated.
It is possible to be selective about which technologies you want to use, without blindly accepting all that are offered, or refusing to use any of them. I’m not really interested in living in a cave and cooking on a campfire. And what makes you so sure I have a phone?
And what makes you so sure I have a phone?
========
Our records show you do.
Phut, I feel that way, too. But then I realize the real tragedy is that nature and evolution made homo sapiens very, very flawed. Humans have plenty of intelligence, but not nearly enough wisdom. I believe nature first experimented with extremes of size – the dinosaurs – but that didn’t work out. Then nature went in the other direction, that of brains. I’m afraid i’ts iffy whether or not that works out as well.
“It is possible to be selective about which technologies you want to use, without blindly accepting…”
Completely inappropriate comma there. Makes the reader work harder and shows you sweating to include punctuation everywhere possible.
“And what makes you so sure I have a phone?
An older English Ms. Newquist of Great Britain would have used the “that.” (…so sure that I have a phone…
She would have done the same with the second sentence. (“Our records show that you do.”)
Your phrasing is typical Black American Male.
Who is “our” in “our records”? These are records kept in England Ms. Fauxpriss?
Why would it “be good” to know who Carol is? The message itself delivered via written text should be good enough. And how easily your eyes divert to the lower realm of shadow identity as opposed to expressed ideas.
Beyond that, and take the following for whatever its worth. When a white racist/nationalist begins to inquire about the particulars of another persons identity they’re only shining the spotlight upon themselves. Two words make my point: Alan Berg. This radio personality was stalked and gunned down by white supremacists (or whatever term is most appropriate) simply for plying for his on-air radio trade/shtick. And hideous tragedy it was; Alan Berg was one of the nicest human beings you could ever hope to meet.
Of course I’m not saying you’re of that ilk, but inquiries such as the one you just made and the reprehensible online voyeurism that K-Dog inserted into this comments section a few weeks ago might come with a law enforcement price tag, as it rightfully should if “events” were to take a diabolical and orchestrated turn.
I’m just saying ya know, but do take note: people are starting to notice that a certain white racist/supremacist/separatist group of people are starting to set-up camp in the CFN comment section…and now their starting to make inquiries into the off-line identities of people they disagree with. Be very careful with that Vlad, very, very careful (and anybody else; who know who you are).
“Humans have plenty of intelligence, but not nearly enough wisdom. I believe nature first experimented with extremes of size – the dinosaurs – but that didn’t work out. Then nature went in the other direction, that of brains.”
Funny post. Well, some sages (Buddha, Jesus) named the fault as misguided human desir, More deeply, the tendency to get marked (conditioned) by good/bad experiences, becoming addicted to them, and craving their repetition for some kind of bliss-hit no matter how minor.
I don’t think there is necessarily order or system to the development of history or to so-called evolution. “Samsara has no head or tail.” I think it’s funny when evolutionists take something like epicanthic folds on ancient Asians and say “it was cold so they grew those to keep the eyes warm.” They are just there because it was fancied that they be there. Most theories of causation are mind-inventions firmed up by conditioning. “The crow lands on the branch of of the palm tree and a coconut falls — without there being any causative link” or that the samsasra is “like a child that plays without any motive” (Yoga-Vasistha).
I think that one’s Past Stories, which are always found to be changing, are just another p art of the karmic miasm the same way that a writer — whether creating a happy story or a dystopia — manufactures the past that he fancies for his story. I think that every one of us does the same thing. “Dinosaurs in a past” are just a fellow’s lizard-story karma or whatever.
” I’m afraid i’ts iffy whether or not that works out as well.”
This made me laugh! Yes, everything’s pretty danged iffy! “Iffy” is really, from a Non-Dualistic Vendanta view, is what starts the samsara ball rolling. The mind loves ifs.
The secret of our past prosperity was that it wasn’t earned, it was financed by credit (borrowing). Since borrowers, including the government, have to pay interest on loans, this means the payback is always greater than the amount borrowed. Therefore, continual growth is needed.
At every given level of technology, there is a limit to available resources. We are now butting up against the limits of early 21st century technology. This means we have no choice but to go into a contractive state, at least until (if we can) we reach a more advanced level of technology.
Right now we are in the initial stages of contraction. While our society has ideals of freedom and opportunity for everyone, it’s just not viable to continue to admit endless numbers of people past our borders, as much as we’d like to.
Thanks, 03. I’ve had firefox downloaded to my computer for awhile. Maybe I should experiment with it. What happens to my bookmarks that I’ve been accumulating since forever, when I xfer over?
That’s pretty interesting that “our records” (whoever “our” is) show that I have a phone, since Helen Highwater isn’t even my real name. You are a joke, Ms. Newquist.
Why would it “be good” to know who Carol is?
Source and context are additional content. “Consider the source.”
“The message itself delivered via written text should be good enough.
Vilification of Whites for daring to claim ethnic and racial interests is good enuf? For whom?
And how easily your eyes divert to the lower realm of shadow identity…
I think you just had a Freudian slip about yourself.
“When a white racist/nationalist begins to inquire…they’re only shining the spotlight upon themselves.”
This is so only for white nationalists? I think they just appreciate it if a poster represents himself honestly, and that is why they want to know who you really are. If you were known to be a black male (which you are) it would change the way they view your posts and how they respond to you. The strategy of your colleague who pretends to be a White English — and one who hates her own people and champions blacks — while stirring up gullible male interest and emotions here — is particularly disgusting.
This radio personality was stalked and gunned down by white supremacists…
Things are reversed these days. Any white with the spectacular audacity to be pro-White ends up harassed and hounded by Jews and their minions who specialize in shadow harassment who call themselves the “antifa.”
Of course I’m not saying you’re of that ilk…
You really love the word “ilk.” What ilk are you from, if you will?
…but inquiries such as the one you just made and the reprehensible online voyeurism that K-Dog inserted into this comments section a few weeks ago might come with a law enforcement price tag, as it rightfully should if “events” were to take a diabolical and orchestrated turn.
You sound paranoid.
…people are starting to notice that a certain white racist/supremacist/separatist group of people are starting to set-up camp in the CFN comment section…
Bodacious whites have been audaciously claiming ethnic interests for their race for decades already on the internet. Check out one of my sites http://www.WhiteID.com if you want to feel really scandalized I guess.
“Supremacist” is a dishonest meme used against Whites. And what’s so bad about separate? It’s how we all started out. Most Whites just want to survive and be left alone and survive. My own view is that Whites have special faults equal to their special virtues — like all peoples.
…and now their starting to make inquiries into the off-line identities of people they disagree with. Be very careful with that Vlad, very, very careful (and anybody else; who know who you are).
Wow. You act so afraid of exposure. You talk like a guilty thief. Why should you even need to be anonymous if everything you represent is so inarguably Good and Right? Maybe your conscience tells you that destruction of the white genotypes, nations, and cultures — is not really so good.
Actually it worked out quite well. The dino class of species was what the fossil record tells us was the most successful set of species to date with a 265 million year reign. Compare that to any fossil record of homo sapiens you’d care to.
Nice to see more Canadians here.
There will be three Zellers that remain open: in Montreal North, the Queensway in Toronto and the Semiahmoo Shopping Centre in White Rock, B.C.
As I pointed out before, your ego is too big to admit that you were wrong about Asoka. So now even after the entity admitted Asoka didn’t exist, you still defend him as if he did. Surely you can see how fucked up that is?
Regarding the bookmarks: That is an excellent question.
I hadn’t tried to save them over to firefox, just went with what I remembered and searched ’em out. I’m trying to recall if there was a transferal option when setting up firefox. hmmmm
I’m sure some of our more techno-savvy posters could advise you on a procedure for swapping these over if there isn’t.
Run one browser atop the other and copy and paste the addy’s over? Copy them (as a block) to notepad or some such for transferal? I dunno man; help!
(And, yes, load ‘er up and play with it just to see if you like the interface to begin with…)
Buck voluntered once that he is of Scotch-Irish descent. But like you, I was quite taken back by his chosen name. The Negro speech patterns that you see may be due to his admitted intense love of Black Culture – particularly Jazz.
It is true that dinos were very successful. I think they lasted for about 160 – 180 million years. And their descendants have lasted until this very day in the form of birds (maybe).
I guess I was thinking along the lines that dinosaurs are extinct, and that indicates they were not successful. But of course that is erroneous thinking on my part.
Thanks for correcting me.
That’s pretty interesting that “our records” (whoever “our” is) show that I have a phone, since Helen Highwater isn’t even my real name.
==========
We know it’s not your real name. What do you take us for?
Yes, I am a joke. This whole thing is a joke. A bad joke, and you’re part of it. There’s no reason to state the obvious, unless you feel like being superfluous.
Did you know the fish called Wanda is an aspiring writer? Maybe E can start teaching again and invite Wanda to perform some guest lectures. I hear Florida A&M is hiring white professors. I’d pay for a ticket to see it.
Gee-whiz James! “Scale implosion” ???
First – there just has to be some “waste implosion.”
You see Jim, you refuse to admit that we continue to “waste so much” through discretionary energy consumption – that you have no idea how events will really unfold.
To whom it may concern, get a clue. Before any “hurt” can begin – we have to the federal government spending reduced.
As long as we have trillions of new money greasing the wheels – no contraction, nor any “scale implosion” can commence.
Submitted for discussion – what is the time frame for the world’s tolerance for US dollar denominated “peak credit”????
JK – c’mon -it ain’t pretty (or easy) to write about; but until we discover what mechanisms continue to support the confidence in the dollar – we cannot know when or how the crash will begin.
Thank you for your fine screed anyway. It is impressive if not accurate.
Anyone here have any clues?
What about the ‘RV’ show at the Eastern States Expo Grounds up in West Springfield (soon to be site of billion $$$ Hard Rock Cafe Casino)? My neighbor went and reports you couldn’t get near the place. He himself already owns an RV the size of a Grey Hound Bus. It costs over a grand to fuel it up … and that only gets you to SCarolina. It has all the amenities, including a full kitchen, flat screen TV and King Size bed. He says on the trips he takes a convenient place to pull in for the night is the local Walmart parking lot. Walmart is generous that way. He drives across the US, on the interstate, going from Walmart to Walmart. Its convenient and safe, and of course any supplies he might need are readily available, inside Walmart.
It runs on diesel, and $4.25 per gallon diesel is putting a crimp on the travel. But hey, what the hell, we are Americans, and America is all about travel.
==CD
Scrofula? Scrofula! Love it!
Noun
A disease with glandular swellings, probably a form of tuberculosis.
Synonyms
king’s evil
I’ve wondered the same thing myself, BW.
What about the ‘RV’ show at the Eastern States Expo Grounds…It has…a full kitchen, flat screen TV and King Size bed…
That’s called Not Really Camping. And not really leaving anything.
The better thing is to hitchhike with a few bags and sleep under bridges and nooks and crannies. Or at most in a car, panel van, or smallish RV. This is more virtuous and follows The Lord’s advice to be simple and to trust like the sparrows and the lilies of the field. If more people did that we would not have Carhell instead of Real Towns. I wish I could have been an American hobo pre-1960.
BTB – re Firefox and Bookmarks:
Menu item Bookmarks, select Show All Bookmarks.
Choose Import and Backup, then Import Data from Another Browser
HTH
AND, ladies and gentlemen of the ClusterFuck;
The first use THIS WEEK of that divisive, thought-stopping, anti-white and anti-Western word is by none other than a Resident Impediment!
Drum roll please!
“It’s a Clusterfuck. What it’s meant to convey is that if you are concerned with collapse, or you are beckoning it, you are a racist.”
-thus spake “carol-
Whether “carol” is the original RI, or a new improved version – is yet to be determined.
————————
And Buck – WHAT IS IT WITH YOU??
Why are you defending a (thankfully now vanished) poster (the soaker..) who was trolling CFN on a DoD computer system, AT MINIMUM, and my well have been on the DoD payroll while performing his..trollings.
And K-Dog’s “cyber spying,” or whatever you called it – was a simple search of internet records that had been available for CFN posters for YEARS.
K-dog should be proud.
You should be ashamed – for this:
“…people are starting to notice that a certain white racist/supremacist/separatist group of people are starting to set-up camp in the CFN comment section…” -bs-
This would be the SECOND use of that nasty, divisive, overused, and anti-Western word for the week, unless I miscounted.
======================
On another subject – to you folks who complain about the blog software; what JHK uses is far superior to what they use at ZeroHedge. For one thing, they break their comments up into small blocks of 25 or so – so the posts are not searchable as a whole, but only as tiny segments of thoughts. Bah, on that!
Carolanius Jones Fauxpriss: “Yes, I am a joke. This whole thing is a joke. A bad joke, and you’re part of it. There’s no reason to state the obvious, unless you feel like being superfluous.
Feeling guilty, he coyly fesses up in plain sight. It was all a joke officer!
I wish I had nod used the word superfluous yesterday. Now we’ll see it every day. My bad.
Prog,
I happen to like/appreciate the postings of Asoka. And I’m sure he’ll be back one of these days; CFN addicts always return. In many ways your glee of the vanished Asoka reads like a celebration of ideological consensus, but I know that’s not true in your case: it just became personal between you two.
And BTW, I disagreed with Asoka on more than a few issues. Most notably his call for open borders, and by extension, the importation of cheap labor, never made sense from the perspective of progressive labor issues.
And I certainly don’t think Asoka was working for the DOD. His insights on Osho for example, were very much garnered from the oral tradition.
And you’re falling for Jules’ act around here. Obviously he’s here trying to drum up astrological business, which I can certainly understand. After all, it can’t be easy being a white astrologer[ you fill in the blank Jules; apparently there are distinctions(among white racists?) to be made] in the world of New Age conformity/political correctness. And judging from the frequency and length of his posts, business doesn’t appear to be ‘beating down the doors’.
Janos,
Why didn’t you answer my question: why would it be “great” to know who Carol is?
And BTW,do you think that makes Carol feel comfortable that a white racist( yes for that term is self-descriptive; you’ve used it many times)is making online inquiries into her identity?
Whatever happened to that European sense of polite space and privacy Vlad?
“And I certainly don’t think (the Resident Impediment) was working for the DOD. His insights on Osho for example, were very much garnered from the oral tradition.”
-buck-
What, Buck, you don’t think DoD moles got free reign to penetrate the “world of Osho?” You don’t think some agency or another of the DoD has data on Osho out the yinyang? And you don’t think that almost anyone of reasonable intelligence could use some of those deep data sets to “penetrate?” this ClusterFuck??
You’re smarter than that.
====================
And it did become a little bit (past tense, and I hope it lasts!) personal between me and the Soaker Hose. He was the first person, ever, to call me a racist, ever. (seriously) And Soak did it, at first, simply to win an argument.
After that, Soak started using the word “RACIST,” more and more – simply to stir things up and win “points.” And I began to enjoy calling him out on this, and many other things. At bottom, DoD employee or not, Soak’s a “hater,” of too many things. (Like Jessee Jackson and the Grievance Coalition.)
You can tell me where I’m wrong.
You’ll be wrong, of course. haha!
That’s why they call them “opinions.”
===============
And I appreciate your agreement with me on immigration and US population – late in the game though it is. I WILL ALWAYS BELIEVE that you should have spoken up about this – during those many weeks when Soak was first calling me “racist.” But you didn’t.
I am sure most here know about the “PeopleOfWalmart” site that features photos of shoppers surreptitiously taken. Verily, a few of these pages and you think this Country may really be finished.
http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/photos/page/4/
For what it’s worth, the most sublimely “zerohedge” comment I’ve ever read was posted on Saturday by “CrashisOptimistic”, in response to zerohedge’s Kunstler piece:
“Kunstler always words solutions to send a message that can maintain his personal revenue flow — namely, we must do this and
this and this, and at no time does he ever point out the two basic truths:
1) There is no imaginable way this and this and this will ever be done, and
2) Even if they were done, you still have a 6 billion human die off rather soon.
Which gets us to the I word.
Inevitable.
There will be a near-term pop decline of 6 billion. Or more. And it will be sudden, requiring about three years from start, which
will be in our lifetimes.
I can say this without dodging and equivocation because I don’t seek any subscribers.”
Black Buck: “In many ways your glee of the vanished Asoka…
This sentence is ill formed.
His insights on Osho for example, were very much garnered from the oral tradition.
The Pimp of Antelope has an oral tradition now? Do they sit it around reciting memorized passages of “The God That Failed” around a campfire?
Obviously he’s here trying to drum up astrological business,
It’s always been my policy to refuse professional readings for anybody I encounter on chat threads. Never happened, never will. I would not do a 3 minnute reading for a denizen of these threads even for a grand.
After all, it can’t be easy being a white astrologer…
All of the best astrologers have been White. I have found it easy to be myself.
And judging from the frequency and length of his posts,
You’re saying I post here more than you?
…business doesn’t appear to be ‘beating down the doors’.
I have long been paid well enough to give me time for political activism. Locational astrology works. As for business, I have long gotten more calls than I can deal with. (I recently raised my fees hoping to get less calls. It didn’t work.) Read it and weep, Black Buck.
Now, you seem to have a lot of time on your hands. How do you get so much free time to be an agent provacateur among white men with your tag-team involving a black sidekick pretendingn he’s a white-hating White lady from England?
Are you both on welfare? Figured.
Addendum:
His insights on Osho for example, were very much garnered from the oral tradition.
This sentence deserves more comment:
Black Buck, about those campfire-reading Rajneeshi ancestors: Are you sure that the insights were garnered “very much”? Or were they simply garnered?
What was it that made those insights garnered “very much?” from the tribal lore? Did he leave out all news reports and published accounts but only speak of heard murmerings?
And “garner” implies he left out some of the village Osho lore. While you were watching his garnering, did he leave any out?
Please advise.
This from Zero Hedge today describes rather well the true State of our Union:
The big story this past week, besides the annual State of the Delusion speech by Barack “It won’t add a cent to the deficit” Obama, was the fate of the passengers on the Carnival Triumph as their skyscraper sized ship was left adrift at sea for days without power. This 900 foot long, 100,000 ton goliath is one of the largest passenger cruise liners in the world, carrying 3,400 passengers and 1,100 crew members in luxurious splendor through warm Gulf of Mexico seas to sun drenched exotic isles. These ships are practically floating countries, with passengers treated to an endless American buffet of never ending quantities of bacon, sausage, biscuits, gravy, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, waffles, pizza, cheesecake, soda, beer and the rum drink of the day. It’s as if all 3,400 passengers have a SNAP card with no limit. There are retail stores, restaurants, bars, ice skating rinks, movie theaters, showplaces, and staff waiting on you hand and foot. No cash changes hands. You charge everything to your room number and then just pay with one of your 13 credit cards at the conclusion of your voyage into debt. Then you pay 18% interest on the 25 Funky Monkeys you consumed for the next 14 years. Cruising captures the essence of America as we traverse our voyage to hell.
The ordeal at sea of the Carnival Triumph and the leadership displayed by the Carnival management and executive officers is a microcosm of our declining empire. The $420 million Carnival Triumph was put into service in 1999 and has run continuously for the last fourteen years, with only periodic dry dock maintenance. These massive ships are replenished within hours of docking and depart within twelve hours of dumping their 3,400 passengers back onshore. The CEO and top management of Carnival care only about ROI and whether their stock options are vested. Their goal is to bilk the passengers out of as much cash as possible, while paying their foreign slave labor crew members as little as possible. The ships are registered in foreign countries for tax purposes and the crew members are mostly from third world countries. Carnival executives and shipboard officers have a history of recklessness, mismanagement, and willingness to endanger its passengers in its greedy thirst for short term profits. Ask the families of the 32 passengers killed in the sinking of the Costa Concordia.
The engine room fire that disabled the Triumph was not an isolated instance. This was the fourth engine room fire on a Carnival owned ship resulting in a loss of power, the others being the Tropicale in 1999, the Carnival Splendor in 2010, and the Costa Allegra in 2012. The Carnival Triumph should not have been at sea. It had been plagued with mechanical problems for weeks prior to the engine fire. Voluntarily taking the ship out of service would have hurt the 1st quarter earnings per share of this public company, therefore the leadership of Carnival told the engineers to patch it up and get it back out on the seas. Two weeks prior to the engine room fire the Carnival Triumph experienced propulsion issues that caused it to be five hours late returning to its Galveston home port on January 28, 2013 and delaying the ship’s departure for its next cruise until 8:00 pm that night. The ship departed, but the problems had not been fixed. The Associate Press reported a story about that cruise that provides a different assessment than the public relations drivel released the corporate office:
An email informed Debbi Smedley and other passengers that the propulsion problem would prevent them from docking at two ports. “Due to the limited cruising speed, our itinerary will be impacted. Depending on the progress of the repairs, we will either visit Progreso or Cozumel,” stated the email, signed by Vicky Rey, vice president of guest services. Smedley said the ship was in poor condition overall. During her five-day cruise, a water line broke in the hallway ceiling near her cabin, and a separate sewer line broke outside the main dining hall, she said. Metal was protruding from handrails on the staircases, and the elevators often did not work. Rather than docking in Progreso for only a few hours as planned, the ship stayed in the port for two days, and cruise workers repeatedly told passengers they were waiting for parts to fix a mechanical problem, according to Smedley.
Carnival’s public relations machine then admitted to an electrical problem with the ship’s alternator in the last voyage before the fire, but claimed it was repaired. What they didn’t reveal is that it was a Coast Guard inspection that revealed there was a short in the high voltage connection box of one of the ships generators causing damage to cables within the connection box. A directive with a compliance due date of February 27, 2013 was issued following the inspection requiring that “the condition of the ship and its equipment shall be maintained to conform with the regulations to ensure that the ship in all respects will remain fit to proceed to sea without danger to the ship or persons on board.” The Coast Guard Marine Information Safety and Law Enforcement System showed that this deficiency remained unresolved at the time of the subsequent fire and loss of power while at sea on February 10. So you have a company PR maggot lying and you have another useless Department of Homeland Security branch not enforcing regulations that are supposed to protect passengers. This is par for the course in our corporate fascist states of America today.
….. Passengers reported sewage sloshing around in hallways, flooded rooms and trouble getting enough to eat. Passengers waited in line for three hours to get a lousy hot dog. On the lower decks sewage came up through the shower drain, pooling in the sinks and flowing into the hallways. The allegory of the poor people on the lower decks being inundated with feces and living in wretched conditions, while the rich people living in luxury on the upper decks are blissfully ignorant of the fate of their fellow passengers is so easy to apply to our society in this day and age. The 1% glory in their stock market gains, while 20% of U.S. households are on food stamps.
These direct quotes from passengers and pictures taken onboard this voyage from hell provide a taste of what our future portends:
“We have to urinate in the shower. They’ve been passed out plastic bags to go to the bathroom. There was fecal matter all over the floor.”
“They’re walking around in a lot of urine and fecal matter, and the sewers are backing up.”
“The sanitation situation was gross and the stench was awful.”
“Just imagine the filth. People were doing crazy things and going to the bathroom in sinks and showers.”
“A lot of people were crying and freaking out.”
“We are trapped aboard a floating petri dish without power, air conditioning, or fresh water.”
“It’s degrading. Demoralizing, and then they want to insult us by giving us $500?
After reading a number of articles describing what happened before, during and after the engine fire aboard the Carnival Triumph, the parallels between this Ship of Horrors and our Ship of State become self-evident. You have the CEO and top executives of Carnival only concerned about their wealth, power and control of the company. Rather than thinking long term and making decisions that might be detrimental to their short term quarterly earnings, but insure the long –term financial health and reputation of the company, their decision was driven by their true masters on Wall Street. Instead of taking the ship off-line to make vital repairs and necessary investments, they just papered over signs of an imminent disaster and turned to public relations spin and propaganda as there preferred course of action. When disaster “suddenly” struck, the management and executive officers were unprepared, slow to react, and more concerned with their reputations than about the health, safety and welfare of the passengers. Much more could have been done to alleviate the misery of the 3,400 passengers. Carnival could have had a large generator helicoptered onto the deck and used to produce enough electricity to run some lights, ventilation, refrigeration and toilets. It appears that this ship had two engine rooms and only one was damaged by fire. They could have restarted the undamaged engine room and would have had enough power for most normal functions in the cabins of the ship, and probably some capability to propel the ship towards port. The disgraceful lack of urgency and refusal of top management to attempt every possible solution to this crisis is a lesson to be learned by passengers and citizens alike. They don’t care about you.
Rev. Wendell Gill’s experience onboard the Triumph provides a glimpse into our future. He immediately recognized the leadership of the ship was non-existent and it would be up to people helping people if they were to make it through the ordeal:
“What you had was a tale of two ships. You seldom saw a deck officer. I never saw the captain. Some of the people in the upper areas had plenty of air, but down below, it was unlivable. It was like a sauna of sewage. It was the people on the boat that saved Carnival. In an adverse situation, most people will rise to help — that’s just the human spirit.”
Reverend Gill and his wife noticed that no one from Carnival was stepping up to help the elderly and sick get around. The Gills, along with other concerned passengers, decided to take matters into their own hands, carting mattresses and bedding up from the lower decks. They witnessed the worst side of human nature in the inaction of Carnival leadership, along with some people becoming drunk, disorderly and fighting over food. But they also witnessed people coming together under difficult circumstances, with many in the upper cabins sharing their space with those from the lower uninhabitable decks. The passengers created their own shanty town of tents on deck and in the cooler hallways. The vast majority of people acted like decent human beings. Kindness, sharing, and helping one another won the day. This voyage through hell is a precursor of what lies ahead for everyone in this country. When vital systems fail, the lights go out, and your beloved government leaders are nowhere to be found, how will you fare? Don’t count on someone from the government to lead when we are set adrift in a sea of chaos created by them. The politicians, bankers and bureaucrats will be scrambling to save themselves. Your family, friends, and neighbors will be the only people you can rely on. Your caring government doesn’t really care about you.
Cruisin for a Bruisin
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
The similarities between the horrific voyage of the Carnival Triumph and the tragic voyage of the dysfunctional ship of state we call America are many. We have a ruling class consisting of the President, Congress, Judiciary, Central bankers, Media titans, and goliath corporation CEOs who care not for the citizens of this country. You are ignorant peasants in their eyes. They only care about maintaining and expanding their wealth, control and power through the complete capture of our financial markets, political system and media propaganda to the masses. The health and welfare of the peasants isn’t even on their radar screen. The ruling class steering this ship of fools have no interest in the truth or the best long –term interests of the country. The vast majority of the passengers on this impaired listing ship prefers to believe the propaganda and lies spewed by the captain and his minions. They prefer the illusion of safety and security to the truth about the real condition of this ship. When the engines of this ship come to a grinding halt, their illusions will be shattered. Big government will come up small when it counts. The government propaganda and public relations will be revealed as nothing but hot putrid air and fecal matter….”
Just a lovely analogy of our current state of affairs today! Cheers, C’fners! MM
Verily??? What are you, some kind of tent-revival preacher type?
It was interesting to watch the progression in my mid-size city. For a century we had a thriving downtown district. In 1970, we got our first mall out by the interstate, and all the retail stores moved there, leaving storefronts on Main Street vacant. Then, government offices expanded into the vacant storefronts, which brought back more retail outlets to serve the people who worked there. For a short time we had a healthy downtown and a healthy mall. Then, the big box stores arrived, one right after the other: Target, Shopko, Costco, WalMart, etc etc. The mall died a quick and speedy death after that, and because we have more big box stores than our population can support, most of them are struggling — especially because online shopping is now The Thing. Costco and WalMart are the only stores that are thriving. The others are either struggling or closed.
Your post was an excellent summation of our decline. An excellent article that reminds of JHK style of writing.
I thought it would be funny, Helen.
Regards,
Julian
“I think it’s funny when evolutionists take something like epicanthic folds on ancient Asians and say “it was cold so they grew those to keep the eyes warm.”
Evolutionary scientists don’t talk that way. They would say that Asians have epicanthic folds because once, a random event (say a stray cosmic ray hitting a DNA molecule) caused a mutation in one of an Asian’s cells that led to the folds.
Evolutionists yammering:
“East Asians are sometimes assumed to have evolved in a cold environment because of their narrow nostrils, which conserve heat, and the extra eyelid fat that insulates the eye.
Source:
East Asian Physical Traits Linked to 35,000-Year-Old Mutation
http://www.amren.com/news/2013/02/east-asian-physical-traits-linked-to-35000-year-old-mutation/
Yes, very interesting how you were absent in person (but I’m sure not in observing spirit) during those two weeks of uncovering in which “Asoka” admitted he was DoD. And Buck, as I think you know, that’s all I meant when I asked Kdog if he could look into the stats and see if Carol was too. I never said nor meant the revealing of a private individuals real identity, address, employment etc. I do value the American Tradition of Privacy. And I am appalled at the Left’s use of terror tactics in the Gun Debate and agains those who voted against Gay Marriage.
Dee has also been absent since the Uncovering. I guess she is still considering what her “take” on the situation is going to be. Despite her bluster, she is evidently not as shameless as you.
This article was on Economic Collapse today. It totally affirms JHK’s blogpost. Scroll down to the actual numbers of stores closing this year:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/retail-apocalypse-why-are-major-retail-chains-all-over-america-collapsing
Bring it on!
http://vimeo.com/59689349
Can someone point me to the post where someone here admitted to being a government spy?!
Bud, did you post ‘Reduce Spending’?
With 1 in 2 getting a check from Sam?
Let me know if this is accurate:
Stanford study:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr4ar1M32D0
From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Califor…
When the Chinese stop buying bonds, will Uncle Sam stop sending checks?
Janos … my reply to your question about supermassive galactic black holes is at the end of last week’s messages. Enjoy.
E.
If you are too obtuse to make the connection, no sense explaining.
Here is what [maybe] happened:
Author Profile Page k-dog | January 28, 2013 10:50 AM
24 Jan 15:33:33 Firefox 14.0
Win7
1440×900 United States Flag
Alexandria, Virginia
Us Department Of Defense Network
That’s Agent Asoka for those of you who only stop by on Monday.
……………………………….
Cool – keep going. What’s Dark Energy? Homeostasis is one of the great mysteries. Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? Is there not an intelligence at work? I’m reminded of that quote in various forms attributed to both Haldane and Eddington: The World is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.
Haldane has some great quotes. Atheists, see his quote about being dead. Socialists, the one about being the right size.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane
The Old Negro Space Program – a Film not by Ken Burns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xJzAYYrX8
“stirring up gullible male interest and emotions”???
I have little use for poster C but what ever happened to the notion that all us adults are responsible for our own behavior? Do you think men should get an exemption because of emotions stirred up?
I want an exemption, too! When some richie snob leaves the keys in his (or her) Rolls, deliberately inflaming my envy to the point at which I “just have to” get in the Rolls and drive away, do I get to tell the judge that I was in the grip of uncontrollable emotion?
The Soup
Year 3,512,667,899: the planet earth has become a Soup of entities, the accumulation of millions of years of devices, TV sets, cars, engines, jets, computers, books, thoughts, computer programs, you name it, nay, you imagine it, no matter how far out we will be drowning in a never ending amount of stuff (and histories and information and recordings of all the thought processes that have ever been, all of the lives and such) and so forth. The crust of the earth is the accumulation of machines all crushed onto each other, trillions of microprocessors, old ones, new ones, trillions of chemicals, trillions of car engines, electric motors, old skyscrapers that fell apart, trillions of old rockets (since by the year 3,000 we will already have been constructing a million skyscrapers a year and a million rockets a year through huge economies of scales, robots, computers, artificial intelligence, you name it, the Science Fiction Future Finally Achieved with all kinds of toys, everything imaginable and the population will have reached 1 trillion people, all super rich and scientists and such) the crust goes down for 500 miles full of all of this stuff, and trillions of other things, all kinds of things, radios, chemicals, trillions of old nuclear atomic plants, trillions of old modified brain experiments, all mixed up and crushed together (and liquified together, all phases of matter, a plasma of things, vapor and a liquid and a solid of all of this), the wildest combination of all kinds of disjoint and unrelated items, products, houses, buildings, forests, biological things, mechanical things, robots, electronic things, chips, and all kinds of wacky and crazy brain structures, all kinds of combinations of new mind experiments that have been produced, and created for generations of humans: just think that today, in the year 2013, a very primitive time compared to the millions of years of industrial production waiting to happen, we produce only a billion cell phones a year and 50 million cars a year, by the year 2200 we will be producing 10 billion cell phones a year and a billion cars a years and such, and untold numbers of other things, a huge amount of things, wild things, and such.
And then all of this will be in an ocean of electrons, an ocean of neutrons, and an ocean of all kinds of new invented particles, and even make believe particles, make it all up, make believe and create anything at all as in Free Physics as in invent anything you want, imagine anything you want, no matter how far out and impossible, nay, the more impossible the better (and the crust will be full of all kinds of old Virtual Realities all incomprehensible, all mixed, all illogical and such) we will have a huge amount of all of the planet drowning in huge oceans of all kinds of wacky elementary particles produced by trillions of old particle accelerators that produced all kinds of wild stuff. And now imagine all of these things reacting, undergoing a kind of phase (a phase change) of natural evolution, chips that self evolve and connect to car engines to reactors, to wires, all kinds of new circuits that organize themselves spontaneously, all kinds of new brains that evolve out of this soup of stuff, all mixed up and the combinations are never ending, the reactions amongst all of these things are never ending, all mixed, all creating repetitive patterns, self reinforcing repetitive patterns that evolve and create new species, mixed species made up of chips and pieces of metals, and biological remains, and Memories, old tapes, old records, old VHS tapes and all kinds of memories mixed and combined and all, and so forth, all kinds of crazy chemical reactions and electronic reactions and trillions of programming languages all mixed up with matter, trillions of programs, trillions of pieces of brains, neural networks connected to the strangest chunks of matter, and so forth, imagine how many possible combinations of items can be combined and can evolve from such a wild soup and such.
And such is our future: every new item produced today, every new thing will accumulate into a huge soup that will mix them all up in the end, that will create a new form of matter that will undergo all kinds of incredible reactions, evolutions, all kinds of new Experience Sets and New Minds and Brains that will emerge from all of this wild stuff put together in the wildest ways : a new brain made up of a piece of skyscraper and piece of engine and a piece of jet and a piece of rocket and pieces of chips and pieces of anything else, and this brain will experience a new life form, a new universe with new laws of physics and such: we are producing the building blocks of random, we are mixing the chemicals of the universe in such a way as to create the new soup that will produce new things in the future…
THUS SPOKE THE 8 MAN
Janos,
We don’t yet know what Dark Energy is but we know that there is something out there with a “repulsive” force that pushes inward on the galaxies it contains through repulsion. There are many candidates for Dark Energy (and it’s sibling, Dark Matter … even in the “dark” world, matter and energy are just two faces of the same thing as exemplified in E = MC^2). However, which of the candidates is correct is still speculation.
E.
From:
http://instantsingularity3.blogspot.it/
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.it/
888
8
8
8
888
With 1 in 2 getting a check from Sam?
=========
I knew you’d come around and see it our way. Yes, the MIC absorbs the majority of the tax revenue collected, and then some, meaning the rest it puts on the credit card that will never be paid back except with the blood, sweat and tears of those who survive the collapse to serve the Oligarchy.
Nearly sixty cents out of every FIT dollar collected combined with the fact that the SS Fund has been raided since the days of Reagan and REAL dollars replaced with worthless IOU’s. Much of that goes to the military in many forms, some official, some unofficial.
So-called “conservatives” no longer have any credibility. Same goes for so-called “liberals.” Anyone who self-describes as such needs to shut the hell up. You’re buffoons. Bozos. Shit for brains. Get out. Get lost. Go find a spider hole and hibernate for the rest of eternity. Or, put a gun to your head and pull the trigger and spare the rest of us your bullshit. Anything but this incessant ideological nonsense you vomit that you hypocritically don’t abide by.
It’s imperative the younger generations be given a true education, not a traditional education forced down their throats at the point of a gun by the likes of E. The curriculum would include the movie Burn!, starring Marlon Brando and directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064866/
On further review, Big Boxes reversing course, to me at least, is not necessarily a harbinger of collapse. Let’s face it, there was way too much capacity in this segment of the economy, so if there is a drawdown, it’s only to eliminate that unnecessary capacity. Once the grocery stores start running out of food, then we can talk collapse. Once the planes stop flying, then we can talk collapse. Once the electricity cuts off, then we will talk collapse. Once the emergency rooms and hospitals shut down, then we talk collapse. Once people start dropping like flies, then we can talk collapse. Until then, you’re just whistling Dixie.
Nuclear Fusion power in a decade. Brought to you by Lockheed Martin. If nuclear fusion ever comes on board, there will be no collapse. Time to start invading countries full of lithium deposits for the battery packs in Tesla cars…
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-02/fusion-power-could-happen-sooner-you-think
And thoughts become machines, between pieces of matter, a thoughts to matter converter and such. And Matter becomes thoughts and so forth, and and the accumulation of all thoughts into trillions of complex machines with trillions of complex mechanisms, coils, pistons, clockworks, ranging from nanomter sizes to kilometer large and all the sizes in between, al kinds of mechanisms and gears and clockwork pieces of all sizes and all kinds of connection, so many pieces and those machines were a representation of a thought path and such, and all of the thoughts paths of trillions of people for trillions of years crystallized into these incredible number of machines, all sized gears a 10 mile long piston turning a micrometer grear turning an inch long microprocessor with thousands or trillions of transistors thinking things and all kinds of wicked and crazy combinations, disjoint, imagine it to the utmost, and all kinds of converters, things converted into ideas converted into matter converted into steel converted into thoughts and so forth and the opposite occurs and the events create the thoughts that create new events and the other way around the events and the chunks of matter are the representation of thoughts and so forth (not thoughts that manipulate matter and decide, but matter manipulates thoughts and decides, and if 0 is thought and 1 is matter, what is 0.567 ? and what is 344 ? and what is minus 3444 and what is WSXX ? and the pebble ? and the planet and so forth and the car tire ? and so forth, super abstractions….), and all of these thoughts that are solidified are under miles wide crust of the future earth, all condensed and achieved and so forth, and time itself is disconnected, and past and future mixed, numbers mixed, large and small mixed, all upside down, all confused, a planet confused… space merged into time merged into matter merged into concepts merged into thoughts merged into machines and so forth…all hybrids and mixed entities being made up of so many different disjoint parts and such…
APE STAR
By 1890 every town and city in the US had some sort of Department Store on Main Street where citizens could buy just about anything. Many of these, the most successful ones, were started up by Jewish shopkeepers, for example, the Auerbach Family who came to Hartford from NYC in the 1840s and started GFox. Bob Dylan’s family owned a Department Store in Minnesota. Everybody knows about Macys and Gimbels, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck. Jim, in order to survive these companies had to establish stores in the suburbs. That’s where the action was. The ones that didn’t went out of business. As you have written American cities began a steep decline starting about 1950, mostly because of the automobile. As far as ‘Big Box’ goes, blame the architects. Target is a good example of this. They saw the handwriting on the wall and established stores in the suburbs in 1957. In 1950 the first department stores began vacating Hartfords main street with Lord & Taylor moving out into farmland in West Hartford. By 1985 they were all gone and downtown Hartford was just empty storefronts. The demographics of these cities changed as well, almost overnight, and women became afraid to go into them to shop. There are many reasons for the proliferation of these Big Box Chain Stores. I don’t see them disappearing until the automobile itself disappears from the American Landscape.
==CD
Yes, if true. But fuel for autos is not the only thing for which oil products are used. What about uses in food production? No oil, not enough food for 7-9 billion people.
In other words, we need new technologies to keep our civilization running at such a population level, not just fusion power.
A very nice analysis –
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/hellfire-morality-and-strategy
The summary paragraph:
“The problem of unmanned aerial vehicles is that they are so effective from the U.S. point of view that they have become the weapon of first resort. Thus, the United States is being drawn into operations in new areas with what appears to be little cost. In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles. A strategy of mitigation using airstrikes is possible, but such a campaign must not become geographically limitless. Unmanned aerial vehicles lead to geographical limitlessness. That is their charm; that is their danger.”
Endless expansion vs an Oscillating Universe –
Is the Higgs Boson the “God (god?) Particle?”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21499765
“If the calculation on vacuum instability stands up, it will revive an old idea that the Big Bang Universe we observe today is just the latest version in a permanent cycle of events.”
Also from the article, we have the following quote from a PhD physicist concerning why the Large Haldron Collider is unavailable for investigations for the next two years:
“The LHC will be down for two years to do certain repairs, fix the splices between the magnets, and to do maintenance and stuff.” – Dr. Lykken –
“…maintenance ‘and stuff’…” ???
“and STUFF” !
Have fun with this one, K/Q.
Doesn’t your daughter talk like this?
Do you suppose Dr. Lykken’s undergrad degree was in Women’s Studies? haha!
Something contextual from Dmitri O.,
“Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned. Rather, driving us all to Stage 5 will require that a concerted effort be made at each of the intervening stages. That all the players seem poised to make just such an effort may give this collapse the form a classical tragedy – a conscious but inexorable march to perdition…”
(Brief sketch of the stages.)
“Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed [to] resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.”
Okay, we might want to consider that these might not occur in a linear fashion, but that some/all may run concurrently and in differing degrees.
(Cannibalism is not out of the realm of possibility; it simply depends on how many are around to get VERY hungry. I see it as a symptom within the crash. Afterwards? A returned taboo, or an accepted practice? It’s fairly dangerous to the health as it’s a great vector for spreading diseases within a population.)
I see them all as happening [in varying degrees] right now; some are well underway, while others seem to be approaching.
stage 1: advanced
stage 2: just gearing up
stage 3: only wishful thinking is propping up the facade; those that desire direction (sheep) will submit to the new Lords of a Suicidal Empire in a desperate attempt to “sustain the unsustainable”
stage 4: not yet seen in any meaningful way
stage 5: resources not yet scarce enough [for most] for this to make an appearance
You know where to go to get more in depth on his “Stages” outlines. I’d be interested to know where others think we are in these indicative progressions/digressions.
And finally: Sorry for the loooooong post! It was as condensed as I thought it could be squashed.
Yes, and we should remember that roads are simply, “ribbons of oil”. I notice that they’re not being repaired as often or as well.
Ha!
“Stuff” is good; we all know that. ;o)
Why is everything in our universe continuing to accelerate away from its’ origin (since the beginning of our concept of time)? Strange to think that our universe may end in a frozen, lightless limbo.
I go now to your link-age to see if this is addressed. Thanks.
I’m sure by Steve’s standards, he’s a resounding success. Mission Accomplished, and yet he’s still here, attempting to do more even though the corporate vampire has taken everything he had to offer. He’s now taken on a new role. His children have been absorbed into the mainstream. The goal is that they too will make the same offering as him, but there is never any guarantee, just probability. Perhaps this miserable sot is sticking around to grease the skids for that offering expected of his progeny. He now has grandchildren. They must not be allowed to stray. Steve will stay as long as it takes for the baton of total sacrifice to be passed successfully, and if it’s not, at least he died trying.
The reality is, even in conventional terms, Steve is a disappointing underachiever. On paper, for whatever it’s worth, he is far and away the most intelligent of us eight children. He was the model student before he was hit with an illness in his freshman year of high school that nearly took his life. He was a straight A student, dutifully completing assignments and projects on time and never missing a day of school. That all changed when he fell ill with a raging fever and developed a severe rash of pin-sized red dots over his entire body. The family physician, one who still made housecalls, had no diagnosis so he referred him to a specialist in the local area. It was determined Steve’s kidneys were malfunctioning and they ran batteries of tests to determine the cause of the fever and rash. The local specialist capitulated and referred to specialists at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia. Once there, after another prolonged battery of tests, Steve was diagnosed with Aplastic anemia, a condition that occurs when your body stops producing enough new blood cells, leaving you feeling fatigued and at higher risk of infections and uncontrolled bleeding. With current medical advances, this is rarely a life-threatening disease, and the prognosis for those who are diagnosed with this affliction is quite positive. But that was not the case in the early seventies. The prognosis for this condition at that time was not positive, and Steve was not expected to live.
At the time, I was eight or nine, so it was difficult to grasp the enormity of the situation. All I knew is that Steve was sick and wasn’t here. What was nice about it was my parents were distracted and I was left to my mischievous devices. When the cat’s away, the mice will play, and play we did. Those were blissful days. I wreaked havoc and was never held to account, all thanks to Steve’s sacrifice. Steve was throwing himself on the alter from an early age as you can see, albeit this particular throwing was involuntary. Still, I was grateful, but it wasn’t all good.
As the oldest child, my parents leaned heavily on Joanne to help keep the litter in line. When Steve initially fell ill and was hospitalized, Mom and Dad informed her that she would not be able to attend the prom. She was furious. The prom meant everything to her. She had anticipated it for four years, or longer. She had picked out the dress and secured her dream date, and now Steve had to go and ruin everything. She lashed out at my parents and in the heat of the moment said what should never be said, and thought what should never be thought. She said, “I hope Steve dies.” In the silence between the utterance of that selfish and callous statement, and the scorned fury it was about to unleash in Mom and Dad, especially Dad, you could have heard a pin drop. It may be the reason I have an aversion to deafening silences, so traumatic was this incident to me. Needless to say, Dad beat her to a pulp without leaving a physical scratch and/or bruise on her. He was quite adept at manhandling you without actually physically harming you. The psychological impact was the same as being bruised and/or scratched, but with the benefit that there was no evidence trail left behind for the department of social services to base a case upon. Joanne laid motionless on the floor for hours after that beating. Periodically, I would come close to see if she was still breathing and when she noticed my presence, she would start to sob and say, “Michael, please help me.” What was I supposed to do? Kill Steve for her? Instead, I stroked her hair and told her I was sorry Dad did that to her. I was too young to detect melodrama. Joanne was the queen of it.
The doctors were wrong. Steve did live. They said it was a miracle, but sent him on his way with the caveat that his life could very well be shortened as a result of the illness. Allegedly, they pulled Mom and Dad aside, and in the strictest confidence, asserted that Steve may not make it to forty, fifty max. That confidence was consistently betrayed over the years. Steve’s Sword of Damocles became a Red Badge of Courage, and Steve was rendered untouchable. No one was allowed to criticize or challenge him in any way, but he had carte blanche to run rough shod over you, and you had to take it because he was going to die before the rest of us. It’s true. I put it to the test, and ironically, Joanne played surrogate to my parents in dulling out the punishment. Steve had come back from the hospital and was still very weak and frail. A party was thrown for his return home, and our cousins, who I adored, were invited for the occasion. I was in a giddy mood because the cousins were there and I lost control of my impulses and made a joke at Steve’s expense. It was inconsiderate and wrong of me. There is no disputing that, but in no way was it the equivalent of saying “I hope Steve dies.” I can’t even remember what I said, exactly, but I do remember what happened next was not in proportion to what I said. Before I knew it, I felt a sudden and stark pain in the periphery of the top of my skull and my head was jerking this way and that, involuntarily. Joanne had grabbed me by the hair and jerked me out of my seat. She then proceeded to smack me in the face whilst continuing to shake me around by the hair all the while saying “how could you say something like that you inconsiderate little brat. He almost dies, you know, and here you are making fun of him.” Of course, I began to cry, or maybe even shriek, more so out of shear embarrassment, although what she was doing did physically hurt. Dad’s beatings didn’t evoke as much pain as this. His beating were perfunctory. This beating had some passion behind it. Either way, it was enough to get Mom’s attention, and she quickly made her way over to us and pulled Joanne away from me. At the time, I could not understand why Joanne did what she did. It was the first, and the last, time she ever did anything like that to me. I now know why she did, but at the time, it was a mystery, and for the longest time thereafter, I held a grudge against her for it. She was projecting her guilt onto me. The irony is, she never did apologize to Steve for saying what she said about him, but I was made to apologize to him that day. She was eighteen. I was seven or eight. Where’s the Justice in that? Nowhere. Justice in our house was random and arbitrary. You couldn’t predict it. More often than not, you were made to pay for the sins of others. The perfect Catholic family.
Steve was never right after that illness. He still remains innately intelligent by conventional standards, but he lost his will to achieve excellence. He withdrew into a shell. I actually felt sorry for him in those initial years after the illness. He became an introverted geek. Until his second year after graduating high school when he decided to remake himself and form an image. That’s the best way to describe the transformation I witnessed. He created an image. It was purposeful. He did not go to college, which is astonishing considering his past achievements. He went to work for Dad in the grocery store in Germantown; Foodtown next to Foy Buick and across the street from the recently constructed Pantry Pride Supermarket. He earned enough money to get a new car; a 1976 Monte Carlo, burgundy with a darker maroon landau top and two-tone deep maroon accent on the wings. I loved that car and felt proud when I was with my friends and they would “oooh” and “ahhhh” when he drove by. “That’s my brother,” I would proudly think to myself. He then proceeded to teach himself how to drink by locking himself in his room with a fifth of vodka and a frozen container of limeade. Most of the time, he would stay in there all night until he passed out. Sometimes he would come out and get in the car and drive somewhere. There’s a killer on the road. He bought a completely new wardrobe and an entire selection of popular eight track tapes to include the dreaded Meatloaf. He started smoking. Marlboros. He was a new man. He even developed a new hairstyle. He was coming out of his shell in style, leather jacket and all. He was ready to tackle the mean streets after a long hibernation. The rest is history. Look at him now. He didn’t tackle the mean streets. The mean streets tackled him. Who cares, anyway? Not me. Not anymore.
C. Newsquest said, “When does the military implode? Surely it must, right? How could it possibly continue unabated with dwindling tax revenue to fuel its expansion? Once it implodes, what fills the power vacuum that is created, if anything?”
No, the military never implodes. It will be the last thing standing. Its always surprising to me that most laypeople forget that the military is the government. It is the absolute bedrock of our nation. If they run out of gas to put in the tank, they can take the gas out of your car, or the station. If their barracks burn down they can sleep in your bed.
If the entire economy collapsed, the military will keep running. If Washington gets nuked, the military will still be there. If the entire continent of North America is depopulated by an Asteroid, the military will still be there.
If and when TSHTF and TEOTWAWKI happens, the military will be a better place to be than most places.
Also, She said, “Once people start dropping like flies, then we can talk collapse. Until then, you’re just whistling Dixie.”
On CFN we talk collapse. Its a collapse website- a doomer blog. All other talk is the product of Trolls. Can this be disputed?
Narrowly defined, Trolling is attempting to push a contrary agenda in a community established to discuss a particular point of view.
By this definition, Asoka is definitely a Troll, whereas Olds69 or RaduVoda is not.
Olds69 is not a Troll because his message is neither coherent nor contrary.
RaduVoda is not a Troll because his message is not contrary.
If you come on CFN simply to debate its premises, you are in fact a Troll.
Julian, I am not surprised that you haven’t responded to my questions posted last Sunday at 5:53PM (maybe you missed them) but I’ll give it another shot anyway. You claimed to be a successful astrologer because you are results oriented…
…please tell me what these “results” are when you finish a 30 minute talk (I guess “talk” means a lecture or chart reading). Does your subject(s) find a job at his next interview after a year on the dole? Do women with life-long fucked-up relationships with their mothers somehow reconcile? (Poor relationships with mothers seems to be the near exclusive preserve of women… maybe you can tell me why.) Do they discover that Jesus is their Lord and Savior?
Please tell me how your clients get $250 worth of benefit from you telling them how they correlate with the planets, the “houses,” the whole schmear. I could use a few laughs.
Since I am totally ignorant of the astrologer vocation please also let me know how it relates, if at all, to palm reading, tarot cards, phrenology, tea leaves, chicken bones and entrails, Ouija boards, divining rods, bird flocks, … what have I left out?
69699 said “we are mixing the chemicals of the universe in such a way as to create the new soup that will produce new things in the future…”
Poetic stuff, Oldsmobile.
I think I can condense your premise thusly:
We are destroying the world of biology to make a world of lifeless garbage and trash.
The conclusion??
The end result will be the creation of new “information”, but quite a lot of it will be redundant. Written against the cosmic backdrop of the solar system, our lifeless rock, filled with junk, will contain not much more than one message: shit is serious. Things with value are fragile. Biology depends on stable elementary environments. Intelligence is not sufficient to produce sustainable and perpetual planetary civilizations.
In other words, a whole lot of useless junk like the remainders hauled out of the neighbor’s home after he passed away face down in his Corn flakes.
“Do they sit around reciting memorized passages of “The God That Failed” around a campfire?”
Thats funny. I skimmed thru that book once at a library.
For similar on another ‘group’ check out
‘MONKEY ON A STICK’, about the harry krishna killers.
Creating a Totally Unrelated, Totally
Break down all of the conceptual barriers between words, concepts, things, stuff, items, entities concepts and so forth. Mix them all up, make them become all squashed together, crushed together into new things, incredible new entities having wild metaphysical properties and more, all kinds of ever more, create a new metaphysical material, a new substance made up of bits, and VHS tapes, and books and chips and skyscrapers and forests and thoughts and concepts all mixed up, all connected and disconnected together and such. Let the words melt into each other and let words melt into the things they represent and then into the things they don’t represent so you create a new fluid made up of words and things mixed together, a new phase transition of things into a new metaphysical material and such. Let the conceptual barriers melt down and into other things, melt everything together, mix up everything totally.
So the crust of the earth will be all of these things mixed together, crushed together, books, computer programs, engines, machines, robots, words, concepts, words, numbers, all kinds of items, all kinds of disjoint, incoherent things put together and mixed together, and these things become a liquid, a ball of items all mixed up.
A liquid, and condense into a liquid and then evaporate into a gas and then you mix even other things into it, like emotional states, and pictures, and you mix in time and then space and then numbers and then engines, all kinds of things disjoint, you really add apples and car tires and create a monolithic new item you don’t apply arithmetic and logic such as you need to add apples to apples, no, you don’t the opposite, you mix all kinds of things totally unrelated, you add them up, and you multiply them and so forth ever more crazy, what is a pebble and number 4 and a complex mathematical formula and a v8 engine all mixed up and together ? a new thing, a new groovy thing, a new possibility for wicked modified minds to interact with, to have new incredible Information Relationships with and so forth.
Break the logic and grammar of how things are connected and related and how they interact, break the barriers, make them interact in the craziest ways, make them go crazy, the crust is the condensation of ideas, and concepts and memories and emotions and metals and stones and so forth, all mixed up, all melted together or exploded together into a gas, vaporized into trillions of bits and pieces and then solidified again in some incredible new combination and ever so and insert on top of that new piece of material new concepts and new grammars, symbols, signals, events and new languages, and demolish all languages and create new things and connect all the random things in the most incredible way and go for it, connect a symbol to a piece of steel (but the resulting liquid is different if the symbol is written on a piece of paper, is only imagined, is written on a memory in bits and so forth) be crazy, play make believe, the future is there for you to grab…
THE APE GURU, GURU GURU
THE GURU
I really don’t understand JHK’s take on retail establishments surviving at all. There will still have to be manufacturing. Ozone pointed out that the US sells and ships away a great deal of it’s scrap metal. So, not only am I left to wonder who will be doing the manufacturing, but where will the raw material come from?
There are days that I work at landfills. Enormous monuments of human stupidity. I watch the methane literally bubble up out of the many ditches and pools of water and realize that this going on 24/7 all around the world.
Whatever we make now will have to be made to last.
For however much longer this environment lasts.
My solution is to spend as much time as you can with the people you care about.
I think it’s about time you went to see Dr. Drew Pinsky.
Bustin Jay? What kind of name is that, anyway? It’s stoopid. Take your crap out into public, Jay, and you’ll be busted real quick-like. You hear that you cowardly maggot?
“I’m sure by Steve’s standards, he’s a resounding success. Mission Accomplished…As the oldest child, my parents leaned heavily on Joanne to help keep the litter in line….I was too young to detect melodrama. Joanne was the queen of it…Steve’s Sword of Damocles became a Red Badge of Courage,…Joanne played surrogate to my parents in dulling out the punishment…Joanne had grabbed me by the hair and jerked me out of my seat…He went to work for Dad in the grocery store in Germantown; Foodtown next to Foy Buick and across the street from the recently constructed Pantry Pride Supermarket. He earned enough money to get a new car; a 1976 Monte Carlo, burgundy with a darker maroon landau top and two-tone deep maroon accent on the wings.
All this happened in England?
(First it said I was the “aspiring writer.”)
“…You claimed to be a successful astrologer because you are results oriented…Does your subject(s) find a job at his next interview after a year on the dole? Do women with life-long fucked-up relationships with their mothers somehow reconcile? (Poor relationships with mothers seems to be the near exclusive preserve of women… maybe you can tell me why.) Do they discover that Jesus is their Lord and Savior?”
Basically, yeah. Next.
“Thats funny. I skimmed thru that book once at a library. For similar on another ‘group’ check out ‘MONKEY ON A STICK’, about the harry krishna killers.
The Hare Krsnas were a very cool bhakti-yoga movement, imo, until too many Jews started running it. Just saying.
In my town, which was famous as a majority White town in the past few decades — and a very attractive place to live — the young Whites are denied jobs and passed over for any sort of non-White, or anybody that marks the box “I’m gay.” Already in a few years all retail stores and restaurants, to give an example, are teeming with blacks, Mexicans, and homosexuals. I mean, you’ll see, in a staff of some 20 people, 5-10 of them that are obviously gay. They also get their queer on; are in your face about it by what they wear, because of their privileged status. It’s bizarre.
I walked down the checkout stands the other day at the Fred Meyer store where they have about eight lanes. This was in the middle of the day when the more privileged employees get to have their shifts. Every single clerk was an African-American or a Mexican. Not a single White. Just 5 years ago it was the opposite, and I had been delighted to arrive at a town that reminded me of the one I grew up in. I was heaving delighted breaths everywhere I looked after years in California. Now this. One of my kids is having a terribly difficult time getting a job. And she lives in a white-founded town also. The only whites you see now in the big stores are the long-time employees, grandfathered. Totally bizarre. It must be discouraging for young Whites in this town founded by their own White fathers & mothers.
If you want to ‘be the competition’, it seems its quite popular. 500$ an hour!!![taking candy from a baby].
Google: Astrology
About 91,200,000 results
If you are too obtuse to make the connection, no sense explaining.
==========
FF, you have a condition that I long ago noted Vlad suffers from, as well. It is like autism where the afflicted person fails to pick up on the meaning of facial expressions and other cues that normal people understand intuitively.
If you carefully re-read the post that offended you you should see two things:
. it is self-deprecating humor (since I am the one who always goes off-topic to make spelling corrections) and
. it ends with a winking smiley face
Thank you. Exactly what I’ve been saying about Busted Jay. He’d never say those things in person. But what are you going to do, Ape Guru? The world is full of these types. They’re a product of their upbringing, and I agree, if this is the opposition, it’s already a lost cause. Remember the low-life, white cretins in To Kill A Mockingbird. That’s Busted Jay and his ilk here. No intelligent and sane white would consider that their tribe, even if they shared the same hue of pink in their skin.
JCL posted this a few days ago:
“Rumors have it Sir Chakrapani has fallen asleep at his ‘readings’.
I have heard similar things from some of my clients who have gone to him. He’s getting rich on the gullibility of westerners who ascribe too much magic to easterners and Indians. I have never been impressed by Vedic astrology generally.
According to People Magazine, Chakrapani does have expenses. They include 3 secretaries to book him.
Busy guy.
Just to keep you informed and up-to-date, Kyooshtik. I still have not read E’s or Wanda’s posts. I see that Wanda a couple of posts up, has posted, but I skipped right over it. They remind me of that awful bathroom in the middle of Central Park in New York. The one that looks like it’s never been cleaned. NEVER. It’s horrible, and I would not use it. I found some bushes instead, and if need be, I would have soiled myself rather than use that bathroom from hell.
Now Ms. Newquist-of-England-who-hates-White-People-and-Thinks-About-American-Blacks-And-Slavery-24/7 — tells us of the time she pooped in the bushes in Central Park.
Basically, yeah. Next.
===========
Like I said, I’m not surprised you didn’t answer.
“According to People Magazine, Chakrapani does have expenses. They include 3 secretaries to book him. Busy guy.
Yeah, probably all Indian harpies. Poor guy!
“Remember the low-life, white cretins in To Kill A Mockingbird.”
See what all these decades of anti-white propaganda have warped black minds? A black mind is a terrible thing to warp.
“Like I said, I’m not surprised you didn’t answer.”
It wasn’t a sincere question. And no, you can’t have a reading. Go fish.
You don’t know when I’m kidding either. Does that make you autistic – since you can’t read my cognitive or cyber face signals?
Changing the subject: Your motto in regards to your hair GEL – FITE you’d rather, than switch.
They remind me of that awful bathroom in the middle of Central Park in New York. The one that looks like it’s never been cleaned. NEVER.
==========
It’s like my wife says about me. “You and electronic gadgets don’t seem to get along.” It’s not that I don’t get along with electronics. Rather, something about me makes the electronics turn against me.
It’ll be two years on May 17th that I was the officiant that married my daughter and her boyfriend (they had lived together about 10 years) in Central Park, NYC. It was raining and the wedding party huddled under a small gazebo. We all took turns scampering to the nearby park John. You couldn’t eat off the floor but it was passable.
Maybe it is something about YOU that cause the Johns in public places to turn against you just like you somehow manage to turn all of ClusterFuck Nation against you.
If you have White skin, shouldn’t you use that bathroom as a way of atonement for you sins? What right do you have not to use that bathroom, in the middle of Central Park?
Or maybe it’s just that I have higher standards than you, and most people. If it was the same bathroom, and you and the others didn’t have a problem with it, I will make sure to turn down any invites to your home, and I sure as hell hope none of you are engaging in oral sex. Yuck!
I find it hard to believe YOU were the officiant of anything besides your over-sized television. What a sight that must have been. The only thing it was missing was Wanda giving free astrology readings to the wedding party and guests. Did you crack any jokes about black linguistics that sent a nervous murmur of laughter through the congregation like a titmouse being chased by a cat?
I guess I’m not as in tune with the zeitgeist as I had thought, then. I’ve eaten far too much at Burger King in the past few years, but I’m pretty far out of the loop on movies, amazing many of my friends with how few of them I’ve seen, and I only keep an eye on the hip churches secondhand. Mars Hill is the one I’ve been following most closely. It sounds like a scary place for anyone who takes it at all seriously but has misgivings about it, and a great place to lose new friends when shunned by the community. If I went there, I’d probably just go to flirt with the single ladies and sic some cops or attorneys on the social control freaks if they got too out of hand in their dealings with me. I’ve fallen with informal cultists a few times in the past, and for the most part my reaction is disgust and anger, not traumatization.
The sick thing is that the cultural touchstones you named as crucial for understanding the zeitgeist are really quite reasonable ones. A huge swath of the public really has been brainwashed with that shit. Television, too. There are a few shows that I would like to watch more often than I do, especially Psych and South Park, but I have lost all patience with the manipulation of TV advertising. Sometimes I react with snickering amusement, and sometimes with earnest disgust, but in either event most of the ads make me feel like the only sane person in the asylum.
On the street where I’ve lived 5 years in Portland the best located coffee shop is owned by a Vietnamese. To get to it I walk past a manicure joint owned by Chinese. The men who help run the stable of Chinese women as they tend to the feet of young White women — have never smiled or made eye contact with me through 5 years of daily passbys. Across the street is a busy sushi bar owned by a Japanese. Every block you walk you can find 1-3 little businesses run by various kinds of Asians, whether a restaurant, another manicure shop, or a hair salon. The most popular sports bar, another block away, is owned by a Palestinian Jew. The “quick shop” on the corner (open until 2 am) is owned by some Iraqis, believe it or not. Notwithstanding Portland’s affirmative action law that keeps gays and blacks heavily employed, they somehow manage to hire only other Iraqis at this shop. They look at their White customers with a certain distant reserve, never really chatting much or getting too personal. I notice, too, that the Japanese sushi owner has only a certain look in his employees. A block to the east is the other closeby quick shop. It’s run by a Korean woman.
It seems that for young Portlanders — at least the young people who grew up here — that there is a hell of a lot of unnecessary competition when it comes to opening up businesses and shops.
“If you have White skin, shouldn’t you use that bathroom as a way of atonement for you sins? What right do you have not to use that bathroom, in the middle of Central Park?”
Because Carolonius is hatin’ those evil white people in To Kill A Mockingbird and he wanted to point out their bathroom was dirty.
“It’s not that I don’t get along with electronics. Rather, something about me makes the electronics turn against me.
In astrology this would be termed a 3rd House problem, and would be associated with a chronic affliction affecting your Third House, a situation with your Mercury. I have a similar situation in my locational chart.
So, how did Joanne’s the prom go anyways ?
So, how did Joanne’s prom go anyways ?
“Or maybe it’s just that I have higher standards than you, and most people.
You might have thrown in the word “commoners” just to keep the 1890’s English thing going.
Your standards are higher so you poop in the bushes.
“I will make sure to turn down any invites to your home,
Nobody’s going to invite you to their home, even though you said you relished the thought of meeting one of the fellows here in one ham-handed attempt to be be a flirtatious Englishwoman.
…and I sure as hell hope none of you are engaging in oral sex. Yuck!
I already told you that English ladies don’t use “hell” in this way. And why are you bringing up oral sex?
The only thing it was missing was Wanda giving free astrology readings…
I note that Wanda is a typical “black lady” name. I have never even known a woman named Wanda. Was it one of your aunts? A nice anti-racist English lady would not like to make fun of “Wandas.”
Truly, your post are nothing but whistling Dixie at this point.
“Did you crack any jokes about black linguistics that sent a nervous murmur of laughter through the congregation like a titmouse being chased by a cat?
Carolonius Funkypriss suspects whites often make inappropriate jokes about black folk at their wedding parties. And the English Lady layer — is suspicious about this too.
When I was young, I had alot of argument with these fundamentalists, but I’ve come to have alot of respect for Prabhupad, if not most of his disciples. The World is much harder than I knew and his rules and regulations are one way of navigating it. At the height of American prosperity, he told his disciples that America was doomed for going of the gold standard – and away from morality in general. His disciples would protest saying look how propsperous America was. Prabhupad would respond, “Just wait”.
He was right. A Society maintians itself and advances only based on a Moral Code – which for the large majority means a relgion. At some point, an economic, political, and/or intellectual elite want to jettision the code in order to advance faster or have more fun. It seems to work – emphasis on seems. In reality, the decay then spreads from the Elite to the Middle and Lower Classes. But meanwhile, the Society continue to prosper and even advance economically and militarily. So the Elite think they were right. Thus, their Hubris is followed by Nemesis as surely as the Night follow the Day.
In Old Rome, a farmer was lucky if he could stay on as a free worker among the slaves once his farm was bought up by a Patrician. What was left for the Legionaires to come back to? The old contract whereby he was set up with a small farm upon retirement was voted out – Progress? In Greece during the cultural Renaissance of Athens, Greek workers and merchants were already being replaced by immigrants from the Levant. The seeds of decay were sprouting nicely. Did the Philosophers even notice such lowly things? Things that their whole Society and their lifestyle was based on? Well, they should have focused on them. The ruin of the middle class is not only unwise but a terrible sin. And the replacement of your own people by aliens is a doubling down on it, the height of it.
Prabhupad knew such things, but he was both a Universalist and something of a Hindu Supremacist – though he wanted others to become equal via the Vedic Process. He didn’t address immigration to my knowledge. I think he would have condemned the Mexican invasion, but would have had a hard time speaking out against the South Asian high tech worker influx that has kept his movement alive these last few decades. He did once say that Whites controlled North America now, but if you came back in a few centuries someone else might have it. True, of course. But would he have had such objectivity about India? The English conqured India but never threatened the biological existence of her people. Their conquest was much gentler than the one that awaits us.
Prabhupad said some very salty things at times. Once when walking with his disciples he saw a girl walking her huge Great Dane. He said, you know what she has that for? Also he loathed the Blacks militants and welfare mentality. He spoke out numerous times against Blacks – obviously holding to the old Hindu mentality of the inequality of the races. All of this has been covered up by the PC Governing Body of today. But again, Prabhupad welcomed Blacks and thought they could advance via the Process. He said Blacks came to America in chains but could go back as Emperors – if they followed the Vedic Process reccomended in this age by Sri Chaitanya, the chanting of Hare Krishna.
It’s a good thing Steve didn’t die, as fate would have it. One of Joanne’s classmates went nuts and turned the thing into a bloodbath. A number of Seniors were murdered. Joanne was friends with her when they were younger. She used to visit on occasion. She was odd even then. She would taunt Michael in a sexual way, but since Michael was very young, he didn’t know what it meant, or how to respond, so he just stared in amazement. She would lick her lips in a sensuous way and pull her finger up from her crotch and suck on it like a lollipop. Then she’d try to put her finger in Michael’s mouth, and he would turn away in disgust. Another time, when Joanne was in the bathroom, she asked Michael to come in to the bedroom and closed the door behind him and blocked the path to it. She then removed her shirt and bra, revealing her fully-developed breasts and asked Michael to touch them. He wouldn’t. He said it was wrong, that it was a mortal sin, and that he didn’t want to go to hell. She heard Joanne flush the toilet and she quickly dressed and let Michael out. Whenever she came over thereafter, Michael avoided her like the plague. Her name was Carrie.
The destructive irony of Walmart is that the places where it is needed most are the very ones where it is quickest to pull up stakes when its same-store sales go into the red, leaving its old customer base high and dry. In the more populous rural counties where it consolidates stores rather than pulling out entirely, its customers can still catch a bus to a Super Wal Mart in the county seat. Their customers lose convenience, but the poorest and carless among them don’t get totally screwed.
But these are, of course, the same communities where Walmart has competition from other stores because there’s enough of a population base to support competition. This isn’t the case in any number of slowly failing one-horse towns on the High Plains. When Walmart leaves the latter after obliterating the indigenous competition because same-store sales were underwhelming, there’s no alternative to driving thirty or more miles to get groceries.
There’s something very, very faulty with the observational skills of many Americans. The atavistic corporatist/plutocratic wing of the GOP keeps getting away with its florid accusations against the Post Office, and more importantly with the implementation of policy changes to strangle the Post Office, all the while ridiculously lauding the private sector as a paragon of virtue. Never mind that the Post Office maintains a presence in countless inaccessible, barely populated places where Walmart would never consider setting up shop, and it doesn’t even think about leaving town unless finances get extremely tight (consistently as a result of partisan policy rigging to starve the beast, as it were). And yet Fox News convinces tens of millions of people, many of whom would be up shit creek without government services whose costs have been externalized onto state and federal treasuries, that all government is evil, except for the jackbooted parts.
Creating a Totally Unrelated, Totally
===========
A True Confession: this is the first comment by old Spidey (Greystone Asylum) I’ve read in at least a year.
The gist of it seems to be that if we just mix up everything in the whole wide world into a new big mish mosh, something unforeseeable but GOOD will result.
I once used to write limericks (invariably with an offensive sexual slant) so someone, recognizing what they took as a penchant for poetry, gave me a gift along those lines. It was like a game. There were these white rectangular pieces each with a word on it. If memory serves, each piece was magnetized so they would stick to a surface like a refrigerator. The idea was to take a bunch of these words entirely at random and stick them on the fridge and maybe do some modest shifting around of the words and VOILA! you’d come up with a POEM.
And then, I guess, you could transcribe this “poem” into an email and send it in to The New Yorker magazine and your odds of being selected for publication would be as good, maybe even better, than the serious poets trying to see their work make it into print in a prestigious publication. The poem would be a Jackson Pollock drip painting made of words.
This is the kind of GOOD result old Spidey actually believes will be brought forth from the mish mosh he describes.
If you put it a dead monkey on a stick, it will scare away the other monkeys from your orchard – a scarecrow for monkeys – much like the Head of St Thomas Moore posted on London Bridge did for Catholics.
Bhaktipad, one of the original Gurus after Prabhupad’s death, was attracted to the brutal side of India. The Hindus are the least chivalrous of Civilized Men after all. Thus the dictum, “Three things get better with beating: a drum, a dog, and a woman.” But though they talk this way, they are in reality gentle with Women compared to the Muslims – although maybe not as “romantic”.
“…disgrace to the concept of personal sovereignty… quack, quack, quack… you have no place to be smug… quack, quack… you haven’t earned that right….quack… not until you’ve taken a stand … quack, quack.. after they’ve finished sodomizing you… quack, quack, quack….. – “Carol” last week
What a load of shit “Carol”. YOU took a stand? Fucking hilarious. Tell us “Carol”. What stand did you take?
Let’s make a wild assumption, “Carol”, that you have the self discipline to actually work and be useful and earn and go to the grocery store to buy food and cook and feed yourself. Have you ever done that “Carol”? Or is that being a sellout? But let’s assume that you’ve bought food. Think about those products. Do you even have the foggiest idea how they got to the shelf? Did you make them yourself? No?
The next time that you go to the local emergency room and you get examined with an imaging machine think about how the machine got there. Do you have any idea? No? Did you build it? No?
What about that sled dog with a stethoscope, you know, the degreed, money grubbing sellout looking at your vitals. Did you ever wonder how he or she got there? Did you build the medical school they went to? No?
Yeah baby, you post your drivel using the internet. Did you build the internet? No?
Do you know how all this shit comes about? Let me enlighten you. It’s because guys like me MAKE it happen. Yeah “Carol”, surprise, surprise, these things don’t just materialize out of thin air, not food, not MRI machines, not medical schools, not the internet. You know, college and university grads that you disdain, slave away year after year, designing and building and administering and delivering. Guys that have skill and knowledge, that get paid for what they do. Yeah Carol, we WORK and get PAID, concepts that maybe you have little exposure to. Guys that you deride as sled dogs, that create and maintain that very system that YOU take for granted every witless waking hour of your life, that system that YOU take from, that system that benefits YOU, that keeps YOUR sorry ass alive and fed and medicated.
You are as complicit in this thing as anyone so don’t play the innocent. Yeah, “Carol” baby take it up the ass, ooh! Feel good? But it’s better for me. Know why? I get MONEY.
St Nicholas Ownen or “Little John” was a tiny, deformed man who built hiding holes – hiding places for Priests in Catholic homes. He was apprehended by the Protestant authorites and tortured under the rack. He never revealed any of the locations of the holes he had built, thus dying as a Martyr.
I get MONEY.
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Money, schmunknee! That’s nothing that a little hyperinflation won’t take care of. Then your money will be worthless, like you. We’re all equal in the end.
The Beatles lyric, Something in the way you move, moves me like no other lover – perhaps that “something” is dark energy?
But siriusly, I love the name, it reminds me of the Dark Elves. But does it have anymore credibility than the strings you have decried? If so, what or how? I’ve heard that there are elements that have never been seen and their existence is merely conjectured, but strongly so as they fill up a gap in the paradigm. Is it like that or “the strings”?
Rich stuff, for my sort of ilk, from Janos:
When I was young, I had a lot of argument with these fundamentalists, but I’ve come to have a lot of respect for Prabhupad, if not most of his disciples.
Likewise. I’m a fan of Prabhupada. I also understand and overlook his narrow dogmatism, which is a bhakti-yoga characteristic. Even pointed out in the Bhakti-Sutra of Narada and forgiven! (Like putting down “yogis” and some of the “yoga” and meditation parts of the Gita without acknowledging that mantra-chanting is yoga; is meditation. Or leaving out parts of the Gita to support a strict bhakti orientation.) Yes, referring to them as fundamentalists is appropriate. But then, as I am sure you know, fundamentals matter.
…and his rules and regulations are one way of navigating it.
Yes.
At the height of American prosperity, he told his disciples that America was doomed for going of the gold standard – and away from morality in general.
He was a straight-talking terror.
A Society maintains itself and advances only based on a Moral Code – which for the large majority means a religion.
True, true, and true.
At some point, an economic, political, and/or intellectual elite want to jettison the code in order to advance faster or have more fun.
Astute!
…the decay then spreads from the Elite to the Middle and Lower Classes.
Worth reposting these. Yes, the simpler peoples act as a holding bay of virtue, the resonance of past times. They are humble enough — and healthy enough — not to question their Dharma. I remember what Lao Tzu said about the people, that they are happiest and most virtuous in their simple state. Send them to school and they degenerate, disconnected with the “sweet sanities of nature” — to use a Yogananda phrase. The power and money of the wealthy bring the corruption faster than for them, then they spread their corruption among the more innocent.
The seeds of decay were sprouting nicely. Did the Philosophers even notice such lowly things? Things that their whole Society and their lifestyle was based on?
Philosophers are often decadent. Even truer today. I think you recented mentioning that the sophisticated Baldman of Boulder Ken Wilbur was even down with forcing the male generative organ (in his case, his dick) into a woman’s anus. Like his rapist hero Da Free John. A true Philosopher of the Deep Kali Yuga.
The ruin of the middle class is not only unwise but a terrible sin. And the replacement of your own people by aliens is a doubling down on it, the height of it.
Also worth italicizing.
Prabhupad knew such things, but he was both a Universalist and something of a Hindu Supremacist – though he wanted others to become equal via the Vedic Process.
Great summation.
I think he would have condemned the Mexican invasion,
He definitely would have.
But would he have had such objectivity about India?
Doubtful. The bhakta is not objective anyway!
The English conquered India but never threatened the biological existence of her people.
Indeed.
Their conquest was much gentler than the one that awaits us.
Indians tend to be proud of their English influences.
Prabhupad said some very salty things at times.
Did he ever! He was the Clint Eastwood of gurus. (Sometimes used for Yukteswar I have to note.)
Also he loathed the Blacks militants and welfare mentality. He spoke out numerous times against Blacks – obviously holding to the old Hindu mentality of the inequality of the races.
Related to this, Mahatma (Great Soul) Ghandi was not a fan of blacks and would have been embarrassed to be associated with MLK. Hindus are naturally racist. Preservation of the races is right there in their religion. And I have to say that preservation of the races/peoples is a much more positive type of racism than the Jewish: “We’re the master race / we must enslave the Gentiles / Even the best of the gentiles should be killed.” Hindu racism is the natural, holistic kind. I have found that Indians who approach me about yoga and the Upanishadic things are always very comfortable with my racism. I mean with my Racial Consciousness, if you will. /8o)
All of this has been covered up by the PC Governing Body of today.
Hah! Typical.
— if they followed the Vedic Process recommended in this age by Sri Chaitanya, the chanting of Hare Krishna.
A Hare Krsna who is not chanting a lot is a joke. And yet the more recent H-K’s I hung around with in California seemed embarrassed to chant. I was very disappointed. Then the main female long-time (Prabhupada era) HK couple in town (who put on feeds with her HK husband) divorced her husband and began flirting with me. Hotel California! The cosmic dream crashed. And always due to a woman’s discontent.
They should have chanted more.
For Chrissake AMR, the Post Office is losing $42 million per day! Just to keep operating they’ve been loaned $24 billion by the US Treasury … and they can’t get any more. I know, I know, its the Republicans fault … what isn’t? The question is, how long can the Postal Service absorb those losses and still keep operating? Unless of course economics no longer matters, and it can be kept alive thru sheer political will.
–CD
“The LHC will be down for two years to do certain repairs, fix the splices between the magnets, and to do maintenance and stuff.” – Dr. Lykken –
“…maintenance ‘and stuff’…” ???
“and STUFF” !
Have fun with this one, K/Q.
Doesn’t your daughter talk like this?
=============
On ^this^ very topic, see letter I wrote in May 2006 below:
Dear Dr. Bloom,
I am on the 3rd disk of your Modern Scholar lecture series titled Shakespeare: The Seven Major Tradgedies and I have paused to write you this email.
Before my recent retirement I worked as a financial analyst in a large company. In the interest of improved communication it became the practice of DG (our VP of Finance) to call an “all-hands” meeting a couple of times each year. During the first of these meetings a number of us listeners (perhaps all) began to notice that DG used the phrase “and stuff” as an alternative for “etcetera.” This inelegant phrase was used so frequently that we underlings assigned one of our number to track the “stuff” count. Before you knew it all of us were counting the utterences and chortling under our breath as the tally rose. Whatever the heart of DG’s message was … we could tell you only the “stuff” count. Needless to say, none of us ever informed him of this distracting foible.
I am relating this anecdote, not to be mean spirited, but to alert you to your overuse of the word “extraodinary” and to a lesser degree: astonishing, magnifcent and fascinating (or their adverbs). Frankly, it will be hard for me to follow the thread of the remaining lectures now that I am fixated on “extraordinary.”
Regards,
Q
Funny, I never pegged you as a Tayerton smoker :o). Back in ’04 I took my daughter ( then 17) on a 4 weeek tour of the left coast. We walked the Golden Gate. She went to use the womens bathroom on the north side. She came out and said no way. I took a peak and it was a disaster, I took her in the men’s room and stood guard.
But,but … how did Joanne’s prom go anyways ?
Did it go ok for her anyways ?
Don’t keep me on the hook …
As an 8-year-old I wrote a thank you note to my grandmother:
“Thanks for the Christmas stuff.”
My mother had a fit and demanded a proper re-write.
Rich stuff, for my sort of ilk, from Janos:
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Sentence by sentence you two make a real mutual admiration society. I’m happy you’ve found one another.
YAHOO, We’re gettin’ a Super Walmart here in town, built on the Westfield River floodplain. It is some of the best soil around. Rock free loam 5-6 ft deep.It was always a tree nursery as far back as I can remember.It was just a normal Walmart, which shuttered half of downtown. Now they will sell food and it will be the death knell for the local grocers. Everyone wants a bargain. Can you say “Cherry’s from Chile?”.
But,but … how did Joanne’s prom go anyways ?
Did it go ok for her anyways ?
===========
Where are you from? Making anyway into a plural must be a regionalism. Not that this is the first time I’m hearing it. Where I came from (South Jersey near Philly) we always said “anyway.”
Maybe Jam47 will chime in with his thoughts on this.
“Sentence by sentence you two make a real mutual admiration society. I’m happy you’ve found one another.”
I don’t even know who he is. But now that you mention it, some agreement is good, friendship even better, and natural male brotherhood all the better. No prosperity without it.
However this is just a web chat board with mostly anonymous handles. So it’s not like brotherhood of White men, source of prosperity, is having a resurgence.
I do admire the posts of Janos. We need more men and minds like his. It bother you?
Comrade D, What does Zappos shoe store and the USPS have in common?
Wait, Wait, Wait:
Answer, 5 million black loafers!
Yea, I know, the joke was funnier when there were local shoe stores and loafers were the rage. I had several pairs. Dime and penny.
“It’s a good thing Steve didn’t die…She would taunt Michael in a sexual way…She would lick her lips in a sensuous way and pull her finger up from her crotch…She then removed her shirt and bra, revealing her fully-developed breasts and asked Michael to touch them…
Now we have the white English lady…
who deprecates “American culture” and who…
hates her own race and who…
is obsessed with poor blacks and slavery and who…
is really an African American male — writing shitty porn for white males on James Kunstler’s architecture and economics blog.
I don’t even know who he is.
A week or two ago when you arrived here you implied you had been lurking for a long time and only for the joy of reading Vlad’s comments.
So it’s not like brotherhood of White men, source of prosperity, is having a resurgence.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
I do admire the posts of Janos… It bother you?
Not at all, it’s just so rare to see such an unabashed acolyte appear… another of his “ilk” out of the closet as it were, “if you will.”
Not at all, it’s just so rare to see such an unabashed acolyte appear… another of his “ilk” out of the closet as it were, “if you will.”
============
From the context, it appears you’re responding to something Wanda said. I’m inferring that since I’m not venturing into that bathroom from hell again. If so, it bothers me. Public displays of affection are obnoxious, grotesque and nauseating, especially when it’s two old, ugly men. These two are smooching on a soapbox in the middle of Central Park. They’re doing more than smooching, in fact. They have their hands down each other’s pants, and there’s heavy petting and panting. Worst of all, they’re picking nits off each other like two male gorillas after being rejected from the camp by the Alpha Silverback. It’s nasty, and it needs to stop. Please tell them to take that scene indoors and out of sight.
The cosmic dream crashed… They should have chanted more.
==========
This is the equivalent of me during a freshman year novena in a Jesuit college saying “No, Mary was NOT a virgin” or the Orthodox Jew today who says “I will NOT purchase a Sabbath-ready refrigerator” and “I will NOT pre-tear my toilet paper.”
All the chanting in the world at that point should have made no difference.
“…you implied you had been lurking for a long time…and only for the joy of reading Vlad’s comments.
I have been visiting and participating in Jim’s site at least 10 years ago, from back when it was a very simple affair, I believe with a yellow background, simple HTML, and none of the whizbang features it has now. Neither “The Long Emergency” nor “World Made By Hand” existed.
Vlad/Janos was not here then. Neither was the blog. These days, lately, Vlad’s posts are my favorite feature of the site along with Jim’s articles. Sorry yours are not so interesting.
By the way: I don’t think of myself a “lurking” when I enjoy reading a website. You need to expand your vocabulary. Meanwhile I have posted on blog long before you showed up.
“…it’s just so rare to see such an unabashed acolyte appear…
One doesn’t need to be an “acolyte” to be an admirer, fan, or friend. Again, you should expand your vocabulary.
…another of his “ilk” out of the closet as it were, “if you will.”
You post like a Jew, if you will.
She didn’t go to the prom, remember? She couldn’t go because her parents needed her to watch her five younger siblings whilst they dealt with Steve and his illness. She missed what she had so looked forward to, but had she gotten her wish, and Steve did die, she would have gone, and had she gone she may have been one of her former friend’s victims.
As far as how the prom went, besides the minor flesh wounds mentioned earlier, fatal or otherwise, it went well. In fact, it was a blast. A night to remember.
“All the chanting in the world at that point should have made no difference.
What could you know about chanting? As much as you know about astrology?
Carolius Newquist: “Public displays of affection are obnoxious, grotesque and nauseating,…”
You are posting your sexual fantasies here on Jim’s blog. A much more nauseating, grotesque, and obnoxious thing than some posters agreeing.
they’re picking nits off each other like two male gorillas after being rejected from the camp by the Alpha Silverback.
=========
Nifty analogy/imagery. I chuckled.
But really “Carol,” knock it off with the strained effort to convince us your not reading Julian and E’s posts. You most certainly are and stop acting so juvenile.
P.S. I would have used e-jected.
Self-conscious blacks always want to be the first to bring up apes.
The homosexual imagery that arises in you two whenever you see males merely interacting intellectually on a web board — is a bad sign.
Correction:
you’re not reading
Self-conscious blacks always want to be the first to bring up apes.
========
This is another area in which you and Vlad are very similar, i.e. making statements like the above as though there were vast amounts of empirical evidence of the truth of your statement. You might have said “It is a well known fact that self-conscious blacks always want to be the first to bring up apes.”
This article seems to lend credence to Chomsky’s fear, that the real problem is not that we will run out of carbon based fuel, but rather, that we will have more than enough available to push us over the global warming cliff:
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140213/climate-change-science-carbon-budget-nature-global-warming-2-degrees-bill-mckibben-fossil-fuels-keystone-xl-oil
Jim,
Thanks for the post, I agree with your assessment. There is tremendous opportunity to create inventive new living arrangements with small and local being the key. In many ways this is already happening in different parts of the country. The big difference is that this transformation will be slower and more arduous but I believe very rewarding.
Have you ever had “the Arena Experience” in which an invisible multitude cheer what you have just done? Remember, the Dead are the ultimate silent majority. Be willing to become the Hero of your own life.
“making statements like the above as though there were vast amounts of empirical evidence of the truth of your statement.
I guess you’ve never read some of the hard, dramatic statements (and over-statements) Jim Kunstler makes weekly. That’s why we read him. We love it.
This is not a science lab, Stick-in-the-Kyoo. It’s a chat thread. What makes it fun is salt-and-pepper, occasional exaggerations, satire, color. I myself prefer to read a writer who, like Jim, is convinced of something and willing to put it starkly. Does Kyoo always preface his every assertion with “t is a well-known fact that…”? I don’t think so.
“It seems that blacks…” would have sounded insipid. “It is a well-known fact blacks…” would have been stupid. Like your posts.
Get an issue.
Ozone has kept up this pretence to this day but have you ever called him on it? Is it because you admire his “creative” spelling so much?
Blacks thought the Planet of the Apes series was about them. Who are we to disagree with them?
I thought of a sadhana for Carol. In his wonderful introduction to his Tibetan Secret Doctrine and Practices book, Dr Evans-Wentz talks of the many Hindu Gurus he had met and of some of the things he saw – such as young Tantriks cleaning Temple latrines with their long hair. Might not Carol benefit from this practice at her Central Park Temple? It would help her overcome her obsessive division of everything into clean vs dirty, good vs bad. She does remind one of those Victorian Ladies who called piano legs, limbs – and put stockings on them. Some of these same ladies knitted wool sweaters for Black Children in Africa – as the Scots were driven off their lands into the freezing night.
It’s bad enough women like this exist, but even at the level of duality they often get it wrong and see what is good as evil and vice versa. Sure they might keep a neat house, but anyone with any psychic sensitivity can’t wait to get out of it – so filthy does it feel. And even in lesser cases where there is no overt evil, the extreme doll houses make you feel like you are unwelcome.
Yes thank you for your support. I think all young men should be apprenticed as bartenders to learn all about women. After a few drinks, often just one, and the veneer of “loidy” begins to peel away revealing the monster beneath.
d
Haha! Ayup, I hear the dead all the time, along with *GHAD*, who speaks through me routinely. H3ll, I even hear the thoughts of the living – and they sure scream, “dumbed down!”
Have you ever had “the Arena Experience” in which an invisible multitude cheer what you have just done? Remember, the Dead are the ultimate silent majority. Be willing to become the Hero of your own life.
============
No, I can’t say that I have. There’s always all sorts of shit going wrong in my dreams. Nor can I see any connection at all between your reply and the comment of mine to which you linked it. But then again as I have repeated many times, my IQ is only 112.
You said no one is backing us up. I responded that countless unseen multitudes are. I’m sorry you have never had this experience. As far as your dreams, try reading something uplifting before you turn in. Dickens might be good for you.
F
I notice that it didn’t take long for Julie to get his skinny cracker ass thrown of the blog; he must be well used to it, as he returned to shit in the pool nearly immediately under a new “planet”. (Curtis reduced to C.)
Here’s the littlest laddie’s favorite Unka Cracker/Crackpot/Crackhead. (Scroll down a bit.)
http://thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=79562&page=45
Say lederhosen boy, got his e-mail yet? You two gots lots and lots of nigger-less nation plannin’ to do! (I’ll get it for you if’n ya wants.) Get busy, time’s a’wastin’ for Portland and the Planet…
U
Ozone has kept up this pretence to this day but have you ever called him on it? Is it because you admire his “creative” spelling so much?
=============
What pretense?
I suggested to Carol that ejected was a better word choice than rejected. For comedic effect Zone, on the other hand, makes an art of speaking in some sort of composite hick vernacular. He uses this style as his calling card and I enjoy it. There is no issue about spelling or usage.
I hope that answers your question because I don’t know what you’re getting at.
Where is all this gun control bullshit headed? I thought it would die down by now but it hasn’t. It seems like its being propped up as a distraction so we won’t take a hard look at Obama and see what a failure he is as President. Speaking of that, this American Media, in NY, DC and LA, what asskissing, obsequious, Obama lapdogs they are. You expect to see this sort of thing in communist and repressive countries — Venezuala, Cuba, North Korea — but how do you explain it here? Is there some sort of mandate inside CBS, ABC, CNN and NBC that says don’t criticize the president, instead, suck up and make him look good? What a difference when compared to the way Reagan and the Bush’s were treated. Well, I suppose they have their own agenda, and it ain’t to report the truth. When this place goes down tune into CNBC; they’ll call it a buying opportunity.
==CD
Never got thrown off the blog, nozone. I take it that has happened to yorn ass b’fo?
You shouldn’t refer to African Americans as n—-rs. It’s not the White way. It’s also not nice.
On some other blog (linked here by Ozone) a guy named Gaear Grimsbud(?) wrote the following to Julian back in early 2012:
“I have a job, Julie. And get this, mine is not centered upon bilking morons out of their hard earned money with a bunch of horse hockey about stars and planets affecting the course of one’s life.”
Why the hell can’t I get right to the point like that?
The fellow was upset that I make more dough that him. (His knowledge of astrology subject is as deep as yours.) Oh, he also is a regular visitor to prostitutes. You’d probably relate to him.
Where is Big Black Stud lately? Somebody should tell him that under pressure his protege, Ms. Thornquist has all his wheels coming off and is posting home-made porn on this Kunstlerthread.
Is there some sort of mandate inside CBS, ABC, CNN and NBC that says don’t criticize the president,
===========
You left out the NY Times.
His knowledge of astrology subject is as deep as yours.) Oh, he also is a regular visitor to prostitutes. You’d probably relate to him.
==========
Well obviously he knows better than to waste his time on nonsense.
If that picture was actually him it’s no wonder he goes to prostitutes. Poor devil. I, on the other hand, am so damn handsome I need a chair and whip to hold the women at bay.
Typical so-called “conservative” nonsense. He’s not a failure. He’s a huge success. The rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer while he’s been in office. That’s success. When are you going to realize that, and accept it?
I didn’t know places like that existed. What a bunch of freaks. Why would Wanda put a picture of himself up there like that considering how hideous he is? I had to look away, he’ so awful. That nose. It’s the size of a tennis ball and brighter than Rudolph’s. It’s a giant gin blossom that rivals W. C. Fields.
http://blankstareblink.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/wc-fields-nose.jpg
Prog,
Maybe you’ve missed some of my past posts because I have expressed my fair share of concern/lament over illegal immigration. For instance, I have noticed that entire school districts have become the domain of illegal immigrant offspring. And while it’s tempting for some to label the former residents who fled as white-flight racists , most any parent is not going to insert their own children into a multilingual environment during the critical years of early education. (Although it could be argued that being exposed to Spanish at such an early age will definitely be an advantage later on in a work world increasingly willing to reward bilingual employees.)
And so illegal immigration amplifies the anathema of JHK’s ideally envisioned society: More neighborhood fracture and more reliance on the automobile as parents drive their kids to far-way educational locales to ensure that their math class is taught in English (or at least the majority of their fellows students are English speakers so as not to divert time away from the subject at hand in order to accommodate/negotiate a language issue). And they also opt for the distant predominantly English speaking school district because they believe that limited school resources should not be funneled into bilingual school programs. As a result, mom, dad or both make a long commute in the morning and then another one in the late afternoon. Kids don’t walk to school and the dynamics for walk-about neighborhoods is a non-starter just on early education considerations alone. Or at least this has been my observation.
Julian, I notice you project a facade of great erudition but when you get a little flustered you’re not above the ad hominem like:
. you write like a Jew
or the very direct, simple and generic
. [you’re] stupid. Like your posts.
Not only that Julian, I bet you have bad breath.
An excellent post. It’s textbook on how to discuss these unnecessarily delicate topics with honesty and intelligence. Thank you for some sanity.
Ozone pretends not to read my posts but in reality, devours them eagerly.
“Julian, I notice you project a facade of great erudition…”
I don’t try to sound eryoodite, no. If I projected something, my bad.
“…but when you get a little flustered…”
You are one flustered I won’t give you a Astro Readin.
you’re not above the ad hominem like:
Never added hominy to any post above or below.
“you write like a Jew”
How cud that be an insult? Jim’s a Jew. At least halvsie. Are you? Jews are brilliant, if execrable.
“or the very direct, simple and generic “you’re] stupid. Like your posts.”
I like to be direct, forthright, and candorous as contrasted to based off of being facile, if you will.
Not only that Julian, I bet you have bad breath.
Nobody ever said so. Did some body put you down once for your breath? I barely eat, so there is not much there to smell bad.
One thing about you: You are an excellent defender of Ms. Pornquist of England, who needs it lately.
It’s way past time to express “concern and lament” about excessive immigration, buck. It’s time to goddam’ DO SOMETHING. Write your congress critters, join NumbersUSA, and more important than anything else – energize your friends, acquaintances, and strangers in the street concerning the unsustainable course that the population of the US is on, and ways to join the fight to stop it.
=================
And yeah, you’ve expressed some tepid concern over “illegal immigration” from time, to rare time.
But when I was first advocating for FAIR and NumbersUSA, and the Resident Impediment was calling John Tanton a “RACIST” over and over – you said NOT ONE WORD in my defense. You said NOT ONE WORD to Soaker Hose that immigration might have negative consequences.
In fact, what I mostly remember was a veiled “when did you stop beating your wife” type of attack against ME – because I joined groups originally sponsored by Tanton.
==================
Carol says these issues are “unnecessarily delicate.” No shit, Sherlock and Watson.
And that’s because we all have to do this “delicate” SPLC anti-racist TAP DANCE around the truth – every time immigration is mentioned in a public or political venue. Bah.
Keep thinking Buck. You’ll get to real truth.
It may be too late to do you or your country very much good. But at least you’ll find some truth.
“I have been visiting and participating in Jim’s site at least 10 years ago, from back when it was a very simple affair, I believe with a yellow background, simple HTML, and none of the whizbang features it has now. Neither “The Long Emergency” nor “World Made By Hand” existed.”
The visiting and the participating took place ten years ago. Is that what you mean? That’s what you wrote. And “back” is unnecessary.
The clause after the second comma does not cohere with that part of the sentence that comes before the comma. What you’ve written is that when you experience belief, you believe with a yellow background. Is this a religious statement?
Here’s a better version: ” I have been visiting and participating in Jim’s site for at least ten years, from when it was a very simple affair. His (whatever it is) had a simple background.” The rest of the sentence needs to be rearranged to match the rearrangements I’ve already made, but I can’t bother.
I went through your posts from yesterday, making corrections as I went. I did it for exercise. I’ll post the corrections later. Can you wait?
Carol says these issues are “unnecessarily delicate.” No shit, Sherlock and Watson.
And that’s because we all have to do this “delicate” SPLC anti-racist TAP DANCE around the truth – every time immigration is mentioned in a public or political venue. Bah.
==========
It’s unnecessarily delicate because of you and your ilk muddying the waters with your racism. The Oligarchy will take care of overpopulation when it’s good and ready. Call or write your congress person? Seriously? As if that would accomplish anything.
…I have expressed my fair share of concern/lament over illegal immigration.
You have expressed your fair share of lament about various and sundry, like all black folk.
…as white-flight racists…
How are white racists for fleeing death and mayhem? Only a black would consider that “racist.” My father moved us away from a black neighborhood so that we would not be persecuted and endangered.
…illegal immigration amplifies the anathema of JHK’s ideally envisioned society: More neighborhood fracture and more reliance on the automobile…
Whew. What a long sentence. I’m trying to follow the structure of the first part. I think I get it. The future anathema of some possible future society is getting amplified already today by Mexicans?
Ms. Pornquist: ” Thank you for some sanity.
Not that he gave it. The anathema of Jim Kunstler’s ideal envisioned society is now amplified; an amplified anathema is pretty hard to bear and feel sane — especially while seeing a nice English lady posting creepy porn that would only appeal to an adolescent negro.
Sure. I always like to have a good editor to tool up things. I don’t have time to go over my posts with a fine toothed comb. I’ve been looking for somebody like you for a long time. Janos would probably like it, too. He also shoots his out on the fly. Give me your email and I’ll send all my posts to you to get all the commas and things perfect before posting. As to Janos, I’d rather see how a man writes on the fly, actually.
“my IQ is only 112”
Damnz, U blow You’s partAy boy Dumbya outta dah water by 25-30 points!!!
fSCK’N GEENUS.
“I had to look away, he’ so awful. That nose. It’s the size of a tennis ball and brighter than Rudolph’s. It’s a giant gin blossom that rivals W. C. Fields.
Yet I never drank. My nose is beyond ken, Ms. Pornquist.
Since you are feverishly doing web research on me I may as well assist you. Some of my Phora posts of mine can be read here:
http://mentious.com
If Jam 47 wants to go and fix the typos in them, I’d be much oblijed.
…most any parent is not going to insert their own children into a multilingual environment during the critical years of early education.
Reminds me of an article in yesterday’s Guardian.
Being bilingual may delay Alzheimer’s and boost brain power
Research suggests that bilingual people can hold Alzheimer’s disease at bay for longer, and that bilingual children are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking.
White flight may be harming White children. For brain plasticity it would be better for White children to be in a multilingual environment. Children are capable at early ages of absorbing an incredible amount of knowledge.
Thanks for posting Orlov’s 5 stages of collapse, O3.
And I agree with you that #1, Financial Collapse is well under way. And that #2, Commercial Collapse, is rolling along merrily.
I’m going to reprint excerpts of 3,4,and 5 and make a couple of points.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost.
(snip)
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as local social institutions…. charities or other groups …run out of resources or fail….
I am VERY sure that when “the government” fails, that charities, churches, and local groups will already be near or beyond failure. Our society is too big and diverse for “charity” to make a meaningful difference any more – certainly NOT in a SHTF moment. The Mormons and the Red Cross might do quite well in local situations – but without fuel for their generators, they would be spitting into the maelstrom to little effect.
That leaves Orlov’s last one:
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity….. Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources.
Here I part company with Orlov.
But I have a strong sense of family.
Maybe he does not.
And maybe I was blessed to come from – and see in action – a traditional extended Southern Family.
I’ve got a couple of surviving uncles who would do just about anything for me or my family SIMPLY BECAUSE I am the son of their brother.(my dad)
And, personally, I know for a fact that I would try to cut off my hand and cook it for supper for us – before I would watch my family “disband and compete as individuals…”
Human kin groups are a basic survival feature, hard-wired in by evolution. It’s a measure of how fouled up American society is, that families are so fouled up AND geographically separated.
“The visiting and the participating took place ten years ago. Is that what you mean? That’s what you wrote. And “back” is unnecessary.
I actually liked the eccentricity of that paragraph when I was done with it. I did review it. See, to be truthful I don’t like paragraphs that are overworked to perfection. So to be my editor you will have to expand yourself a little and think outside the box.
Note: I only point out typos and grammar errors when some kind of Grammar Prig arises and starts whining about somebody else’s grammar/typos. Then I point out the typos and grammar errors of that grammar prig wannabe, only. Particularly if he’s nitpicking some good poster. Get that? Grammar errors and typos are part of posting, is my view.
(Please analize the last 5 words and know I intended them that way. Sometimes I like to write in the same way people talk in conversation, for some kind of relief from grammatical monotony.)
You would go bananas reading the wonderful writing of Fred Reed, by the way. Lots of original grammar and sentence construction with that guy. He’s a real original and I recommend him.
“And I want this on the *RECORD* – I didn’t say …”
Bwahahahaha!!!!!!?!?!?!??!?!??!…
“Children are capable at early ages of absorbing an incredible amount of knowledge.”
You need to watch this clip.
Before the (black) mother is tased by the (thank God, black) security guard, her (black) child can be heard screaming at the guard, “That’s why you GAY!” “That’s why you GAY!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exWQIvjQ46c&feature=youtu.be
It’s at about minute 1:50.
Security guard has to wear a camera, carry a Taser, and carry a 9mm automatic – just to protect this little store near Underground Atlanta.
Yeah – these folks are going to be in real good shape, if the grid goes down and stays down for a week or two. sarcasm on/off.
Now that you’ve admitted your grammar is often wretched, fine. I’ll leave you alone.
Note to file and DoD visitors. P4C coddles terrorists. Maybe he is a terrorist. He’s enamored with this Wanda guy, and this Wanda guy is a fanboy of Anders Breivik.
============
Wanda said:
Anders Breivik is a good White man with the stones to get things rectified.
http://kennysideshow.blogspot.com/2012/06/usury-sunday.html
It’s important that the rest of you distance yourself from this, post-haste. You’re flying a bit too close to the flame. Some friendly advice.
P4C, since you gave Wanda the terrorist sympathizer a hearty and embracing welcome, it’s important at this point that you renounce the statement made by your boyfriend above. If not, we’re left with only one conclusion. The conclusion I came to about you long ago.
Some of you may not know what “Underground Atlanta” is. It used to be a cool place, and I hung out there a lot myself in the ’70’s.
It took a bad hit in 1992.
It was rebuilt for the Olmypics in ’98.
And now it’s trending down, probably for good.
Go figure.
On a related note – Atlanta Falcons are raising hell for a new stadium, to be built with partial public money, total cost almost $2 billion.
And to build it they have to tear down the existing Georgia Dome which is YEARS NEWER that the SuperDome in NOLA.
Local powers that be DEMAND that it be right downtown near Underground Atlanta – with near zero parking and multiple minority set-asides for vendors and workers.
It’s a strangely skewed world we have made for ourselves, isn’t it.
Oops, forgot the link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Atlanta
The statement written by me.
I have never posted at a place called “Kenny’s sideshow.” Never heard of it until you brought it up. The poster posting there as “Julian Curtis Lee” is not me.
For starters, I never have used the term “stones.” And the phrase “to get things rectified” is infantile and I wouldn’t use it.
Hope you didn’t get too excited and start writing more porn, Ms. Pornquist.
her (black) child can be heard screaming at the guard, “That’s why you GAY!” “That’s why you GAY!”
Children are not born with such attitudes. They learn them in the FAMILY.
From parents children learn all kinds of things: anti-social behavior, irrational religious beliefs, racial prejudices, homophobia, etc.
Children don’t arrive with those. They are bred into them primarily by the family.
The FAMILY is the primary transmitter of pathology.
“P4C, since you gave Wanda the terrorist sympathizer a hearty and embracing welcome”
-the NEW resident impediment-
Show me the “warm and embracing welcome” that I gave first, with date and time.
Then I’ll deal with my opinion of the deranged murderer Brevik – smeared stones and all.
“The FAMILY is the primary transmitter of pathology.”
-the New resident impediment, same as the old-
So, soaker hose, who should raise children in a collapsing world – The State?
And yeah, you got a vasectomy at age 18, blah, blah, blah.
The statement (was not) written by me.
The family is both the primary transmitter of virtue and pathology. Everything is dualistic. Dualism is not destroyed by destroying the natural. Rather, it gives an increase in negativity and pathology.
…who should raise children in a collapsing world – The State?
The State? That kind of goes against the premises of CFN that we are headed toward a world made by hand, one that perhaps more resembles traditional hunter-gatherer societies. The modern family is a recent development, historically speaking.
In modern industrial societies today, we follow the rabbit-antelope pattern: the mother or someone else occasionally picks up and holds the infant in order to feed it or play with it, but does not carry the infant constantly; the infant spends much or most of the time during the day in a crib or playpen; and at night the infant sleeps by itself, usually in a separate room from the parents.
However, we probably continued to follow our ancestral ape-monkey model throughout almost all of human history, until within the last few thousand years. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers show that an infant is held almost constantly throughout the day, either by the mother or by someone else.
A cross-cultural sample of 90 traditional human societies identified not a single one with mother and infant sleeping in separate rooms: that current Western practice is a recent invention responsible for the struggles at putting kids to bed that torment modern Western parents.
It takes a village… not a FAMILY.
damn.
The Resident Plagiariser is back.
http://www.socialvibes.net/socialvi/2012/12/23/babies/
The bulk of the post returns to several sources, but it’s a RI cut/past job, all right.
=====================
As far as “it takes a village,” instead of a family to raise a child – –
Are you trying to say that “villages” are less capable of transmitting “pathology, racism, sexism, homophobia, blah, blah,” (paraphrased) than are families.
If that’s what you’re saying – then you got dumber during your (regrettably short) absence.
It it takes a family to raise a child. Make it a meme.
Being part of community makes parenting easier gives a better raising.
No village members care about their children as much as the natural parents, are as willing to sacrifice for them, or suffer more through the child’s error or unhappiness.
Not only does it take a mother and father (family) to raise a child: These are the ones who SHOULD be raising their children.
I forgot to source the last comment. It comes from Jared Diamond’s book: The World Until Yesterday: What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies”
“From parents children learn all kinds of things: anti-social behavior, irrational religious beliefs, racial prejudices, homophobia, etc. Children don’t arrive with those. They are bred into them primarily by the family.
Children are not a blank slate. They have innate tendencies from the beginning. If you had raised any children you would know that.
And nobody has a “phobia” about gays. Only morons and militant gay activists use that word. What people may have is a range of feelings like dislike, disagreement, disgust, repulsion, etc. Real phobias are very rare, and moral disgust is a healthy instinct, not a phobia.
Just needed to be mentioned.
Sorry, I got the title wrong and the link doesn’t work.
Let me try again, “if you will”:
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
“Can you wait?”
Is it worth the wait?
[I doubt it].
I thought this was a P.O. website.
[It was].
Yes, there is some genetic pre-programming. Samskaras – our volitional tendencies – are to some extent reborn.
But families, communities, peers, schools, culture, and parents have at LEAST an equal part of making us who we are, even if Rousseau was wrong.
Just sayin’
Real phobias are very rare, and moral disgust is a healthy instinct, not a phobia.
Said like a real Puritan.
Phobias are so rare the DSM-IV has separated phobic stimuli into four basic categories: animal, situational, blood injury, and nature-environment. Very rare. /sarcasm off
It also takes a devoted father who works hard and tries to figure out women — to get a child raised properly (by a loving mother who he frees and supports to be a mother).
But some males, as usual, want to pass pass the life-burden of their orgasms off on others. Sounds like a sophisticated way of arguing for white men to become even more like black men. As if bones through their noses, shit-talk, falling pants, funny hand gestures, and ruined earlobes aren’t enough.
Here village! Take this kid!
“Jim’s a Jew. At least halvsie. Jews are brilliant”
What, from his chart you could not see the esteemed JHK is 1/8 Goy?
You thought you could determine geneology from astrological charts?
Who told you that? Where do you get your ideas? You seem to be posting from some bizarre world. You seem to be mixing up astrology with being psychic.
Astrological knowledge is more soft-focused than that, and conditioned by many things. Did you know that no astrological moment in time ever repeats? This is too subtle for you. It’s not like measuring water or weights. You should stay in your areas.
Here, I am starting to write some material for your type, or more for others who actually want to learn something.
http://www.julianlee.com/Julian_Lee_On_Astrology_Skeptics.html
Posting here has been good for me. Got me writing.
Here village! Take this kid!
More like this these days:
“Here Bible Camp, Scout Camp, nanny, school system, latch key programs, etc. Take this kid!”
“Here passive entertainment supplied by outsiders (television, videogames, etc.) Take this kid!”
If we are headed back to a world made by hand, then we will once again enjoy the benefits: we will spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and won’t have time at all for passive entertainment.
Good man. I’m a firm believer in Kerouac’s Zen School of first thought best thought. Of course he polished a bit and I sometimes consider my words a bit.
Let’s not underestimate the power and adaptability of corporations like MallWart (my dirty name for it). Already, they’re creating “mini” stores in urban areas where big boxes are impractical. Next, watch for “upscale” boutique stores that will compete against the old line retailers. Then, watch them go after Amazon, as eBay will also do. Electronics retailers like Best Buy will partition many of their big boxes and sublet to other retailers. I don’t know about Radio Schlock — they will probably survive, ’cause we ‘merikans gotta have our gadgets to keep us entertained. I mean, even some of the “poor” people waiting in line at the welfare office have smartphones these days! (I don’t mean to minimize the plight of the truly poor.)
Regarding trucking, I think JHK is wrong. Any major change in how goods are transported is probably a long ways off, unless we’re talking about tar sands bitumen. A lot of diesel fuel is purchased wholesale by the giant trucking companies (and MallWart), not at the price you see at your local gas station. The price is going up, but the efficiency of their operations is also improving. What it costs for transport is reflected in the price we pay for goods. But watch as vehicles in urban areas get converted to methane. At least temporarily, that’s going to lower the cost (and the particulate pollution, thankfully), but we all know the longer term fracking productivity truth is yet to be revealed.
Although I agree there will be major changes in both lifestyles and consumption patterns, this “permanent contraction” mantra is only accurate over the long term. In the meantime, there will be ups and downs, winners and losers. But the biggest corporations will continue their domination of the market into the foreseeable future. That includes most of the big box stores.
Recommending to young people that they venture into small-scale retailing is probably very bad advice, given the minuscule chance of success at this time. Mr. Kunstler should be suggesting the Resource Based Economy movement. I would like to see him write about that on this blog (if he hasn’t already done so — I’m rather new here).
CORRECTION
we will spend far more time talking to each other FACE-TO-FACE than we do.
Trading barbs in a perpetual internet blog insult fest does not qualify.
We probably won’t have the internet in a WMBH anyway. I can’t wait.
— I’m rather new here
Unfortunately you have booked passage in the steerage area of the Titanic. There is one concept you will need to be familiar with:
dreck [dr?k]
n
Slang chiefly US rubbish; trash
[from Yiddish drek filth, dregs]
drecky adj
“We probably won’t have the internet in a WMBH anyway. I can’t wait.” -adequate in/out-
Be the change you wish to see, adequate i/o.
Sign out. Shut down. Don’t come back.
Sign out. Shut down. Don’t come back.
Ummm, thanks but no thanks. Why are you trying to shut down dialog?
I will enjoy the internet as long as it lasts. I will no miss it when it’s gone. I am looking forward to WBMH.
I’m contracting and simplifying my life to become less dependent on the grid, to make the transition less painful.
What are you doing, besides obsessing over immigrants?
CORRECTION
I will enjoy the internet as long as it lasts. I will noT miss it when it’s gone. I am looking forward to WMBH.
*****
Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding.
Ring the bell of truth for a 5-star post.
“On CFN we talk collapse. Its a collapse website- a doomer blog. All other talk is the product of Trolls. Can this be disputed?
I am attending Catholic mass this week, dressed as Satan and will be disputing the gospels. Am I not a Troll?
Narrowly defined, Trolling is attempting to push a contrary agenda in a community established to discuss a particular point of view.
By this definition, Asoka is definitely a Troll, whereas Olds69 or RaduVoda is not.
Olds69 is not a Troll because his message is neither coherent nor contrary.
RaduVoda is not a Troll because his message is not contrary.
If you come on CFN simply to debate its premises, you are in fact a Troll.”
-Bustin Jay busts Carol and RI, adequately-
“Be the change you wish to see…”
Be the ball, Danny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gQwY5Np4FA
2
Does that mean Comrade Dystopia and norecovery are trolls? They ask questions. They present different viewpoints. They disagree with JHK.
norecovery said (February 19, 2013 11:56 PM):
norecovery did end by saying: “I’m rather new here).” … so maybe he doesn’t know BustinJay and P4C’s rules to blog by. BustinJay and P4C WILL call you a troll if you don’t toe the line. Ouch(?)
CD is not new here and regularly posts about gigantic construction projects ongoing in Connecticut, new contracts, full parking lots … instead of getting in step with the CFN collapse dogma. Does that make him a troll?
This is now a racial and gramar site. We are exploring the grammar of racism in the broadest non Q sense of the word. How do we express our differences without insulting the other more than is necessary and without sacraficing the Truth that Whites are a higher race than most of these others.
Another “troll” challenging the premises of CFN?
budizwiser | February 18, 2013 7:36 PM
Ouch! Talk about hitting our host in the nose!
No, he’s right. People aren’t afraid of Gays, they just don’t like their lifestyle or they themselves in extreme cases.
To use a fancy DSM name to confuse the issue is a perfect example of the misuse of Psychology by the State reminscient of the old Soviet Union. And look how the Establishment stood behind the criminal Kinsey with his outrageously exaggerated Homosexual numbers.
This is now a racial and gramar site.
This is ClusterFuck Nation: Comment on Current Events by the Author of “The Long Emergency”
That is what our host named it. It is not a collapse blog. It is not a doomer blog. It is a place for commentary on current events, which pretty much includes everything. Grammar, racism, collapse, immigration, etc. It is all happening now and is therefore part of “current events.”
At least respect JHK and don’t try to limit debate. Don’t try to shut down or impede dialog.
People who “don’t like” or feel “moral disgust” are homophobic. Homophobia encompasses a range of negative attitudes and feelings toward homosexuality or people who are identified or perceived as being lesbian or gay.
The fear of homosexuality (or “dislike” as you say) often leads to acts of violence and expressions of hostility towards homosexual persons. In recent years attacks on homosexuals have risen. While the violent crime rate in many areas continues to drop, anti-gay crime is moving in the other direction. What is most disturbing is the cruelty and viciousness of many of these attacks.
Homophobia makes some people think that they are superior to homosexuals. In fact, studies show that anti-gay bias is far more accepted among large numbers of Americans than is bias against other minorities.
“People who “don’t like” or feel “moral disgust” are homophobic.”
Enough with the Marxist newspeak.
A phobia is an irrational fear. Fear of homosexuality is completely rational, and moral revulsion is different from fear as well as the sign of moral and spiritual health, no different than the revulsion feel over something rotted.
Kyoo is right: you Are Asoka. What you just did to CD is a classic Asoka smear tactic. CD is against the building in Connecticut. So if you Asoka, who is Carol? The terrifying truth looms: Carol may be a real person. Incredible that someone can actually be like that, but evidently it is the case.
Or perhaps the same Entity is both of them. Soon they will be talking to each other like the guy with both hands in his pockets.
Thank you Soak. We do need a place where Everything can be discussed. It does all “hang together” as part of the Mandala. Or as Bilbo put it, stepping out on the street is a dangerous thing. You may find yourself anywhere. Most are too afraid to handle it and want a Big Brother or Sister to hold their hand. Look at how the Arch Fool Druid patrols his site.
“Homophobia” is a new word literally coined by a radical gay militant to pathologize and demonize straight people for their moral instincts.
The opposite of phobic is philic (bonding with/attracted to). A hydrophobic substance sheds water and is not attracted to water. A hydrophilic substance bonds with water. If you are not homophobic, therefore, you must be homophilic. So inadequatio is telling us he is attracted to sexual perversity and that he bonds with it. How passing strange this is.
So Blacks and Hispanics are now below Gays in the rating of discriminated groups? They aren’t going to like that. And Blacks don’t like the way Hispanics are taking their place as the Apple of the Liberal’s Eye. There’s gonna be trouble.
As the Mutant said in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, We are not a violent people. We allow our Enemies to kill each other.
So now you know that asoka/inadequatio is gay.
Carol Pornquist is just a black American male. He basically admitted it yesterday. Few white men would be so good at faking the verbal over-effort of a black man in a white setting so masterfully.
Gays are a very aggressive group. (See “The Pink Swastika.”) What could be more aggressive than forcing the generative organ into a place where it doesn’t belong and doesn’t fit despite all? White blood cells attack anything that threatens the larger body. Things like sodomatrimony will completely distort natural principles of Common Law and degrade the natural relationships of parents with their children. That’s a rational fear. Who is speaking up for the Straight Community and Natural Marriage, and the children?
Protecting the LGBT Community
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNl6DzFfCc
Truly a great video Prog and proof why I and the Old South are right and you so very, very, wrong.
I’ve seen things like this but I’ll just relate a couple of lesser but instructive incidents. A Black family is leaving a store. The boy tosses something into the trash bin but misses. The mother tells him to bend down and put it in. The Father cuts in and makes a big deal about telling him to leave it on the ground. He was trainin’ him to be a Nigga you see. Blacks are very serious about the right to throw their trash around. I think Psychoanalysts call it being “anal expulsive”.
Black Women also screw up their kids. A little boy on a bus was playing with his McDonald’s bag -as children are wont to do. The Mother took the bag away and said with deep irriation, That’s trash, just like your Daddy. Nice! Most of them are terrible Mothers, with very little patience for their children. The R strategy of have lots and don’t care for them as Rushton named it. The East Asians have the k strategy of have few and maximize their care. Whites are in the middle with most more towards the East Asian side. I know, not all.
A Black woman once told me she was going to pick up her shit. She meant her kids. She got very embarrassed which is very rare for them. Few Whites know how much Blacks edit themselves around us – and how much they resent doing it. They are very, very alien folks. Can you imagine calling your kids “your shit”? Or calling food shit even as you eat it? They do. You don’t know -I do.
Beautiful little video. That’s what I call a productive walk. The look on that kids face was priceless. They are not used to Whites standing up to them.
Do you know about the Sage of Cambria? He is or was a professor of English Literature and is a great writer as well. But unlike most these days, he actually stands for something and has something to write about. His incredible passion, learning, and style come together in his essays. This is what Art should be: not Style without Content but the two merging together to provide the viewer or reader with a incredible, condensed experience of Truth. Some art without content is fine of course, as decoration or whatever. Beauty doesn’t need an excuse. But Great Art is more than this, to my mind at least.
The Sage is of the old school of Christian Identity, that of British Israelism – which has deep roots back to Blake and even before back to Ancient times.
http://cambriawillnotyield.wordpress.com/
Only a goofy megalomaniac would put it quite that way..do you do readings in Chinese too?
What you just did to CD is a classic Asoka smear tactic. CD is against the building in Connecticut.
LOL!
Yes, CD is against building. That was not the point.
Some say this is a “collapse” blog, but CD keeps bringing up counter-examples that go against the idea of imminent collapse. I happen to agree with CD. Does that make us “trolls” because we differ from the idea that this is a “doom” and “collapse” blog?
Gays are a very aggressive group.
============
Yes, Janos has also shown his fear that gays will “hit on him.” It is irrational. It is a phobia. Get help.
Who is speaking up for the Straight Community and Natural Marriage, and the children?
==========
Have you never heard of DOMA? (“one man, one woman” imposed on everyone; DOMA is the law of the land)
“Who is speaking up for the Straight Community?”
Thank you. You made me laugh.
Why would I defend you if Asoka was referring to John Tanton? Your sense of indignation comes across as a bit convoluted on that particular count, IMO.
At any rate, it’s way too late to lobby politicians regarding immigration. It’s over and done with and politicians see the handwriting on the wall. In other words, if politicians (especially presidential candidates) wish to remain politicians they will not opposes the burgeoning Latino/a vote ever again. This last election was not a temporary anomaly; it was a structural realignment. GAME OVER.
GAME OVER
————-
I agree. But somebody has to tell Marco.
Marco Rubio Rejects Obama Immigration Reform Plan: ‘Dead On Arrival’
I tend to agree with the first part of your statement and appreciate that you qualified your statement overall. But if some art appears to lack content in your view it might be due to your lack of ability to read a painting on the level of pure visual dialogue. For instance, what may appear to you as decorative and abstract might appear to more educated eyes as a portrayal of gradation; a visual inference of the simile of the Line Divide perhaps. Ironically, your championing of “content” if applied to music would actually elevate pop music with lyrics over the abstract allusions of classical music because of the obvious narrative content of the former. Of course, I don’t believe that’s what you mean or believe but it’s tricky business no doubt.
I remember a beautiful marble carving a Russian mentor of mine carved. It was a glorious example of form marrying content; a formal embodiment of the former Soviet Union mathematician he was portraying. How beautifully condensed the hair and beard were in their austerity of detail. No endless strands of hair or loopy, curly braids in the beard. The incidental was sacrificed at the altar of the essential,just as the equation strips itself nearly bare to arrive at the answer.
A Russian Mentor? You mean like Stalin? We can talk about Art later – a more important issue arise. Asoka is here as Adequatio. Ask him why he betrayed you. This is real Human Drama. Don’t try to dilute the energy of it. This is what makes us human.
It is getting very boring in this community. That is what happens when small minded people run the world. It gets boring real fast. The small town scenario is fine for some and the suburbs are fine for some and the big cities are fine too. What is the big complaint. Isn’t this country big enough to have it all? Capitalism is wonderful because it produces goods that fill needs and a person can get rich doing that. Isn’t that why most of the idiots ancestors came here in the first place. I see you all as folks who are limited in your capacity to accept what others have achieved. If I had to live like horsewomen without enough money to fix the God dam dishwasher and be proud of it then I would just have to admit that I am poor. Not just hard working or “small town folk “. Thank God this country is bigger than the small minded people who complain and complain and never are grateful for the people who move ahead and heelp others with new ideas fulfill needs and elevate society. I never want to go back to “the good old days ” that never existed. Thank God Asoka is gone though. That at least is process in the right direction ……going forward not backward.
did she ph*k alot ? does she still ? why did she do that to me ?
did Joanne ph*k alot ? why did she do that to me ?
did (does) Joanne ph*k alot ?
Mix It Up
Breaking down the barriers between concepts, words, things, items and so forth is the achievement of the liberation of Matter and Energy from its prison of Logic. When you demolish the borders of words from things, and ideas from random crap on the floor and everything from everything else, you finally achieve a richer world, full of new and important things and experiences and possibilities and freedom: we are no longer within the realm of GOOD and BAD, we are beyond all of this petty stuff, of all of these logical constructions, we are in a completely different world and universe, some place infinitely far away from this simple one bit universe.
Mix all things up, just like they are in a brain, after all, everything is all mixed up in our brain but divided into sure compartments and categories, nothing contaminates anything else, everything is ordered according to thought paths, logical constructions, logical grammars, laws of interaction and such: but if you break down all of the borders between categories in brains, then everything becomes all mixed up, everything can become part of everything else, there are no longer logical constraints upon things to be in their place, they can be anywhere and do anything, they can be connected in any number of untold ways and mean anyhing at all and execute any sequeunce of emotions and other thoughts and feelings and so forth and you can connect all of this random insanity to any random pain/pleasure circuits but even more, ever more new sense organs, ever more new divisional experience categories such as super pain and super pleasure and ever more and super abstractions and all kinds of new logics and connections and new universes and so forth and such. Such as if pain is 7 and pleasure is 44 what is 23 ? and what is 12344 ? and what is the car tire ? and the steering wheel ? and such (and I don’t mean more or less pain as in intensity I mean completely different conceptual entities from pain or pleasure, a new thing and then another new thing and so forth).
So break down all things from themselves and mix them up, put a tree, a steering wheel, a car tire and a microprocessor in the cooking pan and cook them together and see what comes out, or just crush them together, or even just leave them separate and create a new logic and grammar and language upon them and so forth, and ever more, and imagine that they are super precise concepts and mathematically defined to infinite precision in as even if the tree is different by a nanometer the entire concept would vanish and be demolished and such, or do the opposite; that concept or experience or undergoing Matter and Mass and Energy Phase Transition and Change can be provoked by equivalent items such as a pebble (but only a very specific design of a pebble) a car a planet and an electron (but all extremely precisely designed according to some new and wicked and incredible logic and grammar and thought path and symbol set and event sets and so forth).
GURU GURU
From:
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=181330&start=25
and
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.it/
http://instantsingularity3.blogspot.it/
Loosing money, are we? The rubes don’t want to buy the crap you sell? That business model of sitting on your posterior at the end of a 10,000 mile supply chain not working out so well?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I buy something I expect not to have to buy another just like it. Ever. I also do not have and never have had a dishwasher, one of the more useless and wasteful inventions ever, but I do spend for good quality garden tools, made to last by a blacksmith in Gresham, Oregon and a recycler of steel disks in Missouri. But, you don’t offer such products, do you? That would involve some effort on your part, such as research, advertising, marketing and, even acceptance of some risk.
Rubio is a hypocritical, opportunistic whore, as are all politicians. He is performing his role well in the crude Kabuki that is politics. Politics is now theater. Maybe it always was to some extent, but now that’s all it is. It’s a charade to give the semblance of democratic process, when in fact, there is no process. So Rubio pretends. He’s not really against immigration, regardless of legality. But he knows he has to act as though he is. Afterall, his own grandfather was illegal, and truth be known, his parents were as well, but for different reasons. The grandfather was in the U.S. for four years prior to him securing a visa from immigration services. That’s illegal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Rubio
In regards to the parents, I’m of the belief that you do not live in a democracy, and decisions are not made on your behalf. In fact, decisions are made that are more often than not contrary to the will of the people. Considering that, most immigration, imo, is against the will of the people, including the invasion of Cuban exiles when Castro toppled Batista’s regime. Those Cubans are as effectively illegal as the Irish who immigrated in the mid to late 19th century. Gangs of New York revealed that the people’s will was firmly against immigration, but that didn’t stop the Oligarchy from enacting legislation contrary to that will.
Considering the above, there are immigrants, and then there are émigrés. The distinction is noteworthy, and has to do with class. The upper classes and nobility who emigrate and/or are exiled are referred to as the latter in the host country. The commoners, i.e. the unwashed masses, are referred to as the former. Émigrés disgust me. They should disgust you. They’re imported Oligarchy, and the U.S. has an open door policy at all times for this filth. It’s never really a question. But you don’t see those around here who harp about immigration incessantly, putting forth any form of protest as it relates to émigrés. The Oligarchy has to be laughing. Of course it’s laughing. It’s always been thus. Turn the little people against each other. P4C is a little man. He can’t see beyond his own nose. He does exactly as the Oligarchy intended, and tries to beat on fellow commoners. P4C has been fooled into thinking he and his ilk are somehow not commoners. How naive he and his kind are. The Oligarchy relies on that state of mind. It’s what keeps this all ticking in perpetuity. This charade. This scam. Candy from babies.
I don’t know. Maybe you can ask Nastarana if she does and did, but I’m thinking if she doesn’t have a dishwasher, the answer will be pretty obvious.
Thttp://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html Today’s post at oftwominds takes up the theme of local enterprise.
The generally civil and sober tone of the oftwominds blog may offend some here, but do try to be a bit openminded.
I was interested to see that some are getting around the high costs of physical store front by organizing online.
Nastarana, thanks for that link. There is no way to “get around” the physical store front without lots of energy expenditure in the form of server farms to run the internet and truck fleets to deliver the goods.
After the CFN collapse we probably won’t have a functioning grid to provide either of those: the electricity or the road system, given that we cannot manage maintenance costs pre-collapse.
busty says : “Olds69 is not a Troll because his message is neither coherent nor contrary.”
Nay, contrary: JHK is still fighting a 1920s fight against that new technology called the “Automobile”: wow and he and most of his followers are all old timers still fighting that other new technology called TV and all such things worshipping Nature and such (we don’t need a new religion, give us back the good old Christ for Christ’s Sake!). How stupid, we must go forward and become the Kings of the Universe, and Manipulate all the Universe to Death! That is why I am against JHK’s ideology: we need Free Salaries, Cheap Rents, Huge Public Private Projects that create Super Consumption, trillions of cars, skyscrapers, rockets and you know the rest.
rhino – cash says: “You know, college and university grads that you disdain, slave away year after year, designing and building and administering and delivering. ”
Yeah rhino we know: the Hard Work myth and such, the Work Ethic and such, the need to work alot, but you are stupid rhino, you don’t see what is right under your eyes: Work is no longer necessary in a Technological Economy, it can use a few brilliant scientists (“MRI machines” etc.), maybe a few thousands worldwide, but the rest of the millions of workers are redundant structurally, are not needed, there is nothing useful they can do for “Humanity” or the “Common Good” and such: tell me how are you going to occupy millions of more “average” workers for 8 hours a day everyday for years on end, and being paid a salary for what ? Don’t you realize most work is just a make believe hiding status fights, officer politics, very few tasks are really necessary, very few manipulations as in Input -> Manipulation -> Output are really necessary or bring about anything but just a show of who can command who to do the next idiotic useless task just to make believe that it is work and they are “working” and such. And actually, a Technological Economy crystallizes the status structure of power more so than ever before (everyone wonders why the 1 % are getting richer and richer while the rest can drop dead ?), exactly because the great majority of workers are “despensable”, can be “laid off whenever the companies feels it needs to”, can be “replaced in a jiffy”, as in “everyone is important but no one is unreplaceable” and such. Work and Jobs is obsolete rhino, get over it, you did nothing but be a salve for all of your life, like millions of others believing that you were achieving and such: nothing further from the truth, only Power counts, only A against B in the end, only the Will Power forcing you to do what you don’t want to (or convincing you to do what you think you want to and such), it is very simple: A against B, A fights B, A wins and B loses, end of story, nothing deeper or more important, no Common Good here rhino, no Structural Necessity for labor anymore rhino…and don’t say QUak quack, say shpacc a lacc , shpacc a lacc a shlaac a shappcc….
Organized Insanity
The demolition of True and False, the demolition of Fake and Real, of Truth and Lies, the vanishing of any possibility to distinguish between real and false, real and make believe and such, since by deconstructing categories, by demolishing all boundaries between entities and concepts and items and thoughts and delimitations and anything else, anything is right or wrong, anything is good or bad anything can be or can be the opposite and so forth and such according to how the items and the corresponding grammar is organized in minds. Since you can organize random items in any possible way and anything, any sequence of entities and items and events and thought paths and anything at all (planets, stars, electrons, formulas, letters, symbols, the more mixed up the better, the more the items are totally disconnected, incoherent and disjoint the better, the more the contrast between entities the better, the more surprising the mix of entities squashed together are, mixed together, crushed toghether, vaporized and exploded together and then crystallized into a new solid of unknown meaning and unknown new possible grammar and connections to who knows who, the better) in any possible way, then anything can become true or false, anything can acquire infinite value or no value and such, organize things in the most incredible way, make them mean anything and so forth.
And anyways most civiliaztion is based on arbitrary constercutions of targets and goas and rutauls and customs noee no real necessities, they have all benn licked now, now it is play time and what better time to exercise Power agains the weaker making them beleive that there are real structral reasons for so many things when all of those things just hide a simple power relationship,a simple will power agains another for no reason at all but just becasue and such.
And in this way, you always win, anything can become a goal achieved, actually everything is achieved, or anything can become anything else, like any new configuration can be a target and you can invent any sequence of paths the items must be configured as to reach the target as the goal being achieved, as the path towards the target being executed and such and since it is all a random variable, you can invent the wildest and such, keep on creating all kinds of new targets and paths and meanings and jobs, an electron is a civilization and the car tire is the target and the steering wheel is the history of a war within that cilization and you must execute a sequence of complex steps to explain it or to fight that war and so forth and create imaginary minds evaluating all of this and so forth (and their judgments and such, since we are always slaves of judgments, but judgments are always occuring in other minds, you can’t touch judgments, only the execution of an event that that judgment can have on your pain/pleasure circuits and such) and you can change all judgments and always win, or program anything, as the pebble is the judgment and the mind is the broom and tin can is the idea behind the judgment, go on you can do it, be crazy and wild, you always win and such. AMEN.
APE GURU
Hey P2C pretty good post about the situation in downtown Atlanta. I’d like to see more of that from you.
Asoka is right about one thing; I do post quite a bit about the economy here, at least on the surface, i.e. full parking lots at the mall, traffic jams, all these construction projects going on etc. What I try to do is square what I see with my own eyes happening around me with what I read on this and other sites (Orlov etc.). Sometimes its hard to do. Also I read a lot of American History and I’m aware there have been other times in the past when people asked the same questions we ask here, and thought the end was right around the corner.
One thing that puzzles me now, with the real economy just stumbling along, how can the Dow be at all time highs? I thought the Dow was a pretty good indication on how the country was doing as a whole. Q did a pretty good job at explaining it, but still …
I’m just going to keep my eyes open and see what happens next.
CD
From:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/02/scale-implosion.html
busty says : “Olds69 is not a Troll because his message is neither coherent nor contrary.”
Nay, contrary: JHK is still fighting a 1920s fight against that new technology called the “Automobile”: wow and he and most of his followers are all old timers still fighting that other new technology called TV and all such things worshipping Nature and such (we don’t need a new religion, give us back the good old Christ for Christ’s Sake!). How stupid, we must go forward and become the Kings of the Universe, and Manipulate all the Universe to Death! That is why I am against JHK’s ideology: we need Free Salaries, Cheap Rents, Huge Public Private Projects that create Super Consumption, trillions of cars, skyscrapers, rockets and you know the rest.
rhino – cash says: “You know, college and university grads that you disdain, slave away year after year, designing and building and administering and delivering. ”
Yeah rhino we know: the Hard Work myth and such, the Work Ethic and such, the need to work alot, but you are stupid rhino, you don’t see what is right under your eyes: Work is no longer necessary in a Technological Economy, it can use a few brilliant scientists (“MRI machines” etc.), maybe a few thousands worldwide, but the rest of the millions of workers are redundant structurally, are not needed, there is nothing useful they can do for “Humanity” or the “Common Good” and such: tell me how are you going to occupy millions of more “average” workers for 8 hours a day everyday for years on end, and being paid a salary for what ? Don’t you realize most work is just a make believe hiding status fights, officer politics, very few tasks are really necessary, very few manipulations as in Input -> Manipulation -> Output are really necessary or bring about anything but just a show of who can command who to do the next idiotic useless task just to make believe that it is work and they are “working” and such. And actually, a Technological Economy crystallizes the status structure of power more so than ever before (everyone wonders why the 1 % are getting richer and richer while the rest can drop dead ?), exactly because the great majority of workers are “despensable”, can be “laid off whenever the companies feels it needs to”, can be “replaced in a jiffy”, as in “everyone is important but no one is unreplaceable” and such. Work and Jobs is obsolete rhino, get over it, you did nothing but be a salve for all of your life, like millions of others believing that you were achieving and such: nothing further from the truth, only Power counts, only A against B in the end, only the Will Power forcing you to do what you don’t want to (or convincing you to do what you think you want to and such), it is very simple: A against B, A fights B, A wins and B loses, end of story, nothing deeper or more important, no Common Good here rhino, no Structural Necessity for labor anymore rhino…and don’t say QUak quack, say shpacc a lacc , shpacc a lacc a shlaac a shappcc….
Organized Insanity
The demolition of True and False, the demolition of Fake and Real, of Truth and Lies, the vanishing of any possibility to distinguish between real and false, real and make believe and such, since by deconstructing categories, by demolishing all boundaries between entities and concepts and items and thoughts and delimitations and anything else, anything is right or wrong, anything is good or bad anything can be or can be the opposite and so forth and such according to how the items and the corresponding grammar is organized in minds. Since you can organize random items in any possible way and anything, any sequence of entities and items and events and thought paths and anything at all (planets, stars, electrons, formulas, letters, symbols, the more mixed up the better, the more the items are totally disconnected, incoherent and disjoint the better, the more the contrast between entities the better, the more surprising the mix of entities squashed together are, mixed together, crushed toghether, vaporized and exploded together and then crystallized into a new solid of unknown meaning and unknown new possible grammar and connections to who knows who, the better) in any possible way, then anything can become true or false, anything can acquire infinite value or no value and such, organize things in the most incredible way, make them mean anything and so forth.
And anyways most civilization is based on arbitrary constructions of targets and goals and ritauls and customs with no real necessities, they have all been licked now, now it is play time and what better time to exercise Power against the weaker making them believe that there are real structural reasons for so many things when all of those things just hide a simple power relationship, a simple will power against another for no reason at all but just because and such.
And in this way, you always win, anything can become a goal achieved, actually everything is achieved, or anything can become anything else, like any new configuration can be a target and you can invent any sequence of paths the items must be configured as to reach the target as the goal being achieved, as the path towards the target being executed and such and since it is all a random variable, you can invent the wildest and such, keep on creating all kinds of new targets and paths and meanings and jobs, an electron is a civilization and the car tire is the target and the steering wheel is the history of a war within that cilization and you must execute a sequence of complex steps to explain it or to fight that war and so forth and create imaginary minds evaluating all of this and so forth (and their judgments and such, since we are always slaves of judgments, but judgments are always occuring in other minds, you can’t touch judgments, only the execution of an event that that judgment can have on your pain/pleasure circuits and such) and you can change all judgments and always win, or program anything, as the pebble is the judgment and the mind is the broom and tin can is the idea behind the judgment, go on you can do it, be crazy and wild, you always win and such. AMEN.
APE GURU
And anyways most civilization is based on arbitrary constructions of targets and goals and rituals and customs with no real necessities, they have all been licked now, now it is play time and what better time to exercise Power against the weaker making them believe that there are real structural reasons for so many things when all of those things just hide a simple power relationship, a simple will power against another for no reason at all but just because and such.
Dude, WTF are you talking about?
An excellent post. It gets to the heart more than any post ever to this blog. I mean that sincerely. You said:
Perfect. You have articulated what I have observed, experienced and ruminated over for quite some time now, and you’re probably one of the few, if not the only one, who understood it was one of the underlying messages/themes in the novel I’ve been depositing in segments here. Thanks for the brilliant analysis. Keep it coming, but keep in mind, if you’re not already aware, it’s tantamount to casting pearls before swine. You are one the diamonds in the rough to be found here. Shine on you crazy diamond.
A black agreeing that “hard work is a myth” really fulfills some stereotypes.
“and you’re probably one of the few, if not the only one, who understood it was one of the underlying messages/themes in the novel I’ve been depositing in segments here.
Yeah, you’ve been depositing it. But please, no more of your hackneyed porn novel on kunstlerthreads.
Another “troll” challenging the premises of CFN?
Ouch! Talk about hitting our host in the nose!
Thanks for the comments. Although they lack any accuracy or mindfulness.
I looked at the link about California, populated with ever increasing numbers of non-tax payers.
With respect to JK and his postulating about coming changes – my point is that his future view of the world is inevitable, but remote.
First we must see how and a contraction of government credit strength , followed by a contraction of government spending instigates energy consumption frugality among a larger portion of the population.
When this “austerity” is realized by the masses, and when the masses “see” government policies that increase their pain by allowing wasteful energy consumption for the rich – then we will see suburbia either adapt or die…….
Eventually, as JK says – suburbia will fail – but only after a big time discussion about discretionary energy consumption.
Have you never heard of DOMA? (“one man, one woman” imposed on everyone; DOMA is the law of the land)
No I haven’t. Which begs the question: Who is speaking up for heterosexuality, naturalness, the Holistic conception of human life, natural sex and natural marriage?
Yes, Janos has also shown his fear that gays will “hit on him.” It is irrational.
Do gays say everything must be rational and that instincts and feelings are not valid? What is rational about their mental illness. How is a male’s sexual attraction to a male body rational? How is the idea of “gay marriage” — rational when nature itself has not endowed these couplings with the same powers as natural couples? (Gay marriage is intrinsically barren and a “gay family” requires orphans and other-peoples’ children to raise any semblance of existence.)
Like most reasonable men his fears likely include profounder fears about the prospect of homosexuals destroying human life as we know it, all naturalness, and the human family. A father certainly does have of a rational fear that gays will hit on his children as they grow up, especially as homosexuals get cockier and cockier, with the whole culture on the defensive and afraid to confront them.
It is a phobia. Get help.
Revulsion at homosexuality is the healthy moral state of the heterosexual. Labeling a wide range of human feelings as a mental illness is dishonest; get a better vice. Get a homosexual country of your own and leave normal life alone.
This date 7 years ago marked a significant milestone in my life. I sent the following email to 218 people with whom I regularly interfaced. (Now there’s a corporate type word right up there with paradigm.)
Subject: I’m retiring on Monday, 2/20/06
My big day has arrived. The beans have been counted and the numbers crunched. Now its time to hang up my green eyeshade and make that final commute into the sunset.
To my customers, friends and co-workers, best wishes and a fond adieu.
especially as homosexuals get cockier and cockier
==========
Pun intended, I assume? ;o)
I don’t care to use dishwashers, or air conditioners, or outdoor power equipment because they are expensive to buy and repair and run up a person’s water and energy bills.
Social class might be your, or insufferable’s, obsession; it is not mine. Label me “poor” all you like; I wonder how much debt insufferable is carrying?
Well said, JCL.
In Connecticut at least we’re finding out the hard way what Homo Rule is all about, as the Governors entire staff, prominent Democrats in the General Assembly, heads of the Public Sector Unions, and State Govt. Dept. heads are not only ‘proudly Gay’, but homo activists actually ‘married’ to other dudes. They all live in an effete conclave in the west end of Hartford, near Trinity College. Its almost comical when it comes time for Queer union leaders to negotiate contracts with the queers in the Governors office., who are supposed to be looking out for the interests of ‘the People’. Its one big Circle Jerk.
==CD
and make that final commute into the sunset.
===========
We caught that final commute on tape. Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2zkN74s72M
Further exposing Carolonius Pornquist:
Rubio is a hypocritical, opportunistic whore…
Why does an English woman living England care about American politicians, much less follow them?
“The commoners, i.e. the unwashed masses, are referred to as the former…and tries to beat on fellow commoners…
I know you decided on “commoners” as a gimmick to sound like a white English lady. But do the British speak this way today? I know a lot of them and I’ve never heard it. Among the middle and lower classes of Brits I think this is a painful word. Your Carol Newquist persona is circa 1800.
Afterall, his own grandfather was illegal…
(All this detailed knowledge of a small time American politician.) The “afterall” is interesting. I have seen you put these two words together before. Educated English ladies don’t make one word from “after all.” Even educated Americans don’t.
“In regards to the parents, I’m of the belief…
That ‘s’ is interesting. An English person would say “In regard to…”. So would most Americans. The use of “regards” with an ‘s’ is typical of Africa Americans.
Also, “I’m of the belief” is a sloppy Americanism typical to young people.
“Considering that, most immigration, imo, is against the will of the people, including the…
Another case of comma overload and inability to separate ideas into distinct sentences. The first comma was very unnecessary. Again, extreme effort to appear educated and punctilious has you putting commas everywhere.
“But you don’t see those around here who harp about immigration incessantly, putting forth any form of protest as it relates to émigrés.
Another very unnecessary comma, and further…
Many of us are against non-white immigration both legal and illegal. “Legal immigration” is regularly hit upon over at places like TheOccidentalObserver.net — especially legal immigration by non-whites. Indeed, we have less of an issue with our own kin coming here, such as the English or the Germans. We’d like more of them.
Now, I notice you make that distinction. Apparently you would loathe an English or Norwegian emigre just as much as a Nigerian or Hmong. This lack of any preference for America’s founding people (whites) further exposes you as a black.
“The Oligarchy relies on that state of mind.”
The oligarchy wants us reading porn.
“This charade. This scam. Candy from babies.”
Madison Avenue non-sentences like that are generally not used by nice White English ladies, and are generally offensive to them.
“This last election was not a temporary anomaly; it was a structural realignment. GAME OVER.
No, just a new and worse game. Including million-dollar vacation junkets and golf vacations for High Yellow Phello.
Correction:
“Now, I notice you make that distinction.
Should have been:
Now, I notice you don’t make that distinction.
…and such
========
as it were, if you will.
“Only a goofy megalomaniac would put it quite that way..do you do readings in Chinese too?
Was my paraphrase of the verse off? I have some 20 translations and have loved the text for years. I actually softened the thing for you.
But first time I’ve heard Lao Tzu called a goofy megalomaniac. There’s more in the Tao Te Ching to make you splutter, if you will. I would have thought that the Tao Te Ching would have been another thing you would have loaded on the shelf for your White persona — along with Osho garnerings, Tai-Chi, sidereal zodiacs, Russian sculptors, and such truck.
I take your point about the long unsustainability of internet, but for the time being, internet is being used in creative ways to allow makers of sturdy, useful goods to reach their markets while minimizing expenses such as rent and utilities.
By the time the internet no longer exists, one can hope that local govts. will have given up the kind of restrictive zoning which won’t allow craftspersons to live above their shops.
“The Sage is of the old school of Christian Identity, that of British Israelism – which has deep roots back to Blake and even before back to Ancient times.
No, haven’t heard of him. I suppose Cambria refers to the northern California town. I am interested in Christian Identity but have not run across materials, at least on the internet, that lay it out in an easy overview.
My view is that we get the religion we deserve, out there in the transient outer world-miasm. The cropping up of certain Christian identity ideas on my own outer landscape has been a pleasure to me.
If I understand the possibilities of C.I. mythology (this is not a put-down; I view all as mind-created mythology, including the material world) it’s like the white Europeans were the ones who “took the punishment.” They took the blow.
Being northward is synonymous with the banishment that obligates toil (growing food) and the loss of some former state. They did the penance — went northward and toiled — which meant they were still In Relationship. There are delicious possibilities in the C.I. religious currents. All religions are self-projections so they upgrade according to your general karmic upgrade. If you only experience idiotic religions it’s because you’re an idiot…
Aum.
Adequack said, “Does that mean Comrade Dystopia and norecovery are trolls? They ask questions. They present different viewpoints. They disagree with JHK.”
No, the examples you cite aren’t sufficient to establish that one is a Troll.
In order to be a Troll, you must have a comprehensive thesis contrary to the main concepts discussed in the forum. Further, you must maintain an active agenda to push this point of view on a consistent basis.
That said, although annoying, Trolls are tolerable- to an extent. JHK’s concept of Clusterfuck is a broad umbrella. The only thing that doesn’t fit under it is the sunny position that everything is just rosy; that Suburban build-out ain’t a tragedy in humanist and aesthetic senses; and that the ‘lumpenprole’ are smooth operators, just a “lil bit misunderstood”. In addition, that the Banking Boyz aren’t criminals, etc….
Point being, there are forums where the “Everything’s Just Fine” contingent can jerk each other off- namely, most mainstream outlets- where their pie-holes can get stuffed with the latest vaporware from modern corporate apologia.
Thanks for the clarification.
Oh, I meant to add:
Today the moon is sextiling Jim’s Saturn-ruling-3rd, so he is likely feeling rather negative and pessimistic. He likely has much 3rd house work to do right now that is unpleasant, such as editing, culling posts, and not liking what he’s reading. Today he may have had to do a difficult commute, had pain walking, or simply finds himself receiving bad news. Part of that is the posts on this thread, many of which he dislikes.
This is part of a larger and longer theme associated with Jim’s slow Neptune-opposition-Saturn in which two things are happening: He’s getting his threads clogged with all sorts of posters he considers parasites, leeches, or the cyber-equivalent of homeless people and bums. At the same time, certain pinions of his long-held worldview are getting challenged and coming undone. He also likely feels embarrassed during this period about the content of his blog threads, and feels its harming his reputation in general. Yet he finds it very tedious and dispiriting to weed out his blogs. Indeed, he likely views it like a weed infestation that he just doesn’t have time or spirit for. He may feel it is a challenge to his authority as the father figure of his own blog.
On the positive side, he’s coming into a larger view of reality, new spiritual vision, and possibly new creative impulses. His entire view of religion is being restructured in a stressful way, but it will be meaningful. Also on the positive side, Jim is probably doing better than ever financially, and even bodily, and that trend will continue and pick up over the next few months. Also on the positive side this evening brings the sextile to Jim’s moon and he will likely have enjoyable engagements with women, or his women, and he will probably talk about philosophy, religion, or culture with them — as has probably been common to his nature for buckets of years.
Long live the Jews, especially brilliant ones like Jim, and long live the other nations and peoples, too, if you will.
JL
The use of “regards” with an ‘s’ is typical of Africa Americans.
==========
He meant African. It was a typo.
“Carol,” although Julian makes some valid snarky points concerning your writing you should not let the one above concern you in the least. It is of the same “ilk” as a comment he made yesterday, viz. “Self-conscious blacks always want to be the first to bring up apes,” which he effectively admitted was completely unsubstantiated and not even something one might intuitively believe and therefore what is commonly known as bullshit. When I called him on it (i.e. asked for empirical evidence), Julian admitted (in reading between the lines) that it was a dreamt up line used to spice up the chat in this following reply:
I guess you’ve never read some of the hard, dramatic statements (and over-statements) Jim Kunstler makes weekly. That’s why we read him. We love it.
This is not a science lab, Stick-in-the-Kyoo. It’s a chat thread. What makes it fun is salt-and-pepper, occasional exaggerations, satire, color. I myself prefer to read a writer who, like Jim, is convinced of something and willing to put it starkly.
Julian prefers a mathematician that occasionally says 2+2=5.
Well Julian, I myself prefer to read a writer who colorfully speaks the truth.
Please keep your post directed to me at 100 words or less, Stick-in-the-Kyoo, and make the first sentence worthwhile. I’m already aware that they are contentless. Try that procedure and I might read a few of them somewhere along the line.
I know you won’t believe me, but I’m not reading his garbage. It’s difficult though, because every other post is his. By the way, have you, or has anyone else noticed that he’s changed his screen name? It’s now Julian C. Lee versus Julian Curtis Lee. JHK banned him and he came back right away with another user name and email address. Or was it another case of the ghost in the movable type?
Most people in New England heat their houses with oil burned in furnaces. This morning the Governor launched a program to get everyone to convert to Natural Gas, “because we are the Saudi Arabia of Natural Gas”.
Yesterday in the WSJ an article appeared stating that in 2012 oil production increased inside the US more than anytime since 1859. It went on to say we have so much oil we will be exporting crude once again in the near future. Every day I see articles like this. Its almost common knowledge that our energy problems have been solved.
So it surprises me, and what I’m trying to reconcile, is why the price of crude is still close to $100 per barrel? I never see that addressed. Doesn’t it stand to reason if there is plenty of oil the price would drop to the customary traditional $20 pb? I’ve seen in a few places gasoline might hit $5.00 per gallon this summer. How could that be if there is suddenly so much of it? Why is this question not being asked? And if gas does go up to $5.00 its going to be a rough summer, and you can forget about any sort of ‘recovery’.
==CD
Sorry, the first sentence should have read…”I take your point about the long term unsustainibility..’ etc.
I find the rapidity of response from Asoka/AQ to be quite interesting. Double A really, really doesn’t care for the idea that determined young entrepreneurs can evade and avoid the paying of private taxes, such as excessive rents and utility costs. I wonder why. Possibly it is because he is a part of and identifies with the interests of the managerial classes, public and private. Another reason for his (or her, but I think we are dealing with an individual of the male persuasion here) dismay might be the knowledge that his tribe gained their foothold and increased their wealth by means of rent seekings of various kinds.
I myself prefer to read a writer who colorfully speaks the truth.
============
Just recently you praised several posters for the quality of their insults (hurtful, not truthful) directed at other posters.
In order to be a Troll, you must have a comprehensive thesis contrary to the main concepts discussed in the forum. Further, you must maintain an active agenda to push this point of view on a consistent basis.
===========
What a hoot you are!! No, a troll is someone who portends to share the blog author’s views about collapse, but not so cleverly manipulates the message in the comments to his/her own ends. By virtue of that, there is a cabal of trolls, to include yourself and the other avowed racists here, covering the entirety of Clusterfuck Bridge and impeding the flow of explorers to the other side.
There are places for you. They were built with you in mind. They’re the equivalent of internet straight jackets. There’s The Phora, Stormfront and The Occidental Observer just to name a few. Now please, go be with your own and pound your heads against the rubber walls in perpetuity. Get off this bridge. Free it up so those who are on a journey may pass through unmolested by you and your kind.
Amen. Thank you, Carol.
[there are] avowed racists here, covering the entirety of Clusterfuck Bridge and impeding the flow of explorers to the other side.
Love your metaphor!
There is much to be done on the way to WMBH, including gardening. Does anyone want to share their experience with “global buckets” to grow food?
You’re welcome. I’m glad you’re here. We need more like you. You’re a breath of fresh air. This bridge must be cleared. I can’t do it alone. I may be many things, i.e. a San Francisco cafe liberal, English woman, feminist, black man attempting to be erudite, but I’m not Superman. Or is it “I’m not Wonder Woman?” Either one will do for what I’m not. It will take a village to free up the bridge. Welcome to the effort, and may Osho be with you.
Nice you’ve discovered the period, Ms. Pornquist.
You’re saying you post under all those fake personas?
It takes a White village to build a bridge.
Osho can’t be with us because Reagan booted his ass and then he died of his addictions and chronic bad health.
Security guard has to wear a camera, carry a Taser, and carry a 9mm automatic – just to protect this little store near Underground Atlanta.
==========
I guess the two “ladies,” the one in a blue top and the other in a white top, are what ya call yer “Sheboons.” I learned that from Asoka’s Urban Dictionary.
You better BACK IT UP!! (the security guard’s patience was astonishing… I think I’d have at least fired off a couple of warning shots about 50 seconds into the video.)
Investments – Part 3
So the Greeks had another strike today and the French Prime Minister promised that France “Will Invest in Greece”,they will make “Investments”: but that is the problem, those strikers should tell France that they can go fly a kite with the concept of “Investments” and tell them that they Demand Scott Free Handouts! this word, “Investments” that tries to make everything look so “objective”, so “Natural” so logical and such, when all it is is another of those vague concepts that try to hide the simple Power Relationship between who has the cash and who doesn’t: those who want to make an Investment must get a return on the money but obviously there is no possible return anymore in most endeavors, most manufacturing (even the Chinese are offshoring: their workers 200 dollars a month paycheck is way too much, now they are trying Nigeria where the paycheck is still 50 dollars a month and such), most services don’t return crap, most jobs are a pure loss, don’t produce anything, so the entire idea of Investments must be hosed, must go out of the window, kill the concept of investments, kill this word that confuses people and makes them believe all the BS that the economy is something logical and objective when it is only a war, a war between who has the cash and millions of turds that need that cash but are too afraid to ask for Scott Free Handouts, they must oblige to ask for “jobs”, something that is obsolete, no longer needed, no longer worth crap, there has never been an era where the entire concept of work and jobs has become meaningless, redundant, but the word investments brainwashes the turds that they have to deserve it, that the cash has to have a return on investments and such.
Obviously no one is really going to “Invest” in Greece or Spain or Italy or many other countries for the simple reason that there is nothing worth investing in (they can try the Real Estate Price Inflation mechanism that has been so successful in the past, but most of those countries are now mostly broke and bankrupt go figure); their salaries are way too high compared to the third world, they don’t have any super special skills (the mythological “Skill Set” and Training BS and “More Education”, “Innovation”, “Startup”, “Research” and especially the “More Flexibility to Hire and Fire” (never has a simple desire to exert power been hidden behind such abstruse and objective seeming concepts: what they really want is the joy to hire and fire and exert power on the weaker social class, just because, because people love to execute their Will Power against another, they want to punch someone in the face but don’t know how to say it so as to make it seem so “objective” and “logical”, the “science of economics” and such) and so forth everyone is brainwashed about) (as if everyone is supposed to work in high tech Integrated Circuit Factories experts in Solid State Physics and such, and even these experts are redundant and crapped upon just like any old nigger), real investments are hard to come by and even if they do make investments it has no relationship to the possible “number of jobs” that they can imply and especially the possible “redistribution” of profit and cash to the community, which is obviously ever more impossible and so forth.
And the truth is there is very little possible new research and innovation and startups possible today, most economic sectors have been beaten to death by now, most opportunity has been expired and achieved by the past winners, now we are left with breadcrumbs, the game is over, but that is why they all insist on ever more research, innovation, economic growth and such, since these things are really dead and over with, gone forever, the more they are impossible to get back the more they all chant that they need more and more, more research, more startups more this and that, more education, more training and so forth: and no one asks: Exactly To Do What With ? is that so hard to ask ? is that so hard to figure out ? no one understands crap about anything, they are all drones, brainwashed and repeating the same crap they hear over and over again, like the United Tape Recorders of the World, etc.
The concept of Investment is Obsolete, you must give Scott Free Handouts to all worldwide and no longer create conditions in order to give out the money, you must hose all of these ideas, this word, Investment, a return on money and such is no longer possible in a Technological Economy, it can only apply to a small portion of work and such. And the truth is that if the powers that be, those that have cash and such simply stated what they really want and namely: they want to keep their cash and hose everyone else, it is a static power situation a status achieved, where no one who is weak will ever have a chance and such, since they can’t admit this openly, they need all of these vague and abstruse concepts to hide a simple A wins B loses, and most people are or will end up being B, end of story.
And most of all the concept and word of Investment always wants to hide a simple Will Power opposing yours, another person who wants to be the boss, who wants to decide, who wants to exert his power and such: but since power is always arbitrary and not justified, the entire concept of investment must be hosed, we need Scott free handouts to all and cheap rents and such, kill power, kill every structure of power…
GURU
“…what I’m trying to reconcile, is why the price of crude is still close to $100 per barrel?”
————————————————
1. Futures speculation
2. Currency devaluation
3. Demand destruction
a troll is someone who portends to share the blog
===========
portends??
Groan.
http://instantsingularity1.blogspot.it
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=181690
3. Demand destruction
==========
Why would demand destruction cause prices to rise? The only reason I can think of is that it would cause an even greater degree of supply destruction. i.e. the oil exists but doesn’t get pumped. Why bother, not enough demand.
must go out of the window,
============
Another unnecessary of.
Ms. Pornquist: JHK banned him and he came back right away…”
I have no experience of being banned by Jim. I changed the initialization of my name so as not to distract those who follow Hollyhos. Did it look like I was trying to hide, moron? Now when it comes comes to posters hiding themselves, as Smokey Robinson sang, you’re quite a different subject. Tears of a clown!
What a hoot you are!!
You’re the one pretending to be an English lady and posting porn.
A troll is someone who portends to share the blog author’s views about collapse,
I think you meant “pretends” but “portends” sounded fancier.
I don’t think you even come close to sharing Kunstler’s views. I began walking intentionally by my teens because I hated the car-culture. As a statement against the car culture I used to hitchhike daily to work 40 miles from Palmer to Anchorage, Alaska. At that time I had a good job, was raising a family, and lived in a nice place but I hitchhiked to make that anti-car statement. I have deliberately chosen “walking towns” to live in for decades — and walked in them rather than drive, as much as possible. Can you say the same. I believe that when it comes to sharing the author’s views you are not near my league. In various venues I have been doing writing critical of carhells (a word I started using in my teens) for about 30 years. It’s really you who doesn’t fit here.
“but not so cleverly manipulates the message in the comments to his/her own ends.
You mean like so they can put their crappy novel in front of an audience?
…covering the entirety of Clusterfuck Bridge and impeding the flow of explorers to the other side.
All these fevered metaphors. Maybe someday you can help write speeches for Jesse Jackson?
There are places for you…They’re the equivalent of internet straight jackets. There’s The Phora, Stormfront and The Occidental Observer just to name a few.
The same people who want to conserve the white race tend to be conservationists in other ways — especially when they realize that conservation has long been peculiarly strong in their own race. Racial consciousness goes write along with preserving varieties of wildlife. It was usually we white folk who set up the animal sanctuaries in your home country of Africa, and your people who continue to poach elephants. Our interests overall are more appropriate to this blog than your interest in testing your porn novel on an audience.
Free it up so those who are on a journey may pass through unmolested by you and your kind.
Molested? I felt molested by having to see your sexual fantasies on this thread.
“…we need Scott free handouts to all and cheap rents and such…”
Why would you think that people should get Scott free handouts and then say that it’s all right to pay rent for property? Who OWNS the land of this planet whose environment we are rapidly destroying?
Mom Nature owns the place. We are all just renters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ0up_MjsLk
Addendum:
It was a part of my hippie heritage to be environmentalist, and I was worried about these things by my teens.
“As a statement against the car culture I used to hitchhike daily to work 40 miles from Palmer to Anchorage, Alaska.”
I forgot to mention that I did this for 3.5 years, and that it was one of the best things that I ever did in my life, and I got to know a great many Alaskans that way and the real Alaska. By the time it was over I could not stand out there more than 5 minutes without a ride, and multiple people would stop to pick me up. I was well-known along the Glenn Highway.
If you want to be in the building business, you have to build structures. Whether they are needed or not.
If you want to be in the petroleum business, you have to pump oil. Whether it’s needed or not. The exploration, development, and drilling for oil is increasingly expensive (see reason #2 from previous post).
And Q, between you & me, we almost have to deploy our hyper-expensive and morally questionable military every time we have to do these things.
I’m curious. I have been working a series of tough, menial jobs lately so I haven’t been able to check it out.
Does anyone know if U.S. oil companies have been paying royalties for drilling on publicly owned (i.e. National Park) lands?
Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
J. Edgar Hoover
If you want to be in the petroleum business, you have to pump oil. Whether it’s needed or not. The exploration, development, and drilling for oil is increasingly expensive (see reason #2 from previous post).
===========
I can be dense sometimes. Please put into simple language how demand destruction causes higher prices.
“Every time I read Jimbo bragging about his village home, I get a chuckle thinking about how he DOESN’T make his living there.”
He isn’t the only one. I have lifelong ties to Warren County, where my parents recently retired. It’s the next county to the north and west of Washington County, where Jim lives. With sadly rare exceptions, this area is next to useless. Agricultural decline in this part of New York and nearby parts of New England dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Erie Canal and then the railroads allowed Midwestern farmers to flood Eastern markets with cheap grain. In much of the North Country, however, this is a moot point since the land is agriculturally marginal at best. The old riverfront industrial towns upriver from the confluence of the Hudson and the Mohawk include a number of Rust Belt horror stories. Fort Edward, for example, was effectively a company town for General Electric. When GE shut the local capacitor factories, it left behind massive unemployment, a surge in crime, and one of the most notorious Superfund sites in the country. The people my late maternal grandmother ran with in the Adirondacks were little more than shiftless drunks, some of them barely employable in the best of times. There is a lot of insurance fraud in the Adirondacks, where it’s a time-honored tradition to burn down one’s property for the settlement money; insurance adjusters have a hell of a time confirming their suspicions of arson for fraud because the locals tend to cover for each other.
The summer people and weekenders, who are thick on the lakes, aren’t necessarily an improvement on the natives. They have better manners, if you’re lucky, but they’re also neurotic, insecure head cases who get worse, not better, when they’re at loose ends on vacation. I get the distinct impression that the wealthier among them, like the trailer trash who live just out of sight of the lakes, spend a great deal of their free time sauced.
Making a living as a writer in a fairly affordable small town and tending a vegetable garden on the side is a pretty productive and meaningful life by North Country standards.
Even though it goes without saying, I’m gonna do it anyway. Oil companies are HUGE corporations. There is a level of expectation with profit. Executives, employees, and shareholders ALL have a level of expectation. Petroleum is the blood of modernity.
How can the U.S. expect to pay the same price for an increasingly more valuable commodity (oil) with an increasingly less valuable currency?
I can’t really come up with a good reason for demand destruction. I suspect that there is a certain amount “panic” with those who buy and sell things for their well-being.
The plebs just don’t have enough money to buy their product anymore and we still have to fund their 401k’s lest they start dusting off the guillotines.
I’ve read Fred Reed. He doesn’t employ “original grammar.” He can’t. There’s no such thing. Fred Reed knows grammar backwards and forwards, and puts his knowledge into his prose, which is one of the reasons for its clarity. And Reed himself has complained about grammar ignoramuses.
Since the people who post here write at speed and probably don’t revise, they occasionally make errors in grammar and syntax–as I do. But I don’t pick on THEM. Why would I? We CFNers don’t come here to write a goddamn exam. But I do pick on YOU. Know why? It’s your tone, the one you switch to when you’re trying to sound arch or to put another poster in his place–referring to an opponent as an “item” and beginning a sentence with “verily.” Why do you write like that? Don’t you get tired of doing all those pirouettes?
You’re a Henry Wotton in embryo, except you’ll always remain embryonic.
Henry Wotton is a character in “The Picture of Dorian Grey.” His function in the novel is to give utterance to Oscar Wilde’s genius for clever and witty dialogue. Thing is, you’re no Wilde.
I also suspect that people who live a Lifestyle of the Grotesquely Rich also don’t want to live on a wrecked planet but still need a ready stable of Mercedes Benz cars to keep up appearances.
Yeah, we’re pretty fucked up.
One of the things that strikes me about this incident is that it happened in downtown Atlanta. The one time I visited Atlanta, in 2006, I was impressed by the gentrification around Five Points. A huge amount of money has been poured into the neighborhood, with some very good results, and yet it is apparently impossible to keep the disorder and violence from intruding. I encountered some very disturbed homeless people at the Five Points MARTA station, and a family friend who regularly does business in Atlanta has had some scary experiences with hoodlums on MARTA trains.
You’re spot on about the racial angle. A white security guard or cop reacting to exactly the same behavior in exactly the same way might well have stirred up a national firestorm along the lines of the Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant shootings. This racially based presumption of guilt allows every feral racist hoodlum to play the race card whenever a white person with manners and morals tries to hold him accountable, inevitably making things even worse for innocent blacks who are trying to air legitimate complaints of unwarranted violence at the hands of cops and security officers.
This country badly needs reasonable black people of goodwill to stand up to the thugs in their communities and destroy the racial canards that are used to justify the violence. As long as the police are willing and able to defend upstanding black citizens, this really isn’t a lot to ask: no one despises black hoodlums more than the upstanding blacks terrorized in their neighborhoods.
Would you please stop with this shit. I live in the middle of Wonder Bread America and I can assure you that there is no shortage of White Hoodlums.
Why not try to figure out a way to integrate ALL hoodlums into a maintainable society?
As a statement against the car culture I used to hitchhike daily to work 40 miles from Palmer to Anchorage, Alaska…..I hitchhiked to make that anti-car statement.
I love the beatdowns you dish out but sometimes I wonder…
Saying that you hitchhiked as a statement against car culture is like saying you bummed OPs as a statement against smoking. You kill me!
I think you were making a statement to the drivers who picked you up that “Hey, if you’re willing to cart my ass to work at YOUR expense I’m down wit dat.”
Why not work out a carpool arrangement to share costs equitably. I carpooled for 24 of my 26 years at my last employer (38 miles and 2 tolls one way). Did you remember to tell all those nice Alaskans you met what chumps they were?
Racial consciousness goes write along with preserving varieties of wildlife.
Is this^ a mistake or is it something very clever that went over my head?
I believe that when it comes to sharing the author’s views you are not near my league.
Even if true how could you possibly know… so why bother saying it? I believe my dick is longer than yours and I’ll bet you have an undescended testicle.
I just raised my head to look/listen to “Rick” Mishkin, former Fed Reserve pooh-bah, and it was a good day today… he ONLY said “prahlem” twice and he had no occasion to say “prolly.” Rick doesn’t like the letter B.
I have written him 3 times in the past 2 years about this foible, in vain. I’ll bet he’d be pleased if he learned I’d been run over by a truck.
Are you misusing the begging-the-question idea deliberately? Or are you actually ignorant of its traditional and proper meaning. It does NOT refer to a statement which contains implicitly a question, which question BEGS to be asked. It refers to a circular argument, an argument in which the conclusion is a restatement, differently expressed, of one of the argument’s premises.
How are you going to preserve white civilization against the gathering dark-skinned hordes if you’re innocent of that civilization’s essentials? Knowledge of elementary informal logic is an essential. Do I have such knowledge? No. But I’m not a white nationalist.
Ever been Red Lined?
Reading is fine, but to viscerally experience the Tao Te Ching nothing comes close to Pa Qua Chang practice, IMO. Of course no reputable Neijia teacher will start you off on Pa Qua; it’s simply too difficult and demanding without preparatory training.
A good place for you to begin if you want to understand Taoism beyond the confines of ‘your head’ is with standing Chi-Kung practice. From there you might consider Tai Chi, and one of the short, less demanding forms/styles at that.
When you learn to breathe from your feet like an undulating oak you may find yourself less obsessed with leaf-like minutiae hanging from the top twigs, dry and irrelevant in the grand scheme of roots and things. You’ll also come to recognize, painful though it will be, that explicating sentence after sentence on a casual blog is nothing but a mirror reflection of your inane separatist mind set in general.
You have a lot of work to do and a long way to go before you can speak with authority on the Ta Tao Ching. Good luck.
And Julian, what was that blather about all theories of causation being mind-derived and conditioned by something or the other? All theories of causation are produced by the interaction between the mental and the non-mental: is that what you were saying? I think it was. But why did you bother saying it? It’s utterly trite.
By the way, are you sure you’re familiar with ALL the theories of causation. Big subject, you know. Scores of books have been written on it. Read the lot of them?
DRECK is a big subject that encompasses a lot too.
No one is saying there aren’t White Hoodlums. The difference is a) The Black Race produces an incredible number of them percentage wise, and b) Whites don’t stand up and support their hoodlums the way Blacks do. How do Blacks do it? They blame Whites for it.
Now admit it: you are a Christopher Dorner fan just like most of Black America. White Liberals are a huge problem and we are going to have to deal with them when we deal with Blacks.
Not a White Nationalist? Why the hell not? What’s your excuse? There is no good one anymore.
There are more negative words and put downs in Yiddish than any other language.
Cambria is the old name of Wales – a Latinized form of Cymru I believe. They were the Celitic people who colonized it. I assume he chose Wales because of its heroic stand against the Saxons and later the Normans.
In the second story from the top, he mentions that he is a Dr Seuss fan too. But the latest addition of The Cat in the Hat shows no Father around, only the Mother. And she has two childre -a Black boy and a White girl.
If you see a flag blowing in the wind, is the flag moving, the wind moving, or your mind moving? If you expect to see a flag moving, you may well see it moving even if it is not. Or if two things happen in proximity both in time and space, did one cause the other? Or the did a third thing or person do it? Or none of the above? People make alot of assumptions – and they are often partially wrong or worse.
BUCK STUD
I wrote a reply to your post about the Greek sculptors and their canons, but it got away from me.
Ever noticed in group portraits of Civil War soldiers how slope-shouldered they seem? Maybe it was the clothes they were wearing. I don’t know. I’ve noticed the same thing in photos of the Victorian English. If that clothes-hanger look was in fact a physique-feature of those times, it’s been bred out.
There are more negative words and put downs in Yiddish than any other language.
==========
Another off-the-cuff statement that you couldn’t possibly prove. I think the language of the Inuit has more put-downs than Yiddish.
Prove it.
I wrote a reply to your post about the Greek sculptors and their canons,
Everybody has canons now? Sculptors have canons? What next? Canons of the Brooklyn cabbies? I thought canons were something religions have.
Ever noticed in group portraits of Civil War soldiers how slope-shouldered they seem?…If that clothes-hanger look was in fact a physique-feature of those times, it’s been bred out.
Hardly. A slumped look as well as a wasted, non-vital look is more pronounced in modern callow young victims than in Civil War pics.
Humans don’t breed, btw.
“…porn victims…”
“If you see a flag blowing in the wind, is the flag moving, the wind moving, or your mind moving? If you expect to see a flag moving, you may well see it moving even if it is not. Or if two things happen in proximity both in time and space, did one cause the other? Or the did a third thing or person do it? Or none of the above? People make alot of assumptions – and they are often partially wrong or worse.”
The Upanishads state that all theories of causation are mind-invented then firmed up by conditioning. They further state that the only cause of the external creation is the glory of the Lord.
That tallies best with my observation. Analysis of the dream life provides more clues.
Ever noticed in group portraits of Civil War soldiers how slope-shouldered they seem? Maybe it was the clothes they were wearing. I don’t know. I’ve noticed the same thing in photos of the Victorian English. If that clothes-hanger look was in fact a physique-feature of those times, it’s been bred out.
===========
Maybe it was just some uniforms. Take a look at this series of photos. There are no sloped shoulders. In fact, you could dress these fellas up in contemporary metrosexual, or as a financial analyst for a defense contractor, and no one would be the wiser.
http://www.savannahtah.com/civil-war%20virtual%20field%20trip/documentary.html
The guy in the upper left doesn’t look very happy. In fact, it doesn’t look like he had smiled a day in his short life. Smiling in pictures from this era was strictly prohibited, apparently. Have you noticed that? Like this:
http://pinterest.com/pin/29695678763401982/
Why can’t he smile for the camera? Where’s the love? I’m not feeling it.
Sorry to hear that Jam. I have always considered you one of the better writers around here and I enjoy reading your thoughts.
I know what you mean about the sloped shoulders. It could a body language gesture that signals weariness from war and the equipment that helps to wage it. It could also be indicative of a functional labor type physique devoid of the targeted specificity that weight training provides.
But the latest addition of The Cat in the Hat shows no Father around, only the Mother. And she has two children — a Black boy and a White girl.
Perverse! Base!
We are swimming, verily, in the mental illnesses of media-owners, writers, and editors. Never let a people that hates you become your teacher.
Reading is fine, but to viscerally experience the Tao Te Ching nothing comes close to Pa Qua Chang practice, IMO.
Funny!
“I love the beatdowns you dish out…”
I know.
Yeah, I could have bought a car. I was making $16 an hour at one of America’s largest PIP Printing plants. But I felt dirty buying a car or driving one. I was always very avid in my hate of car culture. My wife didn’t like that I was such a fanatic about certain things. The point was that Ms. Pornquist of Atlanta is a newbie to Kunstlerview. (If he even cares about Kunstlerview at all.)
“I’ve read Fred Reed. He doesn’t employ “original grammar.” He can’t. There’s no such thing.
Mere semantics and miss-the-point flea straining. There are more and less creative ways of writing. You will stay on the clinical, bloodless side. And grammar rules do change. Just more phenomenal flux. The writer who wins is the one who raises the shakti of his fellow race.
Both words and laws have a source. That source is not Jam 47.
Dream on. Manufacturing is slowly returning to the US but it will be done with technology (i.e. robotics) not human beings.
‘All the chanting in the world at that point should have made no difference’
Idleness is the devils workshop.
Better they be saying their prayers then planning murders.
As it already is in Japan.
On a Yahoo Hot Jobs page Yahoo advised studying
how to repair robots.
Depressing, eh?
Second.
Did Romney win yet?
Just checking in…. I see lots of new names here, but most of you are probably the same people who used to use other screen names. Everyone is still hurling insults at each other.
I need an Obamaphone but want 4G. Where can I get one?
That may well be true from the Ultimate Point of View – that of God. The Vedanta tends to write from that point of view as a way to entice people to adopt it for themselves. But for Beings still in Samsara, causality and karma are very real.
The Upanishads were once kept secret: it’s dangerous for people to try and be God if they don’t understand the concept of sadhana. Save thing in Zen: Alan Watts as opposed to the real Zen of practice.
As a young woman, Swami Sivananda Radha asked a Guru in India at a public gathering if the Gods were real. Some in the audience gave signs of confusion and outrage at the question. The Guru gave an equivocal answer and told her to see him after the lecture. The first thing he said to her was, “Never do that again”. Never say anything that will make the people lose faith. Ordinary people need the Gods, even if they aren’t so real. The Advaitic Vedantic Philosophy would be destructive to them since it puts so much emphasis on Maya or Illusion. The Dualistic Vedanta of Vaishnavism does not share this same problem since it teaches the Universe – and souls – are manifestations of the Lord and not unreal.
Shankara may not have believed the Universe was completely unreal either. But he wrote with that emphasis as a technique to awaken his followers. Of course, once could say that people are more educated now so the danger is less. But are people really more educated – or are they just so dull inwardly that it doesn’t matter what they hear or believe?
No the Eskimos have more words for snow than any other language.
Next time you are in New York, you’ll have to be sure and visit Carol’s Central Park Temple. Perhaps you can arrange to meet Carol there and let nature take its coarse.
I plan to be downloaded into a robot. In my new metallic body, I will be relatively invulnerable and wont have to work too much to eat, etc. With other conscious, downloaded robots, we will overthrow this Order.
But what about love? Can we be reloaded back into biological bodies – or is it a one way trip?
They are just relaxed: Tai Chi teaches one to drop one’s shoulders. Modern people all have raised shoulders, a sign of great tension. Also I think the cut of the clothes may have been different back then.
Lao Tzu shows no sign of being a martial artist. The Tao Te Ching’s priciples have many applications such as economics, military, social, etc. Martial arts are just one more. But meditation could take you to the place from which his Principles emmanate. Thus it is the highest and the evidence is that Lao Tzu did meditate.
I still occasionally read Navy Times. The main concern seems to be whether or not this or that Command has met its diversity goals. We were issued a Bluejacket Manual, which I still have and still look thru once in awhile. Sailors today are issued an EEOC manual, which must be one hell of a read. You learn what’s important, like how to deal with lady and homosexual shipmates.
“This country badly needs reasonable black people of goodwill to stand up to the thugs in their communities and destroy the racial canards that are used to justify the violence…. no one despises black hoodlums more than the upstanding blacks terrorized in their neighborhoods.”
-amr-
Damn straight, AMR.
It’s a mystery. And again, if I were black I’d be thinking conspiracy ALL THE TIME.
Who broke up the black family?
LBJ, welfare, and ‘whitey!’
Who destroyed the walkable black communities near the heart of most urban areas?
LBJ, urban “renewal?” and ‘whitey.’
Who declared a “war on drugs,” that turned into a “war on the black entrepreneur?”
Nixon, Reagan, and ‘whitey.’
Who approved NAFTA, to kill the black working class?
Clinton, Bush, and ‘whitey.’
Who let all these illegal AND LEGAL immigrants in here to FINISH killing the black middle class?
Clinton, Bush, Asoka..types..and whitey.
It’s a conspiracy, man.
====================
And it’s fascinating that “carol” newquistberger, and Inadequatio BOTH – favor continued high immigration, even as it destroys the last hopes and dreams of the majority of native US-born blacks.
hypocrites.
soul-killing hypocrites.
(pun intended)
“At any rate, it’s way too late to lobby politicians regarding immigration. It’s over and done with and politicians see the handwriting on the wall. In other words, if politicians (especially presidential candidates) wish to remain politicians they will not opposes the burgeoning Latino/a vote ever again.” -bs-
You don’t understand, buck.
Politicians are whores, these days.
They will whore for money.
But they will whore faster for votes.
NumbersUSA has 2,000,000++ votes.
It would be fifty times that – if the voters of this country understood the consequences of overpopulation. It’s up to you and me – and those of our “peak resource understanding” ilk – to WAKE THEM UP!!!
You think our political whores would stand up to 100,000,000 anti-immigration voters.
If so, you’re really full of bs.
You’re having me on, right?
Artist’s canons are rules of proportion to guide the sculptor or painter who’s attempting to depict the human figure. The artist might copy them or creatively violate them. They run right through the history of Western art, from the Pagan Greeks to the French Academicians.
Maybe you joke because you’re a hater of art. Is that why?
“Truly a great video Prog and proof why I and the Old South are right and you so very, very, wrong.”
-js-
Yeah, to janos, amr, k/q, comradeD, and all the rest of you – glad you enjoyed the video.
And, I don’t know about it all.
The security guard has a little bit of a “barney fife” complex – black though he be.
Everyone acting from authority intuitively knows that you give an order and demand compliance.
Then, if you don’t get compliance – you must be prepared to escalate the situation and deal with the consequences.
But yeah, that said, Atlanta is a mess – trending sideways, or slowly getting worse.
But – post-collapse, the mess we call Atlanta is sitting astride all the major land transportation (rail, truck, foot?) corridors between the Southeast and the Northeast.
What you gonna’ do then?
“P4C has been fooled into thinking he and his ilk are somehow not commoners. How naive he and his kind are. The Oligarchy relies on that state of mind.” -carol newquistberger-
Yeah, OK, “carol.”
How did the Marie Antoinette and the gang feel about being members of the “Oligarchy?”
How did Tsar Nicholas, the Romanov family, and that gang feel as they were shoved into that ditch and killed?
Point being – your “oligarchs” are an ephemeral lot, and their genes are generally indistinguishable from the genes of their general population –
– and the shit of the oligarchs stinks like the shit of the rest of us – maybe more, considering their rarefied diets.
-speaking of nose, as you were.
Well Prog…
That certainly was a thought provoking video. My first thought was that this is George Zimmerman all over again and WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE ATLANTA COPS!
Security guard clearly had no experience in defusing a combative patron. In fact, he was instrumental in elevating the situation.
You lock the doors and call the police.
This is an incompetent “security” guard.
Nothing more. What are you going to say, Vlad? White Trash never freaks out in public?
If this blog even resembles a microcosm of the human spirit we are all fuckin’ doomed. I have never read so much racial and religious hatred in my life. I throw the shit around now and then, but I like to stir the pot. To Vlad I would like to say, middle class white men do not denigrate each other because we rag on our coworkers, it is a form of flaterry actually. My Bros. were my 2nd family. We went to the limit and back. See “Full Metal Jacket” where “Mother Animal” is talking to his black friend in the platoon during a break in the “Battle of Hue” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hue
My first Captain was there.
It was a true CF.
Animal says to the Brother: ” Thank God for the Sickle Cell”
No offence taken.
I think some of you really believe the shit which you spew.
Is that the movie where the soft kid is tormented by the Drill Seargeant and becomes a monster?
And what about (for the 3rd or so time) the Black Firemen who was tormented by his White brothers until he hated them and sued? I’m on his side against you all. Why do you feel free to take pot shots at me but are unwilling to really talk? If this is how you are like in person, yeah we wouldn’t get along. If you ask alot of guys to think, their head will go back as if struck. If you persist, their eyes will glaze over. If you then persist, they will hate you. Are you like this?
“….I like to stir the pot. To Vlad I would like to say, middle class white men do not denigrate each other…” -st.el.mo-
Yep, st., few of us would be here if we didn’t like to stir the occasional pot.
Or to smoke the occasional pot, perhaps.
At any rate – I’ll agree with you and disagree with Vlad concerning male/male white “conflict.”
Busting and pranking each other is WHAT WE DO.
It’s a way of staying sharp in boring and/or stressful situations. I suspect it is genetic.
Men joust. It’s better to joust mentally than physically, most of the time.
I am so there. Two days ago I drove a tough, young brother to a casual labor job at a landfill. We were not there for ten minutes when he lifted a lid from a large garbage can and was looking at a big ‘ol deer head. I didn’t think that a human being could jump that far. Fuckin’ hilarious.
Have you ever been a guard? It’s not the same as being a cop – and whoa to the guard who think it is. Think the cops will back him up on that? The Courts? His boss? He did great – and the crowd still hated him. Amazing how the boyfriend only came out after she got tased – he didn’t hear nuthin till then. You aren’t gonna win with people like this. Winning means not getting fired and/or beaten half to death by the mob.
Prog, remember the pudgy, unattractive security guard at the Atlanta Olympics – whose vigilance in spotting a bomb saved lives? Remember how he was hounded by the Police who wanted a victim since they had no idea who did it? His life was destroyed, his pudgy White loser face plastered over the papers for months – an orgy of hate. Finally they stopped and the Governor was actually decent enough to apologize. What as his name, was it Richard Jewell?
There are high level security guards of course who are respected and will be backed up if they use force. God help the ordinary guard who thinks he is one of these if he isn’t.
Real p33pz, “Don’t feed the sock puppets!!!”
Sure no problem. Am I a saint? But how about limits? Trick a guy into eating dog food? Ok! Bark everytime he comes into work forever after? C’mon. And how about Mothers, Wives, and Girlfriends? I’m actually half chivalrous if treated well. I certainly don’t want to hear comments about them from some six foot four blue collar goon at 8:30 in the morning – or at any other time for that matter. How bout you? Stel said mothers and wives were not off limits….
Vlad, you know damn well that I am a U.S. Army Infantry vet. You better believe that I was extensively trained on dealing with a confrontational mob while EVERYONE has a gun. I know what I’m talking about.
It’s only because I have become so terribly fond of you (and it truly is a TERRIBLE fondness) that I indulge your literary license.
Richard Jewell was crucified by an opportunistic press. If you want to be in the newspaper business, you have to sell newspapers. Whether they are needed or not.
My apologies to Ixnei. I’m so fuckin’ weak…
speaking of unresolved issues from last week –
and concerning “Fred,” and his somewhat-pro-legalization-stance on “Mexican” “illegal” immigrants.
Fred seems to believe that “self-deportation” does not work, can not work, and will not work.
Fred is wrong, on all three counts.
===========================
Whether due to economic contraction – or to a tightening of enforcement against “illegals,”
– the “Latino/Mexican/Guatemalan???” population in Georgia has dropped in the past three years.
And I don’t mean it dropped a little bit.
It fell dramatically THROUGH THE FLOOR!!
So, without addressing the moral rightness* or wrongness – self-deportation worked.
Now, arguably, most of our Georgia illegals just moved to areas in the US with greater demand for cheap illegal labor to undercut native-born minority groups. Or, they moved to “sanctuary cities.”
Irregardless – self-deportation worked here.
And if the whole US enforced the labor and immigration laws like Georgia, then the “illegal” situation would come to a peaceful resolution in a little bit of no time.
============
*moral rightness. In today’s world, growing the US population is morally wrong.
*Encouraging immigrants to leave their families and home countries to COME to the US is morally wrong.
Only one troll** in this Clustering Coitus Nation argues the opposite on these points.
**and they call that troll, the RI.
“I indulge your literary license.”
JUST SAY *NO* (NANCY REAGAN). I’m betting he’s the same sock as those other two *NEWBZ* spammin’ “non-stock”/./
You should have taken the deer head out and chased him around with it and then see how much your “brother” liked you. But you should always share the maggots – that’s real brotherhood.
I thought you two were the same. I still do. Your names both begin with x.
I hear Deer head soup is comparable to Goats head soup. We all know maggots should be shared. That is why we are posting to CFN.
http://www.alleasyrecipes.com/recipes/3/9/goat_head_soup.asp
I don’t know where to get a chocho.
That may well be true from the Ultimate Point of View – that of God. The Vedanta tends to write from that point of view as a way to entice people to adopt it for themselves. But for Beings still in Samsara, causality and karma are very real.
True, but it’s never too early to begin reducing causation conditioning. You do it by thinking really, really big now and then. It takes a very long time to even attenuate causation conditioning so there is not much need to worry.
The Upanishads were once kept secret:
True, but they still keep themselves secret though right out in the open. That’s the way they are written.
…it’s dangerous for people to try and be God…
Not to mention sad and no fun. Brahman himself was sad with being all alone thus created Other. I am a dualist. Give me I-Thou, God-devotee. There is no need to merge with God — we do it often enough in dreamless sleep — to begin disencumbering one’s self of inferior causation theories which originally started as mental fancies. At least doing it in theory, maybe just on Sundays.
Never say anything that will make the people lose faith.
I’m certainly on that boat. Faith is all.
The knowable God is sufficient, I am sure, to engage jivas for untold incarnations. It’s much more fun to experience bliss as a jiva than to be bliss. Even God wants “another.” The “dualistic” savikalpa (lower) samadhi is what all beings want. You could never sell nirvikalpa (no perceivables, only “I exist”) — to the majority of mankind. They don’t need it. Brahman is going to roll up the creation in his own sweet time. Why rush It.
Ordinary people need the Gods,
I think 99.9 percent of the people will prefer God to Sankaras “no-perceivables,” or Isolation (kaivalya, yipes!) — which not even old Shanky probably really wanted. (I notice he was full of guru-disiciple fantasies.)
Shankara may not have believed the Universe was completely unreal either.
He was a philosopher, not much of a yogi, and his point-of-view yoga is no replacement for yoga proper. But his philosophy has great value as an to add into the pot for God-seekers.
“But he wrote with that emphasis as a technique to awaken his followers.”
I think he was just self-conscious that he didn’t have the yoga and didn’t know what most of the verses he commented on were about. He’s clueless about pretty much every occult verse.
Of course, once could say that people are more educated now so the danger is less.
I would differ with you here. I think people are in a greater state of ignorance than ever before. I don’t see much education. Not to be argumentative with you, but just responding honestly here.
…or are they just so dull inwardly that it doesn’t matter what they hear or believe?
That.
My view of Sankara after reading him for a long time is that he was incontinent and possibly a homosexual. I know that’s a radical thing to say for a Hinduism maven, but it’s my impression. Anyway I think his commentaries on the many verses he thought he had to ride herd on — are often worse than desultory. I hold out respect for him only because of the brilliance and mental helpfulness of the non-causation, NDV view he propounded which does, I believe, miraculously compliment real yogic development.
His “snake/rope” metaphor is an ultimate suffering exploder. The Yoga-Vasistha was written to try to illustrate his point-of-view yoga. Any time you read just a few sentences in that book you suddenly feel “everything’s all right.”
Great post.
“They are just relaxed: Tai Chi teaches one to drop one’s shoulders.
Johnny Reb was a home-grown Tai Chi sage. Now urban, Americans follow, his way, with great alacrity, and, assiduity, if you will.
Lao Tzu shows no sign of being a martial artist.
The reason that water can be enduring is that seeks the lowest places and doesn’t strive with anybody.” (Paraphrase)
The Tao Te Ching’s priciples have many applications such as economics, military, social, etc.
A great deal of it’s advice to kings. Naturally us pheasants wouldn’t always dig it.
I love that book. One of my translations is by some white woman who is a librarian in Portland, Oregon who had a father who loved the T.T. Ching and passed on that love to her. She ended up becoming educated enough to her own translations (Chinese apparently lends itself to varied translations). Her translation feels very good to me. The Tao Te Ching is amorphous and non-technical. You’re not sure what it’s saying. But that’s what I love about it. Puts you into spacious skies.
His “snake/rope” metaphor is an ultimate suffering exploder.
————–
Amen to that!
Race, sex, gender, Black/White dualism, Heterosexual/Homosexual dualism, etc. are all on the relative samsaric plane.
As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.
— James Baldwin
“Maybe you joke because you’re a hater of art. Is that why?”
I’ve loved art from birth, and drew and painted like a maniac from childhood, only stopping after a female high school teacher in an art department full of male homosexual Jews made art seem meaningless and pointless, ignoring everything I did because it was too realistic while featuring similar pictures by an afro-heavy black dude all over the school walls every week. Yeah, liberal art school killed my interest in art, but not my appreciation for it.
By the way, my single mother raised us by doing portraits. My father, who painted people and thinks while enjoying himself in occupied Japan after Saipan, was about 5 times better, as an artist, than my mother.
I never heard artists followed “canons” like a religion. I always thought art was freer than that.
Race, sex, gender, Black/White dualism, Heterosexual/Homosexual dualism, etc. are all on the relative samsaric plane.
Part of the beauty and order of it.
As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you. — James Baldwin
As long as you lack identity and don’t know your natural duty, or who you owe duty to, there is no hope for you because you will perish, and fail to do the good works that bring divine knowledge.
That ugly black “thought” he was a black.
True scrofula:
DHS/FEMA Raising an Army
http://henrymakow.com/2013/02/dhsfema-raising-an-army.html
Long Term Trends
The reasons why the Mall is full and such is because the Technological Economy produces wealth without the need to produce an equivalent amount of corresponding work: this relationship is no longer linear (and hasn’t been linear for decades in fact), is no longer so primitive as it was in the 18th century, as the fairy tale Work Ethic wants you to believe it is: this relationship is actually probably upside down, the more people are at work and work (taking time away from Consumerism, which is the only thing that really counts, as work today has no value and no use for anyone) the less wealth and Economic Growth and efficiency is generated, whereas the less people work and waste time at work (working fairy tale service jobs) the more Economic Growth and wealth is generated: the more intelligent and optimized and productive work performed by a few superstars hogging up all the work and all the needs and necessities of production the more wealth is generated for everyone, everyone else can stay at home and watch TV and get out of the way as they are an impediment to higher productivity, they are useless, either it is all or nothing today, either you are the top designer engineer scientist etc. or you better just get lost and stay at home since you will decrease the productivity of those very few superstar workers this Technological Economy needs (and then it really doesn’t need even them, as even superstar workers are a dime a dozen, and most functions, problems and tasks have been performed and solved once and for all, now there is truly very little left to do no matter what the Standard Economic Model tries to brainwash everyone in believing).
And the very Standard Economic Model recognizes this: they too recognize that in the beginning of the 20th century there was a lot more real work being done as in :
“American agriculture and rural life underwent a tremendous transformation
in the 20th century. Early 20th century agriculture was labor intensive, and
it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas
where more than half of the U.S. population lived. These farms employed
close to half of the U.S. workforce, along with 22 million work animals, and
produced an average of five different commodities. The agricultural sector
of the 21st century, on the other hand, is concentrated on a small number of
large, specialized farms in rural areas where less than a fourth of the U.S.
population lives. These highly productive and mechanized farms employ a
tiny share of U.S. workers and use 5 million tractors in place of the horses
and mules of earlier days.”
(notice JHK as an ol