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The ill-feeling among leaders of the G-7 nations — essentially, the West plus Japan — was mirrored early this morning in the puking financial market futures, so odious, apparently, is the presence of America’s Golden Golem of Greatness at the Quebec meet-up of First World poobahs. It’s hard to blame them. The GGG refuses to play nice in the sandbox of the old order.

Like many observers here in the USA, I can’t tell exactly whether Donald Trump is out of his mind or justifiably blowing up out-of-date relationships and conventions in a world that is desperately seeking a new disposition of things. The West had a mighty good run in the decades since the fiascos of the mid-20th century. My guess is that we’re witnessing a slow-burning panic over the impossibility of maintaining the enviable standard of living we’ve all enjoyed.

All the jabber is about trade and obstacles to trade, but the real action probably emanates from the energy sector, especially oil. The G-7 nations are nothing without it, and the supply is getting sketchy at the margins in a way that probably and rightfully scares them. I’d suppose, for instance, that the recent run-up in oil prices from $40-a barrel to nearly $80 has had the usual effect of dampening economic activity worldwide. For some odd reason, the media doesn’t pay attention to any of that. But it’s become virtually an axiom that oil over $75-a-barrel smashes economies while oil under $75-a-barrel crushes oil companies.

Mr. Trump probably believes that the USA is in the catbird seat with oil because of the so-called “shale oil miracle.” If so, he is no more deluded than the rest of his fellow citizens, including government officials and journalists, who have failed to notice that the economics of shale oil don’t pencil out — or are afraid to say. The oil companies are not making a red cent at it, despite the record-breaking production numbers that recently exceeded the previous all-time-peak set in 1970. The public believes that we’re “energy independent” now, which is simply not true because we still import way more oil than we export: 10.7 million barrels incoming versus 7.1 million barrels a day outgoing (US EIA).

Shale oil is not a miracle so much as a spectacular stunt: how to leverage cheap debt for a short-term bump in resource extraction at the expense of a future that will surely be starved for oil. Now that the world is having major problems with excessive debt, it is also going to have major problems with oil. The quarrels over trade arise from this unacknowledged predicament: there will be less of everything that the economically hyper-developed nations want and need, including capital. So, what’s shaping up is a fight over the table-scraps of the banquet that is shutting down.

That quandary is surely enough to make powerful nations very nervous. It may also prompt them to actions and outcomes that were previously unthinkable. At the moment the excessive debt threatens to blow up the European Union, which is liable to be a much bigger problem for the EU than anything Trump is up to. It has been an admirably stable era for Europe and Japan, and I suppose the Boomers and X gens don’t really remember a time not so long ago when Europe was a cauldron of tribal hatreds and stupendous violence, with Japan marching all over East Asia, wrecking things.

There is also surprisingly little critical commentary on the notion that Mr. Trump is seeking to “re-industrialize” America. It’s perhaps an understandable wish to return to the magical prosperity of yesteryear. But things have changed. And if wishes were fishes, the state of the earth’s oceans is chastening to enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. Anyway, we’re not going back to the Detroit of 1957. We’ll be fortunate if we can turn out brooms and scythes twenty years from now, let alone flying Teslas.

This will be the summer of discontent for the West especially. The fact that populism is still a rising force among these nations is a clue of broad public skepticism about maintaining the current order. No wonder the massive bureaucracies vested in that order are freaking out. I’m not sure Mr. Trump even knows or appreciates just how he represents these dangerous dynamics.


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317 Responses to “The Summer of Discontent”

  1. pequiste June 8, 2018 at 9:47 am #

    “Now is the summer of our discontent made glorious winter by this son of Queens.” (to terribly mutilate and paraphrase the Bard.

    DJT’s bull in the china shop diplomacy is refreshing as a spring rain, one that turns into a torrent that causes an upstream flood which subsequently washes away some slumbering burg; inhabitants. houses and all.

    • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 11:06 am #

      In that same vein and also piling on Jim’s recent post about the environmental pressures acting on the left coast, I’ll post a link to a gem of an article at The New Yorker I discovered yesterday from a commenter over at NakCap. A rather longish piece, but one that I found enthralling. I recommend teaming it up with Google Maps so you can view the sites that the author discusses.

      https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1988/09/26/los-angeles-against-the-mountains-i

      • erik June 8, 2018 at 11:37 am #

        John McPhee’s essay in the New Yorker was also incorporated in a larger volume entitled “Control of Nature”. A good read. Before I read that book, my first visit to the area was in 1992 attending professional training in LA, which gave me the opportunity to do some tourism. I drove up one of the canyon roads and found an enormous dam with concrete inlet towers in it’s basin. I saw it was devoid of water and thought: WTF?. Then I found out the dam was intended simply to trap debris flows and the resulting mass of boulders, etc would then be loaded on trucks and hauled away.

        • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 11:54 am #

          Thanks for that. I’m going to buy the book now. Masterful writing and I’ve always been fascinated by the LA area’s history and geography. Fun fact: both Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and the Rose Bowl sit in or directly adjacent to the direct path of a major debris flow.

          I also recommend Mark Reisner’s Cadillac Desert for a discussion of LA’s and the west’s early water wars and how things got to be as they are currently. Another great read.

        • My Point of View June 8, 2018 at 12:30 pm #

          McPhee is a superb writer, I’ve read several of his books.

          The flood of debris he writes about happened 40 years ago, as per this article: http://articles.glendalenewspress.com/2003-02-01/news/export21140_1_pine-cone-mother-nature-mattress

      • elysianfield June 8, 2018 at 6:24 pm #

        Nick O Demus,
        Excellent article…attempted to obtain the part two offering, but after about 40 minutes of effort found it requires a subscription….

  2. PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 9:53 am #

    “This will be the summer of discontent for the West especially. The fact that populism is still a rising force among these nations is a clue of broad public skepticism about maintaining the current order. No wonder the massive bureaucracies vested in that order are freaking out. I’m not sure Mr. Trump even knows or appreciates just how he represents these dangerous dynamics.”

    yeah, I agree. I don’t think either Trump or the established political order understand the fire that they are playing with. There is this kind of common held delusion in the US that regardless of what happens, “everything will be OK”. It’s almost like most people believe the nation is on some kind of bad plot line from a TV show; Problems will arise for our heroes, but at the end of 60 minutes– everything will be solved, and we will all sit down and laugh it off over beers.

    There are some very real and dark forces in US society at the moment. Yesterday new suicide research revealed a very palpable uptick in suicide, amongst all demographic groups in the US. People in the US are literally being boiled to death by real economic pressure. The increasing stress on people will not last forever– something will explode. Whether it means civil instability, or an election of an authentic autocrat, I don’t know. However, there will be an equal and opposite reaction to the type of applied force occurring in the country.

    I also want to post the suicide hotline. We lost another very creative person today to suicide with the death of Anthony Bourdain.

    National Suicide Prevention Hotline
    Call 1-800-273-8255
    Available 24 hours everyday

    • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 10:01 am #

      yeah

      People commit suicide for many different reasons, but what is happening now has as much to do with feelings of helplessness & despair, as much as any other factor.

      • Ron Anselmo June 8, 2018 at 12:02 pm #

        Yes, helplessness & despair, not only of our general population, but of our young, is staggering, truly staggering.

        According to the CDC, annually, there are 4600 suicides in the 10 to 24 age range.

        In addition, there are 5400 suicide attempts DAILY, by children in the 7th thru 12th Grades.

        Yet, the scripted narrative & discussion remains about guns & active shooters. WTF?

        Maybe we need to get our eyes off our screens and take a look at our children. Heaven help them.

        • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

          That really is staggering. They’re worrying here because there are 184 teen suicides/year for a population of about a fifth of yours. But that’s off the radar.

          • K-Dog June 8, 2018 at 1:14 pm #

            THAT A DEAD body should be found washed up on the beach was not so unusual. Sandy Hook had had more than its share of floaters over the years. Hog-tie union officials in advanced stages of decomposition, crab-eaten torsos, discarded pets, missing children, drug dealers in oil drums; they came down with the current. Carried out of New York Harbor, down the Jersey coast, they filled with gas and popped to the surface before coming in with the tide.

            From Bone in the Throat a novel by Anthony Bourdain

        • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 1:50 pm #

          “Maybe we need to get our eyes off our screens and take a look at our children. ”

          yeah, sure. I think children are feeling a real weight with the advent of social media & a lot of unforeseen consequences around this technology.

          The drive to be “liked” and “get likes” in social media, the ability to spread malicious gossip, and the instantaneous nature of the technology is really horrible for kids.

          • Ron Anselmo June 8, 2018 at 2:20 pm #

            Pete,

            Agreed with all you said. But even the younger ones look to us and follow our examples, and additionally, process the non-verbal cues their parents send.

            Recently went to West Asheville, NC, a new (over maybe the last 10 years or so) bastion of trendy, progressive culture.

            Eating breakfast in a little trendy vegan café, watched one father at a table with his son, transfixed on his phone screen, while his son ate his breakfast in silence. In a little off-in-the-corner sitting area or nook, a father transfixed on his phone screen, while his daughter sat on the floor reading a book. Not making this up, but this went on for maybe 30 minutes. It was like the Twilight Zone – like these children didn’t exist.

            Heaven forbid the first father should talk to his son, engaging him in conversation, or the second father should actually read his daughter the book.

            This isn’t a missive on proper parenting, I’m certainly not one to speak to that, but the message that these children get is that whatever is on that screen is more important than they are. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll grow up being socially healthy. Enter suicides or active shooters.

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 9:08 am #

            I agree that is depressing. I’ve seen young mothers pushing babies in buggies (strollers?) while staring into a phone.

            Mostly I don’t though. Because I travel by bus a lot I see a huge amount of interaction between young mothers (and fathers) and their babies and toddlers in their buggies. And a fair amount of interaction between said babies and toddlers and us random bus passengers when we’re opposite them or they’re looking over the seat at us over their mum’s shoulder. Everyone smiles at babies.

            Buses are good in all sorts of ways 🙂 .

    • Elrond Hubbard June 8, 2018 at 10:06 am #

      Hear, hear. Thank you for this excellent post, PeteAtomic.

      Re: your point about U.S. society as a bad TV episode: perhaps it means something that TV has actually changed quite a bit in the past 25 years or so. Amid the explosion of reality TV and similar rot, drama shows and even comedies have actually cultivated audiences with a taste for more complex characterization, anti-heroes, and plotlines that upend expectations and even take more than one episode, or even one season, to resolve.

      Of course there’s still plenty of trash as well. But with the sheer number cable channels, online streaming services, and what have you that we have today, all of them needing to feed the system, there has never been more sheer content. With all those monkeys banging away at all those typewriters, it would actually be surprising if some of the product wasn’t really good simply by accident.

      • Loneranger June 8, 2018 at 10:26 am #

        it would actually be surprising if some of the product wasn’t really good simply by MISTAKE.

      • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 2:54 pm #

        And also there’s the rot of public TV and national broadcasting, full of lies and State Propaganda for the New World Ordure.

    • Tate June 8, 2018 at 10:21 am #

      A falling off of religious faith is clearly at the root of the suicide pandemic. But most of our churches don’t provide the answers. Too many people think God is something you consume.

      • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 11:12 am #

        All due to their literalist translations, IMO. Read religious text as myth and allegory hinting at larger truths and they make sense. Read them as literal, factual truth and any 5 year old will tell you they’re simply unbelievable.

        • Sean Coleman June 8, 2018 at 1:41 pm #

          I think it might be the other way round. If it is just taken as allegory and the churches are no more than fellowships then Man’s deep religious need is not met. John Robinson, trendy the Bishop of Woolwich, caused a stir with his book Honest To God in 1963 which scorned traditional belief.

          Writing in the Observer (quoted from Booker’s The Neophiliacs, which quotes him selectively): “Few people realise that we are in the middle of one of the most EXCITING

          • Sean Coleman June 8, 2018 at 1:53 pm #

            theological FERMENTS of the century… SUDDENLY… NEW ideas about God and religion, many of them with DISTURBING REVOLUTIONARY implications, are BREAKING SURFACE… RADICAL… DANGEROUS… IMMENSELY EXHILIRATING… EXCITING… in the WORLD OF THE H-BOMB, etc, etc.”

            Booker continues: “In fact, the true message of Honest To God was one which we have already seen in Look Back In Anger or in the rage of the nuclear disarmers against the ‘Fascist’ police force, that is to say, the subconscious projection of a false image of order and authority in order to provide an Aunt Sally for feelings of aggression and superiority. The ‘nursery picture book’ idea of God, which the Bishop so confidently painted as having done service for all believers before ‘man’s coming of age’, and which he claimed ‘had been destroyed’ by the ‘coming of the space age’ had nothing to do with the idea of God expressed in the Old of New Testaments, let alone by millions of believers of all religions down the ages – but was only the same superficial caricature which had, quite understandably, been rejected by every one of Bishop Roinson’s agnostic predecessors.”

          • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 2:54 pm #

            I’ve long been a subscriber to the Joseph Campbell school of thought on religion, which is actually prevalent throughout most of the world, to the degree that indigenous religions even consider the subject at all. Modern mass religions are little more than cults of personality, which is why it’s so ironic when the mainstream religious adherents throw stones at the startups. The west has totally repressed the power of myth, even though it’s still present, hiding in plain sight, everywhere we look. Rest assured that the 1% are quite adept at using that fact to our great disadvantage.

          • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 2:55 pm #

            EVIDENCE for the Existence of God will soon be announced by the White House! UFOs too….

          • Sean Coleman June 9, 2018 at 9:29 am #

            Janos

            Just to be clear, are you saying you don’t believe in God because of the absence of ‘EVIDENCE’. I haven’t the time to parse sarcasm, irony and archness in comments, although the Americans (at least some of them, here) are plain speaking, thank God. What kind of evidence would you need?

            Scratch

            Modern mass religions as cults of personality? Don’t see that round here. Cults of personality are found in the new ‘start-ups’, towards which the ‘mass’ religions are too indulgent. I have never come across anyone throwing stones at them. even if they deserve it.

            The term ‘mass’ religion is always used, it seems as a criticism. Do we talk of ‘mass’ nations or societies or sports?

            The west has totally repressed the power of the myth? See my posts to Tate on this thread. Myth has never been stronger and it takes the shape of collective fantasies and mass delusions, none of which have any EVIDENCE (to use Janos’s word). Richard Webster argued that the present age is in a particularly dangerous circumstance because, in its professed rationality, it believes it has outgrown such things and cannot see them when they happen. Well, they happen all the time around us and I have utterly failed up to now to persuade anyone to look at the evidence, or rather the lack of it.

            Like Jimmy Savile it is these modern myths which are Hiding In Plain Sight (the Savile sceptics like to capitalize the phrase. Savile, you see, was supposed to have committed his crimes in full view of the multitudes and their salacious press teams, in the course of a very public life, because he was so devilishly (sorry) clever. In a notorious and very stupid editorial the Guardian in February 2015, in the course of a discussion about whether his body should be exhumed to satiate popular rage, argued that it was the sheer improbability of his wickedness that allowed him to get away with it. Certainly, when you examine the evidence for the individual claims (which nobody ever does – why?) you realize that the man must have had supernatural powers, to walk through walls, be invisible and travel through time. How about that for a myth?

            Religion on the other hand should not be confused with myth. Neither is it a biologically determined thing that is ‘hard-wired’ (to use the stupid modern analogy) or ‘programmed’ (another one) in our DNA (don’t sea urchins have more genes than Man?) arising from the need for primitive people to organize and co-operate in acquiring their food sources and avoiding predators during the evolutionary process (I am just seeing what it feels like to write such tripe)? It is neither a ‘need’ nor a ‘prerequisite’ nor an ‘instinct’ nor a ‘by-product’ nor a ‘fairy tale’ involving childish imagery of bearded men sitting on heavenly thrones nor a ‘construct of a repressive patriarchy’ nor a ‘superstition’ born out of the fear of crop failure’ nor a ‘conspiracy by the One Percent’ nor a ‘hoax’ concoted by randy cult leaders nor an ‘evolutionary conditioned tool to reinforce group identity against the Other’ nor anything else like that.

      • Tate June 8, 2018 at 11:36 am #

        Why has religious faith fallen off? IMO, it’s because of the liberal training the seminaries provide. There the seminarians learn textual criticism & it turns them into atheists, at best agnostics. They convert to a ‘social gospel’ orientation, thinking that churches’ main mission is therapeutic and/or charitable. Of course, these are important activities, but not the main mission of the church.

        The congregants sense this change and religious faith dies off. They lose their moorings and all the rest follows. No-fault divorce, empty consumerism, loss of community, rapacious capitalism, and so on.

        • shotho June 8, 2018 at 11:47 am #

          I agree with you that a loss of the transcendent in Western society is a major factor in the sense of hopelessness people feel today. When there are no ultimate values, why continue on when our vaunted ‘lifestyles’ can no longer sustain us.
          But, there is a lot more to the loss of faith in God than liberal seminaries. They are the result of a long history of declining Christianity, which probably began with the advent of the European Enlightenment. As Neitszche predicted in the late 19th Century, our future is bleak with the Death of God. There is nothing to prevent the slide into nihilism, which he predicted would lead to the horrors of the 20th Century and a complete collapse of values in the 21st.

        • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 12:21 pm #

          And yet the suicide rate among young English and Welsh people, which I’ve cited elsewhere (and which is already serious enough), in a largely post-Christian country, is utterly dwarfed by the rate in your own country, which is famed for its religiosity within the Western world. Something’s not adding up, Tate.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 2:19 pm #

            The thing that’s not adding up is your obstinate inability to read what I plainly wrote. What we get in the liberal congregations is a faux religion, without conviction. Preaching a ‘social gospel,’ the youth ostensibly Christian, see right through it.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 5:27 pm #

            I understand perfectly what you’re saying.

            What you’re obstinately not answering is why the suicide rate in the mostly post-religious UK isn’t like yours. So the link you’re positing between lack of religious belief and poor mental health isn’t showing up. Other things seem to be more significant.

            Note that NONE of the points made about the effects of religious belief or its opposite are in any way a proof or a disproof of the existence of a deity. I’m not making any statement on that one way or the other.

          • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 6:02 pm #

            And Gays continue to both die many years earlier than Heterosexuals and commit suicide infar greater numbers, despite complete acceptance in Northern Europe, where objectors to the Gay Agenda are the persecuted ones.

            Because it’s against Natural Law you see. Human Law is supposed to be based on that, not the lusts of man, or the needs of a power mad bureaucracy.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 6:02 pm #

            Oh, as if you think I don’t understand what you’re saying, as though you have to explain it to a ten-year old — a thick-headed ten-year old at that. You’ve always been condescending, & I usually ignore it, but really…?

            Different societies — and our societies are different though they spring from a common root — see different outcomes for a number of reasons. I see no point in trying to “add up” the reasons for this different outcome, as you put it. It’s a ridiculous exercise. I am simply making an observation that applies to MY society. Is it worse to be taught something not at all or to be taught something that is false? The religion being taught in this country is often worse than being taught nothing. Along with all the other bullshit the kids get in school. If you think that doesn’t have an effect on the rate of suicides, there’s no helping you.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 6:06 pm #

            And I meant that for GreenAlba, obviously. And the first paragraph was addressing her ‘godsplaining’ to me in her last paragraph.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 6:24 pm #

            Tate, there was absolutely no condescension intended – I wasn’t even trying to mirror your own.

            You take it upon yourself to be the arbiter of what is ‘true’ and ‘false’. How is that not condescending to everyone who doesn’t see things the way you do? And I don’t mean me.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 6:58 pm #

            You take it upon yourself to be the arbiter of what is ‘true’ and ‘false’. How is that not condescending to everyone who doesn’t see things the way you do? And I don’t mean me.

            I state my positions often without qualification. So do many others here. I assume we’re all adults & can figure out that we’re just expressing opinions.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 8:11 pm #

            You don’t talk as if it’s an opinion. You talk as if it’s self-evident and anyone who doesn’t agree with you is both stupid and malign.

        • EvelynV June 8, 2018 at 12:29 pm #

          It has fallen off because it was pitched as a conglomeration of fairy tales that can no longer be taken seriously.

          Things went downhill in ancient Greek society too when their population stopped believing in their gods and goddesses.

          Every person born is faced with an identical challenge – to overcome the ego. Religion anthropomorphized this simple fact by making up a pretend character it chose to call Satan or the Devil.

          Religion got taken in by the metaphors and thereby surrendered wisdom.

          • Elrond Hubbard June 8, 2018 at 1:17 pm #

            Religion is a part of human nature. It would hardly be as widespread as it is if the religious impulse weren’t related to something fundamental in our being. That’s not to say that I practice any religion — once you subtract the supernatural (a category that doesn’t exist), what’s left is rituals, practices, narratives and exhortations that can be judged individually on their merits. I get along fine without them, but I see how some of the products of religion convey values that are worthwhile (even while others convey truly terrible ones).

            The one thing that religion is really good for is manufacturing a sense of shared identity. Groups of people who believe the same things will draw the sharpest of boundaries between themselves and people who profess even slight differences of interpretation, and then they’ll police those boundaries rabidly (sometimes homicidally):

            https://imgur.com/gallery/RJ0ab

            There’s a deep streak of xenophobia in us, whereby many people can’t be satisfied until they’ve divided the world between Us and Them and declared war on Them. Such people will pick up on any little thing that comes to hand so they can act out their xenophobic urges. This pattern of behavior has roots in our evolutionary past, a past that we share with chimps among others. Personally I think we’re at our most admirable when our beliefs enable to act like human beings, not like ultra-territorial primates.

          • Sean Coleman June 8, 2018 at 1:59 pm #

            Well, what definitely cannot be taken seriously is the collection of delusions which constitutes the strange faith of political correctness. While religious belief is transcendental (or whatever the word is: I don’t know) these delusions can be demolished using the very empirical methods it claims as its foundation. That they remain intact is a testimony to the faith of its followers.

          • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 3:00 pm #

            Religion got taken in by the metaphors and thereby surrendered wisdom.

            Rather, religious people totally forgot that the metaphors ARE JUST metaphors in the first place. Allegory speaks to a more basic level of consciousness than mere facts, which is why Christians (or whoever) always go wrong when they insist on the literal truth of their foundational myths; or indeed, the very idea that a literal fact could possibly speak more truth than the myth itself.

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 7:55 am #

            Elrond

            “Religion is a part of human nature. ”

            I read an interesting piece one time which described the source of early religious belief as being the same as the source of our ability to make tools (i.e. observation of cause and effect – ‘that stone falling on that nut made it crack’, then ‘I can hit that nut with a stone and it will crack’), which is what has brought us so far.

            Early humans saw ‘effects’ everywhere – heat coming from the sun, water flowing in a river, things growing, tempests – and looked for causes (gods of this or that).

            Today, with more developed, monotheistic religions holding sway, along with scientific knowledge, there are still some things we can’t explain (and possibly never will be able to), although we know why the sun shines and why things grow. Hence what is often called the God-of-the-gaps approach. In the early days the gaps were pretty much everything.

            That’s a different side of the equation from the need for social narratives, which is also a function that we have given to religions, probably in the same way that ancient storytelling of all sorts developed, even when it often just involved ancestors rather than the ‘supernatural’.

            The word ‘supernatural’ itself is a bit strange. Just as ‘alternative medicine’ is a ruse, because the bits of it that have been found to work just become ‘medicine’, anything normally described as ‘supernatural’, if it really existed, could equally be described as ‘natural’, surely?

        • elysianfield June 8, 2018 at 6:32 pm #

          “Why has religious faith fallen off?”

          Tate,
          Maybe…just maybe mass education has something to do with it? Anyone versed in critical thought might have…difficulty with faith, and especially the examples of the the failed humans who “pastor”.

          “You can go to your college, you can go to your school…but if you don’t know Jesus, you are an educated fool….”

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 7:01 pm #

            Well, okay, LOL, if you call mass education becoming versed in critical thought.

          • elysianfield June 8, 2018 at 11:23 pm #

            Tate,
            I understand your point, but consider that those without education have little opportunity to be so versed.

          • Tate June 9, 2018 at 12:31 am #

            You’ve lost me, EF.

        • SpeedyBB June 9, 2018 at 7:15 am #

          Tate comments ‘The congregants sense this change and religious faith dies off. They lose their moorings and all the rest follows. No-fault divorce, empty consumerism, loss of community, rapacious capitalism, and so on.’

          I have for some time been pondering the composition of a book (or a long essay anyway) on ‘Consumerism as a de facto “religion”‘, based mostly on observations in the Third World, where traditional faiths have either been largely ignored (Japan & Vietnam), paid lip service to (China, much of Malaysia) or fused with adoration of material trinkets (much of Indonesia, Thailand for sure, now I’m observing wild-in-the-streets consumerist obsession in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).

          There are exceptions of course, such as the odd surge in evangelical Christianity among South Koreans (reportedly abandoning Buddhism in large numbers), and the insidious faux-Arabist fundamentalism infecting Indonesia, part of which is the rejection of western values (purportedly including consumerism – but just try to pry the girls in jilbabs and the wispy-bearded guys in bedsheets away from their smartphones and see how far you get). In the train I see many locals hypnotized by Islamic juu-juu nonsense on their mobile units.

          Consumerism as a guiding creed, if not obsession, sure appears to have taken hold throughout East Asia and, reportedly, most of the rest of the world. Who is there who proudly rejects becoming a more successful consumer? Particularly since the intense allure of mobile devices has arisen.

          Of course with ‘Consumerism’ there is no ooga-booga about invisible sky tyrants or angels with wings or shoveling coal for Satan; it is the social aspect that is shared with the practice of religion.

          And the absence of a transcendental is also what makes ‘Consumerism’ in the end a false faith. Though maybe no falser than the existing Desert Death Cults. I except Buddhism as it is undoubtedly the most practical discipline, appropriate to these woozy times we live in.

          Excuse the verbosity. (I did not really mean that: my fingers like to dance.)

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 10:23 am #

            Interesting post, Speedy. My daughter is in Sg and has visited most of the places you mention (not Japan, yet) while she’s over there. And you’d seem to be right (not that I doubted it anyway!)

            I’m not sure about the fashion for calling consumerism (and other things) a ‘religion’, though. It has something of the tit-for-tat take down of the genuinely religious person (not in your case) who wants to say ‘but look at you – you worship something too and it’s worse’.

            I think of consumerism as more of a ‘filler’. I remember (from decades ago so please excuse inaccuracies) the philosopher Simone Weil saying that Art is something we engage in to forget our mortality (she was a bit of a mystic as well). Consumerism is perhaps only a tasteless version of the same imperative (I’d include some modern art in there too, in the ‘tasteless’ category, but I’m too ignorant – or something – to appreciate the artistry of your own messy bed, for example, or half a dead cow).

            I also remember C. S. Lewis saying, a very long time ago, that (already) modern life was configured in a way that made it almost impossible for people to find the peace to just – think. Maybe consumerism is also a means to avoid thinking.

            Sorry, likewise for the unintended ramble…

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 10:41 am #

            And, of course, the corollary would be that those who wish to sell us things also wish to keep us too busy to think.

      • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 1:53 pm #

        “Too many people think God is something you consume.”

        yeah, absolutely. I suppose it was one logical outcome in a capitalist society such as ours. I think there is a special circle in Hell for such christmongers.

        • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 6:27 pm #

          You wanted to see, so See:

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eJqXEoUU3U

          Think this kind of attitude from the Elite doesn’t put a damper on the minds and hearts of young men? That their race has no future?

          One (or at least this one) is reminded of Harvest Home. The old Witch caught the Husband trying to see what kind of cult his wife and daughter were involved with in their new home. She said to everyone, He wanted to see so let him see. What did he see? The Corn King having intercourse with the maiden to bless the field. And at the moment of climax, having his head taken of with a scythe. And then they took the Husband’s eyes out, Pete. The bitches took out his fucking eyes.

          • PeteAtomic June 9, 2018 at 7:49 am #

            they’ll still be wars regardless if ‘everybody is so mixed up they won’t know ethnicities.’

            The Mesopotamian city states warred with one another, and massacred each other. The people looked pretty much all the same, too.

    • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 11:35 am #

      Same over here, Pete A. There was an article just this morning in the Guardian about the increase in suicide among teens in England and Wales. What have they got to look forward to, with a gig economy and no possibility of getting a house or flat without a regular wage?

      • Tate June 8, 2018 at 11:38 am #

        That has nothing to do with it. That’s looking at it strictly from a consumerist, corporatist, materialist perspective. The rot is much deeper.

        • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 12:09 pm #

          Tate, I didn’t go in after your comment and say, ‘that has nothing to do with it’ because I chose not to be that arrogant.

          There are multiple reasons why people commit suicide. I mentioned one. I asked a rhetorical question – I didn’t suggest it was the only rhetorical question available.

          I seem to remember you listing some reasons for suicide extremely sarcastically not that long ago – all utterly trivial and not a single one to do with ‘God’. And all female, even though young men commit suicide at a higher rate than young women.

          Lots of things are ‘to do with it’. Your interpretation may be part of it. JHK’s not one for religion, if you listen to his podcasts, yet you don’t tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because of that.

          I’m not a consumerist, corporatist, materialist person. But I know people worry themselves sick about their hopeless futures. And religious people have been known to kill themselves too.

          It’s been known for decades that large numbers of poor farmers in India commit suicide for reasons to do with the utter hopelessness of just keeping afloat and feeding their families, especially with the likes of Monsanto crucifying them with their seed patenting policies. They’re not killing themselves because they don’t believe in God any more.

          There are other realities than yours, Tate.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 12:25 pm #

            And the pressure on kids in middle class schools to get the last of the jobs that aren’t flipping burgers, is enormous. And they don’t want to ‘let their parents down’.

            A young doctor in England walked into the sea recently because of pressures at work. She’s not the only young doctor to commit suicide recently. People in all sorts of professions are overwhelmed. And when someone leaves, gives up to totally checks out, it puts even more pressure on the ones that are left to keep the show on the road.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 12:26 pm #

            *or* totally checks out…

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 12:34 pm #

            Yet we have in the US one of the highest standards of living in the world — measured in materialist terms. And a high suicide rate which is getting higher. A paradox? You must reconsider the premises on which our happiness mantra is measured.

            India is one of the most corrupt societies on Earth. It is multicultural in the ultimate sense. The results of research by David Reich author of Who We Are and How We Got Here, Oxford University Press, 2018, has shown how ‘diverse’ India is genetically. Every little village and indeed within every little village unique genetic family profiles separate the people such that underlying their society is a war pitting everyone against all. This is deeply imbedded in their ‘religion’, where they worship monkeys & elephants & cows. Have you ever read V.S. Naipaul? You should. Read “A House for Mr. Biswas,” and you will understand what I’m talking about. Although their lives are hard, it’s not the material aspect that causes a poor farmer in India to commit suicide.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 1:11 pm #

            Since we don’t have their suicide notes, we’ll have to leave it as a moot point, Tate. I have, in years gone by, seen statistics that correlated suicide rates with rates of impoverishment specifically within the peasant farmer demographic.

            I won’t press you further on why the suicide rate among youngsters in the US utterly dwarfs that of the much less religious UK, because I think enough has been done to derail JHK’s actual topic towards your hobby horse already at such an early stage.

            For my money, Evelyn V’s on to something, although I read her post very quickly, but I’m on my way out as it’s Friday night and ex-colleagues await, so I’ll leave you to it. Have a good evening.

          • Being Frank June 8, 2018 at 1:14 pm #

            What have they got to look forward to? I tell my daughters (16&19) that they have an enormous reset to look forward to, at the end of which probably only the young(of all ages) and fit will be left standing. In short they can look forward to taking the world forward into a wold made by hand.

          • messianicdruid June 8, 2018 at 7:38 pm #

            “There are other realities than yours…”

            Interpretations of reality should not be assumed to be reality. We are comparing interpretations not realities.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 8:06 pm #

            “Yet we have in the US one of the highest standards of living in the world — measured in materialist terms. And a high suicide rate which is getting higher. A paradox? You must reconsider the premises on which our happiness mantra is measured.”

            I never measured my happiness or the value of anything in my life by my standard of living anyway.

            But I agree that while there’s a lot of that about, like everything else it’s more extreme in the US. Like the difference between rich and poor and the awareness of how little it takes to fall through the net.

          • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 8:07 pm #

            Sorry, MD, only a figure of speech.

        • Walter B June 8, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

          You are right Tate, no matter what the root case may be, it is an act of utter desperation. A choice made by those that have NO hope and no care of what they leave behind. It is so sad.

          • elysianfield June 8, 2018 at 6:45 pm #

            ” A choice made by those that have NO hope…”

            Walter,
            “Hope” I would not expect to be a common denominator.

            No Hope”

            Robin Williams
            Anthony Bourdain,
            Untold others of great wealth

            All could afford any options they might entertain…they had no paucity of resources…lack of hope would be difficult to identify as causal.

            Tired of living? Maybe…. Too many indulgences? Perhaps.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 10:46 pm #

            Very sad, Walter. And it leaves a huge hole in a family. If only they understood that.

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 8:10 am #

            Elysianfield

            I think I remember it being said at the time of Robin Williams’ death that what made it so hard for his family was how much they loved him and that he could kill himself despite knowing that.

            I believe RW was a long-time sufferer of depression (many creative people are – I’ve heard depression described as ‘the price of sensitivity’). While I’m absolutely not going to be drawn into a discussion on the actual nature of depression again, one thing we know about people who commit suicide while depressed is that they specifically can’t get beyond how the depression is making them feel for the love to stop them. They are overwhelmed by what they’re feeling themselves, which might be inadequacy as a human being just as much as hopelessness in the normal sense, no matter how ‘adequate’ they look to everyone else. Many successful people live with a perpetual fear of failure. They have further to fall.

            A schoolmate of my daughter went to Spain on holiday with her mother and sister, in her 20s, and right out of the blue, jumped in front of an underground train, in front of them. They had no idea she was even unhappy. And I presume, whatever made her do it, she was unable at that specific moment, to see beyond it to how horrific what she was about to do would be for her family. People aren’t always rational at the moment they make terrible decisions.

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 8:59 am #

            EF

            I’ve just been reminded that that RW was suffering from Lewy body disease:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewy_body

      • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 2:02 pm #

        “Same over here, Pete A. There was an article just this morning in the Guardian about the increase in suicide among teens in England and Wales. What have they got to look forward to, with a gig economy and no possibility of getting a house or flat without a regular wage?”

        yeah. I mean, the fact that young people would leave this jewel of a planet by cutting their lives short willingly, is a real mystery to me. I think there are a lot of very unhealthy streams & pressures out there that have created lifestyle obsessions, and people are feeling this stress to somehow live up to a certain imagined, unrealistic lifeway. Then throw social media into this insanity. Add powerful drugs, whether prescribed or illicit. It’s simply too much for immature young people to handle. It’s tough for a lot of adults, as well.

        It’s a lifeway that is helping to create mental illness, imho. I don’t think any system like that is sustainable in the long term.

      • michael June 9, 2018 at 5:30 am #

        You may be interested in the phenomenon of the “behavioural sink”
        (a consequence of overcrowding) explored by James Calhoun in the brown Norwegian rat.
        It’s interesting with funny parallels to ourselves.

        • michael June 9, 2018 at 5:32 am #

          Sorry, it’s John B. Calhoun.

        • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:47 am #

          Are the incels the “beautiful ones”?

    • ozone June 8, 2018 at 11:49 am #

      PeteA,
      Good of you to inject some give-a-shit into our fevered zeitgeist about a fake it to make it (at any and all cost) society. What is the catalyst to the ultimate expression of despair?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC_4qMibiks&list=PL1yEjL-ofemDyvZOIoZaMoM0VMV8T1v_X

      Just a note: Looking around at what this country pretends its “values” are (some laughable conceits contained therein) I think the [near] future is going to feature a bald-faced Theocratic Fascism. Yes, they will break themselves on their own inherent contradictions, cognitive dissonance and (the inevitable) corruption, but boy, it’s not going to be any fun… exempting the hardcore psycho-sadists. What happens to a population when a generation of folks who have at least a smidgen of empathy is done away with? (When it’s no longer “taught” or inherited.)

      • Tate June 8, 2018 at 12:12 pm #

        We already have Theocratic Fascism.

        Read Paul Gottfried’s “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Toward a Secular Theocracy.”

        • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:36 pm #

          Yet we have in the US one of the highest standards of living in the world
          Do we?
          Whites running to the suburbs [to avoid blacks and browns], long commutes, GMO foods.
          Since 1965, the QOL has declined, steeply.
          Look at the prices of coastal hoses, autos and college. Even food prices.

      • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 2:04 pm #

        wow, great link bud! 🙂

        is that you?

        I’m gonna Join the Circus too, brother 🙂

        great stuff

        • ozone June 8, 2018 at 9:54 pm #

          PeteA,
          Yep, ’tis I. Glad you like it; hey, somebody’s gotta write this stuff…
          😉

          • PeteAtomic June 9, 2018 at 6:45 pm #

            great. I saved it in my favorites bar to listen to the whole album later

      • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 2:08 pm #

        “What happens to a population when a generation of folks who have at least a smidgen of empathy is done away with? ”

        nothing good, I’ll tell ya that. Soylent Green meets The Walking Dead.

    • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 2:16 pm #

      He was very, very excited about the death of the White Race. Naturally young White Men feel this attitude from the Elite and realize they have no future in the societies their ancestors created.

      • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:37 pm #

        Paul Gottfried–Paul who???

      • Tate June 8, 2018 at 10:40 pm #

        There was no religion in his home growing up. He was half-Catholic & half-Jewish according to Wikipedia. He knew neither Jesus nor J_h_v_h.

        • Tate June 8, 2018 at 10:44 pm #

          To clarify, his father was a lapsed Catholic and his mother was non-observant Jew.

          • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 2:26 pm #

            I was talking about Bourdain. Paul likes or liked Whites, he just don’t think we have any right to anything of our own apart from the Jews. They have thousands of inter-locking agencies, local, state, national, and international working on their behalf yet they can’t stand the idea of us even having one. In other words, he sees us as 2nd class citizens. Yet Whites are so beaten down that they laud this man as a hero and friend. Such Whites are no more than dogs. This is the point that got me kicked of Amren.

          • Tate June 9, 2018 at 5:00 pm #

            I was talking about Bourdain also. I don’t know much about Paul beyond that triple parens thing (and that he’s a high intellectual muckety-muck.) Being aware of that wrinkle allows you to put what someone is saying in context & evaluate on its own terms.

    • SpeedyBB June 9, 2018 at 5:09 am #

      Is that the one that changed its name from ‘National Suicide Hotline’? All sorts of wags were phoning up ordering takeaway suicides.

  3. Tate June 8, 2018 at 10:00 am #

    “And all the clouds that lowered on our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried…”

    That’s the way the weather is, it can flip on a dime. Note: ‘weather’, Chicken Littles, not climate.

    • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 7:32 am #

      “That’s the way the weather is, it can flip on a dime. Note: ‘weather’, Chicken Littles, not climate.”

      Exactly, Tate. I’m glad you’ve accepted that climate is an aggregate of weather and can’t ‘flip on a dime’. For example, the CO2 emitted today won’t have its particular effect on the climate for about 40 years, that being the lag time. So a bit like having a party and leaving your debts behind for your children – or being a SKI-er (Spending the Kids’ Inheritance).,

      It’s also why you can have a punt at predicting the weather next week but only the overall likely climate 40 years from now, not whether or not you will be able to have a BBQ on 15 May 2058.

      • Tate June 9, 2018 at 12:29 pm #

        I would say the odds of my having a BBQ on 15 May 2058 are about 1499 to one, and that’s only if I set my whole being to it.

        • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 1:20 pm #

          I was going to say something along those lines myself,but didn’t think it necessary.

          It’s also more likely that there will be some extra wildfires somewhere in the world that normally experiences them, compared to this year, but I don’t know on which days or in which particular countries.

          The irony of the one at Fort McMurray wasn’t lost on a number of people, although we didn’t feel schadenfreude, just despair.

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 2:12 pm #

            Should have added, though, that not everyone lives where you live. The odds are very different here, but in 40 years time they’ll be different to today’s.

          • Tate June 9, 2018 at 5:17 pm #

            You notice an increase in tropical cyclones in one year and that’s evidence? Sorry, I’m not buying that. OTOH, maybe the climate is changing over the long haul due to human release of co2. It does make sense on a rudimentary level but what counterintuitive forces are in play?

          • GreenAlba June 10, 2018 at 7:05 am #

            “You notice an increase in tropical cyclones in one year and that’s evidence? Sorry, I’m not buying that.”

            And neither would a climate scientist. They’d recognise a straw man when they saw one, though.

            “It does make sense on a rudimentary level ”

            It makes sense on the level of basic science, because it was demonstrated even back in the 1890s that adding CO2 to the atmosphere increases the atmospheric temperature (the extra CO2 absorbed by the oceans is not helping in terms of their function as a habitat for fish either).

            So all you’re seeing is that observation playing out in real life.. And people how deny it are either refusing to accept the basic science (in which case they need to explain why the basic science is wrong) or they’re saying ‘yes, but no…’,

            “but what counterintuitive forces are in play?”

            There are always other forces in play. What scientists do is model recorded observations so that you can isolate the different forces and draw conclusions about what is the most likely driver of climate change at any given time.

          • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:36 am #

            True, no climate scientist would say that. But do they offer strenuous denunciations when media types & politicians do their work for them?

            So whose straw man were we talking about, “GreenAlba”?

            And uh, ‘rudimentary science,’ is NOT the same as “basic science”? (Scratchin’ my head on that one.) My dictionary definition of rudimentary is,

            “of or relating to basic facts or principles.”

            “and people how [sic] it are either refusing to accept the basic science… [yada yada]

            But I’m not denying it.

            And next comes the condescension, ‘climate-splainin’ it back to me. LOL.

          • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:39 am #

            Now you got me doing it.

            “and people how [sic] deny it are either refusing…”

          • GreenAlba June 10, 2018 at 11:41 am #

            Tate

            You are becoming a self-identifying victim with all these accusations of condescension where condescension is in no way intended. And, BTW, you started off this conversation by your condescending (or something similar) references to ‘Chicken Littles’.

            I thought you folks disapproved of victim identification.

            Apologies for unintended confusion regarding rudimentary and basic science. They have slightly nuanced meanings to me, because of the field in which I work (albeit not as a scientist).

            So, rudimentary science might be what is taught to 10-year-olds in school, although I’m not offering that as the only definition (since I don’t want another argument).

            On the other hand, medical students study ‘basic science’ in various fields (anatomy, physiology, metabolism etc.) which is something different from ‘clinical observation’, but they are not studying it at a rudimentary level. It’s a term I use because I’m used to it professionally – apologies for not clarifying. I’m becoming wary of clarifying, though, because if I do I risk being accused of something-splaining.

            I agree that non-specialist newspapers and magazines are not the place to find proper scientific information (there are websites like the Royal Society, in this country, that are obviously better, where you get the information straight from the horse’s mouth).

            However, the bit I was actually taking issue with was the idea that the data from *one particular year* could be regarded as significant. It is trends that matter, not individual years.

          • Tate June 10, 2018 at 12:42 pm #

            Sounds like we pretty much agree then. And I understand what you mean by rudimentary vs basic now. Thanks.

  4. KK June 8, 2018 at 10:04 am #

    You will recall that Nicole Foss has likened the shale industry to a bar patron sucking spilled beer out of the carpet because the establishment has closed.

    I have always loved this one.

    KK

    • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 10:06 am #

      ha ha

      wow, nice allusion there

    • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 11:23 am #

      Very nice! Or vacuuming pot detritus out of the couch with cheesecloth over the nozzle. Been there, done that, as they say.

    • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 11:29 am #

      She pinched the pub analogy from The Transition Handbook by Rob Hoskins:

      http://transitionus.org/sites/default/files/TransitionHandbook_freeeditVersion.pdf

      Page 16 on this PDF, but he’s talking about tar sands as it was before shale 🙂 .

      TED talk here by Rob H. if anyone’s interested:

      https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_hopkins_transition_to_a_world_without_oil#t-980384

      “Transition to a world without oil” – c. 16 mins.

      Although it’s back in 2009 (just post-crash, which he, like JHK, also relates to the oil situation), his approach is quite positive (as is the Transition movement generally), but while he doesn’t think the creativity that took us to the top of the mountain (his analogy) will desert us on the way down, he acknowledges that we can’t get anywhere until we face the reality of where we are. As we know…

      He lives in Totnes in Devon, which I think was the second Transition Town to be founded after Kinsale in Ireland. Like Lewes in Sussex, they have their own currency, the Totnes pound, which can only be spent within the town so helps boost the local economy.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Hopkins

      Portobello, on the sea (well Firth of Forth) coast of Edinburgh is also a Transition Town. It’s not going to save the world, but it might help the Porties a little bit. And it all helps to build communities and ‘resilience’ which is the key word for the Transitioners.

      https://www.pedal-porty.org.uk/

      There are lots of Transition groups in the US too, of course.

      • KK June 9, 2018 at 8:37 am #

        Thanks for that information. I wish that Transition Towns could have gotten more traction. We tried to get one going here, but there was not enough interest to sustain it, and the “principals” burnt out.

        • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 9:56 am #

          It’s almost impossible to get a critical mass of people interested enough – or scared enough – given that most information everywhere is telling them the opposite message, that everything will be OK, somehow or other, or that there are problems but not that one.

          The Portobello group is quite low-key, I think – community initiatives and so on, but the place is still full of cars etc. so just looks like anywhere else! They’re really just a suburb of Edinburgh. But at least they’re aware and trying.

          Totnes (which also has lots of cars!) is the one people have heard about more here and they do seem to keep the ball rolling better, not least because they’ve had more publicity, which helps. It’s a small town, so ideal for the purpose.

          Most people in the country have never heard of the Transition movement, though, sadly, or its concerns.

          I used to mention peak oil issues occasionally to people in conversation years ago, but you could literally see them backing off!

  5. Georges1202 June 8, 2018 at 10:11 am #

    America’s lovable Orange Godzilla heads north to swing his tail to and fro and belch forth his unique vision. And who will stay him? Does anyone have the gumption to stand up to this horrid slob?

    Support this blog on PatreonSupport this blog on Substack
    Support this blog via Patreon or Substack
  6. robert magill June 8, 2018 at 10:16 am #

    With ANT Financial breaking into the ranks, China now has more banking institutions on the Top 10 list than does the US.  The breakdown is that the US has four , the UK one, and China outscores both with five banks on the list of the top 10 worldwide.  The market capitalization of both the US and Chinese banks are nearly identical at something over one trillion, one. Phew!  Time to learn Mandarin.

    • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 10:43 am #

      > China now has more banking institutions on the Top 10 list

      But would you really trust a Chinese bank over an American one with your millions?

      China will never have the legitimacy that America enjoys so long as its ruling institutions are not transparent.

    • shotho June 8, 2018 at 11:59 am #

      And how secure are those banks, with trillions of yuan in dodgy, unsecured loans?

    • Tate June 8, 2018 at 12:07 pm #

      I can easily remember back in 1988-89, everyone was saying we had to learn Japanese. LOL.

      • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 4:50 pm #

        But their numbers were decreasing and still are, yes?

        China, India [Chindia] is 3 billion and growing.

        • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 5:13 pm #

          So would you rather bank in a country that needs to feed 1.5 billion? Or in a country that has food reserves aplenty?

          • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:41 pm #

            I was replying to Tate, I dont have an op about banks, right now.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 7:49 pm #

            Malthuss, if horses were wishes beggars would ride.

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 7:57 pm #

            BTW, we’re gonna need a lot more horses when the shale oil runs out.

            See what I did there.

      • elysianfield June 8, 2018 at 6:49 pm #

        Tate,
        …Better to learn Spanish…and Ebonics….

        • Tate June 8, 2018 at 7:50 pm #

          Appears that way, EF.

  7. bukowskisghost June 8, 2018 at 10:19 am #

    Jim,
    If you pulled the plug on the comments section maybe these narcissistic buffoons would have to THINK rather than pretend they are clever. I beg you.

    • 100th Avatar June 8, 2018 at 11:03 am #

      Best comment. ever.

    • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 6:35 pm #

      Yeah, just like everyone else. We don’t even have to repeal the First Amendment – just let it become a theoretical abstraction since there will be no Place where People can speak freely.

      The real Bukowski refused to buckle down to the Post Office (his employer) when they tried to get him to stop writing. He describes how they flinched when he mentioned the First Amendment. Blue Collar guys aren’t supposed to know about that, or at least not have the balls to invoke it.

      • Sean Coleman June 9, 2018 at 9:37 am #

        Is his ghost female? I can’t remember.

  8. AKlein June 8, 2018 at 10:25 am #

    I think our host JHK really hit the nail on the head.

    To wit, “The West had a mighty good run in the decades since the fiascos of the mid-20th century. My guess is that we’re witnessing a slow-burning panic over the impossibility of maintaining the enviable standard of living we’ve all enjoyed.”

    Perhaps a more colorful way of saying this is that we are now entering the morning after the night before.

  9. Paulo June 8, 2018 at 10:29 am #

    Good article and comments. As a citizen of probably the most pissed off country, Trumpers need to notice that Canada produces 5% of the World’s energy supply, and is actually a net exporter, exporting over 100% of domestic use. The return on the denigrated Oil Sands is 6:1, eroei. Canada also has, at a minimum, the World’s 3rd largest reserves, plus surplus renewable electricty, (BC and Quebec Hydro).

    A new pipeline for China exports will be built to the Pacific Coast, already started and just purchased by the Federal Govt.

    This clip sums up what a lot of Canadians think about Trump and the US. 3 seconds: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/bfeb28bc-3614-47a2-b64e-939b5f47fcd3

    • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 10:58 am #

      > Trumpers need to notice

      The USA doesn’t need Canadian oil, nor does it need the Canadian Keystone Pipeline running through the heart of its territory—a pipeline the USA could easily shut down.

      > This clip sums up what a lot of Canadians think about Trump and the US

      I’m happy to report that Americans do not feel the same way about Canada. But Canadians are acting like that 30-year-old man who refused to leave his parents’ house. Time for Canada to get a job and support itself. The Canadian welfare program is over.

    • Elrond Hubbard June 8, 2018 at 11:04 am #

      If the people of the province of Ontario, at any rate, don’t like Donald Trump, that didn’t prevent them from just electing his clone to govern the province. The Progressive Conservative party under Doug Ford, brother of the late crackhead mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, will govern Ontario with 76 seats in the legislature, a comfortable majority.

      To give you a sense of Doug Ford, now premier of a province of 13.6 million people, he is credibly alleged to have been a hashish dealer for several years in the 1980s. Other members of his family (aside from the crackhead brother already mentioned) have also been involved in the drug trade or with drug-related violence.

      Also, when his crackhead brother died, Doug Ford was made executor of his estate. The crackhead’s widow has filed a lawsuit against her former brother-in-law alleging that Doug Ford has not made a proper accounting of the estate, is mismanaging it, and that no payout has been to the beneficiaries (the crackhead’s wife and two children). She also accuses Ford of using his late father’s estate to hide losses in the family business while Ford himself extracts handsome compensation from it.

      The one bright spot is that my own party, the Greens, have elected our first MPP in Guelph. Congratulations to Mike Schreiner — that’s one!

      • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 6:38 pm #

        Maybe there is hope for Canada after all. Countless English speakers fled from Quebec once the Frogs imposed French on the Civil Service. They took their money with them! Their loss was Ontario’s gain.

  10. K-Dog June 8, 2018 at 10:29 am #

    Now is the summer of our discontent
    Made inglorious by the bum from New York;
    And all the crowds that lured him to to be the louse
    In the deep state are buried.

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    • Georges1202 June 8, 2018 at 10:54 am #

      Isn’t the real horror of Trump the fact that he is a kind of composite? This lumbering, snarling thing that is devouring the planet.

      • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 1:32 pm #

        > This lumbering, snarling thing that is devouring the planet.

        Right. It’s Trump that’s devouring the planet—not the ever-increasing billions who overpopulate and trash their own countries, and then flee to successful ones with their loser cultures in tow.

        Trump is an inward-looking nationalist. Be thankful he’s not a globalist looking to impose a one-world new-world order.

        • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:45 pm #

          T H A N K S

  11. sauerkraut June 8, 2018 at 10:59 am #

    Just when the situation calls for careful thought, impeccable planning, and consulate diplomacy: TRUMP!

    Sure, the world was due for a bad time, but thanks to the Republicans, this is turning into an irreversible catastrophe. Anyone who thinks that this is going to end well, in any sense, is deluded.

    • sauerkraut June 8, 2018 at 11:10 am #

      DAMN auto”correct” !!!

      consummate diplomacy

  12. teddyboy46 June 8, 2018 at 11:03 am #

    While I am a big fan of JHK, I must respectfully disagree with him on two topics. 1st. The Economy collapsed in 2008 and we have been running on make believe money ever since, so since it is imaginary why would it ever stop? We can keep on like this forever. 2nd Trump was the right man for the job at this time in history. Ever since Ronald Reagan every president has been working towards a new world order of a Corporate Dictatorship. Trump is all the bad things you say he is but he is the Hammer that will break up the New world order. Thanks for listening.

    • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 11:37 am #

      he is the Hammer that will break up the New world order

      That remains to be seen. Personally, I think anything that qualifies as a genuine “New World Order” is many orders of magnitude more resilient of that. But even more importantly, even if he succeeds in breaking things up, what does he plan to replace it with; indeed, does he even have a plan? The early returns indicate that whatever else it is, it’s not going to be anything even remotely populist, in spite of all the hype.

      That said, he’s still an infinitely better alternative than ol’ what’s her face.

      • michael June 9, 2018 at 5:49 am #

        I just hope the Russians, Chinese and assorted member of the SCO
        are content with the lot which the “New World Order” decrees for them.

    • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:46 pm #

      Forever would indicate no ‘outside’—no yin to the yang. No
      banksters or countries wanted to dump the dollars and bonds, yes?

  13. Cavepainter June 8, 2018 at 11:08 am #

    Janet won’t be happy in hearing this but there’s even deeper (more primal) underpinning to the disquiet within the national psyche. It arises from the very depth of identity formation, personal and national, essentially amounting to a pathological break-down. Sorry folks, but the post WWII era that JHK this morning has addressed has fostered a society based upon narcissistic impulsiveness wherein no consensus of “normality” can exist. Consequently, all the most fundamental building blocks for formulating “identity”, personal and national, have been strewn asunder like archaeological rubble. I’m speaking of the erasing of the most elemental margins such as between male and female (on the personal level) and citizen as opposed to alien on the national level. The suicide rate is display of our human “ant colony” dispersing after the queen has died. I’ll repeat what I’ve posted here before, the very foundation of societal order has always been in attempt to harmonizing the inherent tension between the male agenda and that of the female. Instead, we vacillate; between an amorphous passivity or suffer the confused bi-polarity of that minority of individuals who biologically can’t reconcile the sexual divide.

    • Sean Coleman June 8, 2018 at 11:34 am #

      No harm stating it there again. JHK put it well a few months ago when he said that a generation or so back people thought of themselves as Americans before anything else.

      My own view is that it is a fantasy. A colleague went out to help her husband canvass for a no vote in the Irish referendum to introduce what will be abortion on demand. She told me, the next day, that what struck her was how angry those people were who intended voting yes. In contrast those who wanted to keep the restrictions in place (only allowing it where the mother’s life is in danger) were agreeable and at ease with themselves. I think this rage is very significant and it dominates what is laughingly called the national debate (there is none, like everywhere else it seems).

      There is a video on YT which features old people in the US talking to camera, which was filmed back in the twenties, I think. What strikes the viewer is how ordinary, how sane and reasonable they are. There is no rage, nor anything like it.

      Just found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FE30a4J38Q

      • Cavepainter June 8, 2018 at 12:14 pm #

        “Fantasy”, really? Well,…..yes, in that the notion of self as well as that of nationhood is a concept. That is, attempt to sort through the chaos of sensory input, ordering it into a useful survival tool of apprehension. Yeah, “apprehension”; males have innate greater apprehension (focus) of 360 degree environment for detecting threat or quarry.

        • Sean Coleman June 8, 2018 at 2:18 pm #

          I mean that normality, identity, tradition, structure, authority and the like have been undermined by fantasy. The big pc fantasy is composed of lesser delusions including mass immigration (likened to a millenial cult by Ed West in the final chapter of his book The Diversity Illusion), AGW (Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager exposes the astonishing gap between hype and reality in the absurd IPCC), the astonishing abuse and (Ireland mainly) anticlerical abuse scandals raging around the world (look at any of them and they crumble to dust), the farcical EU project which seeks to build Utopia by way of obsessive micro-regulation, the wholly fact-free Me Too nonsense, the idea of black victimhood and relentless white racism (see Colin Flaherty) and fake news. All of these and literally everything else (or so it seems) are fantasy. Those who defend it have to resort to lies and dishonesty because otherwise they would have to face the truth.

      • sharonsj June 8, 2018 at 3:21 pm #

        That anger you speak of is everywhere in the world. I’ve seen it first-hand for years and it’s why Trump got elected–even though there was no reason to believe anything he said. The politicians, the financial institutions and the giant corporations are trying to keep the lid on, but I expect the pressure cooker to blow at some point.

      • 100th Avatar June 8, 2018 at 4:15 pm #

        The irony being that they lived in a time when people did not alter their persona for the camera, for it did not exist.
        They were unspoilt.

        Today we are inebriated with caricatures of behavior. Dramatized TV, opinionated news, affected emotions in supposed reality programs. People are bombarded with what passes as acceptable behavior when expressing an opinion: feigned outrage, bombastic retorts, shameless demagoguery, and sanctimony for exhibition’s sake.

        Very few know how to remain grounded and express an opinion without the drama surrounding an emotional response. It’s as if a calm thought out articulation is worthless without an emotive display that signals a very personal attachment.

        Then again, we are living in the mepoch. Or should I say, all of you are living in my mepoch?

  14. 100th Avatar June 8, 2018 at 11:18 am #

    “Like many observers here in the USA, I can’t tell exactly whether Donald Trump is out of his mind or justifiably blowing up out-of-date relationships and conventions in a world that is desperately seeking a new disposition of things. ”

    As many researchers have pointed out, Trump, despite his wealth, education, and addresses has never been part of the convention, the old money establishment. It has certainly bred resentment, particularly in such a vindictive personally consumed by cultural and status signifiers. If he cannot and will not be accepted by this out-of-date established order, he will simply upturn the sandbox.

    There are people that voted for him that knew, predicted, and eagerly awaited this behavior.

    Politicians are always useful idiots. Always. However, this one isn’t merely a useful idiot for the deplorable idiots as the press would have you believe.

  15. marcus1 June 8, 2018 at 11:34 am #

    “Like many observers here in the USA, I can’t tell exactly whether Donald Trump is out of his mind or justifiably blowing up out-of-date relationships and conventions in a world that is desperately seeking a new disposition of things.”

    My guess is the former, The Donald is a petulant, self-centered narcissist, that has the tendency to rip things apart, but has neither the inclination or creative capability to put complex arrangements together. There is no vision for replacement of systems, there is only “fire and fury.”

    He is a demagogue pure and simple, and he apparently learned from one of the masters: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-adolf-hitler-books-bedside-cabinet-ex-wife-ivana-trump-vanity-fair-1990-a7639041.html

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    • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 1:21 pm #

      > The Donald is a petulant, self-centered narcissist

      I agree—but it doesn’t follow that this is mutually exclusive with regard to good policy.

      > He is a demagogue pure and simple

      I would rather have a demagogue that does the right thing than a globalist who doesn’t.

      You keep looking at the man; I’ll keep looking at the plan.

      • 100th Avatar June 8, 2018 at 2:05 pm #

        Agreed. So much attention paid to the man and his seemingly unlimited ability to get into tiffs and rather childish beefs with everyone from psychotic Asian despots to American professional ball bouncers that the net results go untracked and untraced.

        Is it his plan? The plan of those that backed him and support him?
        Many understood it would be this way, or made to understood.

        Understood that the cult of personality mostly drives the legions of brain dead voters in the USA where they’d rather have the wool pulled over their eyes and beaten by a nice and articulate politician than clobbered by unfiltered truths by a buffoon deathly allergic to decorum and diplomatic pretensions.

        • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 4:46 pm #

          > and his seemingly unlimited ability to get into tiffs

          Last I heard, it takes two to tiff. Static—don’t start none, won’t be none.

          Next you’re going to tell me that liberals and the MSM haven’t been attacking Trump nonstop. Next you’re going to tell me that if only Trump used mellifluous words like Obama, that liberals and the MSM would sing his praises.

          Trump has kept or is in the process of keeping everything he promised. THAT’s the real problem. The Left hasn’t been able to bully him into accepting libtard values, like they managed to do with legions of RINOs.

      • marcus1 June 8, 2018 at 3:57 pm #

        The “plan?” You or any other please explain the plan to me. All I see are payments from Russian Oligarchs, playing nice with dictators and Saudi princes, and destruction of traditional relationships with democracies.

        Please explain the plan, the vision, besides self enrichment for he and his fellow Oligarchs.

        • Exscotticus June 8, 2018 at 4:53 pm #

          > All I see are payments from Russian Oligarchs,

          Oh you mean when donations were made to Hillary’s slush fund to enable the Uranium One sale?

          > playing nice with dictators and Saudi princes,

          Oh you mean when Obama sent Iran a cargo plane full of cash? Or are you referring to Obama bowing to his Saudi master?

          > and destruction of traditional relationships with democracies.

          What destruction? Did we bomb Canada and I missed it?! Oh you must mean Trump daring to renegotiate an unfair trade imbalance that has existed for over 40 years. Yes how outrageous that Trump is fighting for equality. No wonder you’re upset.

          • marcus1 June 8, 2018 at 10:11 pm #

            There ya go! You don’t disappoint. No plan. A big nothingburger like your destroying Angel. Good luck with that indulgence.

  16. lost-in-north-dakota June 8, 2018 at 11:51 am #

    Another thing about shale oil (besides the financial aspects JHK writes about)…..there isn’t as much of it as people think. I did the math once, on the amount of recoverable oil in the Bakken Formation, as estimated by the USGS, and then compared it to oil consumption in the USA. Answer: about 12 months’ consumption. 7.4 billion barrels recoverable vs. 7.3 billion barrels consumed annually. I don’t know about other shale fields, but the Bakken is just a blip on the screen with regards to oil consumption by the USA.

    • Tate June 8, 2018 at 12:05 pm #

      Did you do the math over 12 months ago?

    • Georges1202 June 8, 2018 at 12:13 pm #

      That is still quite a lot – enough to run Circus USA for a year.

  17. janet June 8, 2018 at 12:14 pm #

    “He is a demagogue pure and simple…” — marcus1

    Yes, he is a corn-pone white trash racist dictator in the making (aka “president for life”) … Trump admires dictators like Putin and Xi and little rocket man.

    Trump is the corn-pone dictator JHK prophesied, yet does not seem to recognize. Such is the fruit of distrust.

    • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 3:09 pm #

      OMG! You and Finca (with his interminable HRC screeds) are bookends. Neither Trump or HRC possess that much power or the good sense to use it if they did. And if you’re going to blame anybody for Trump, start with HRC and her supporters (you), who allowed her to steal the nomination from Sanders in the first place.

  18. volodya June 8, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

    There’s many things that are dead broke as anybody with eyes can see. As Cavepainter sez, the broken-ness goes to the very bottom of our most primal relationships, be they male-female, or familial, or clan, or tribe, or country.

    Why do we have those relationships? Simply because they enabled us to survive, ever since our ape fore-bears got up on their hind legs. They’re so old as to be innate, hard-wired in our brains and glands and innards.

    How did they get so broke? Part of it is economic. As any chick will tell us, ain’t no romance without finance. Ninety percent of them admit it, ten percent lie. In public, so as to not look out of step with the times, the percentage of liars among them is a lot higher.

    It’s not just economic, part of it is in the vanities of the academy. They’ve been propagandizing for generations about how everything we know in our bones is inadequate and reprehensible. Why do they spout nonsense? Part of it is a play for power. Many just LOVE telling others what to do, inflating themselves at others’ expense. And academicians wield real power, destroying the lives and prospects of those they deem attitudinally deficient. This makes the power-wielders feel good and satisfied and high and mighty.

    But the other side of it is that human neurology is a shaky construct, subject to serious mis-fires. One can argue that the surplus of food over the past several generations enabled the survival of people that are just plain unfit, hence more serious mis-fires. You look at the insanities of the past decades, the German invasion of Russia, the Chinese cultural revolution, and also smaller crazinesses like the widespread conviction thirty years ago that there were satanic rites all over the place taking sexual liberties with kids in day-care. And the absurdities we see on campus. But also the very real sexual depravities in the Roman Catholic Church. There’s also the mystery of how the Church avoided being banned and disbanded at gunpoint. Is this another neurological mis-fire? What about hundreds of girls and women being sexually abused by coaches for decades and not one of them bringing the abuse to the attention of father-brother and not ONE father-brother beating the malefactors to a pulp. Not one.

    But Mother Nature has limited tolerance for deviations and deficiencies and nonsense. And then she does a cull. Stay tuned.

    • Sean Coleman June 9, 2018 at 7:13 pm #

      Volodya

      You were doing all right until

      “But also the very real sexual depravities in the Roman Catholic Church. There’s also the mystery of how the Church avoided being banned and disbanded at gunpoint.”

      It is hard to blame you when even most Catholics believe this. I firmly believe it is complete rubbish. Boston: nonsense. Ireland: nonsense. And all the rest.

      For Ireland this is the site to look at:

      http://www.irishsalem.com/individuals/accusers/christine-buckley/index.php .

      I shudder to think what would happen if anything happened to Rory O’Connor, he is not a young man. Richard Webster’s Sceptical Essays website, kept going by friends and family, is the other place to start. It is an extraordinary thing.

      As for coaches a fellow on Moor Larkin’s Savile blog is always arguing that the case against Jerry Sandusky is very dodgy.

  19. janet June 8, 2018 at 12:39 pm #

    “then compared it to oil consumption in the USA.” — lost-in-north-dakota

    Did you take into account the fact that petroleum consumption may decline, thanks to the Green Transition underway?

    There seems to be an unstated false assumption here that, given economic growth and population increase, oil consumption will continue to increase.

    Yet US oil consumption was lower in 2014 than it was in 1997, despite the fact that the economy grew almost 50% over that period and population continued to increase.

    Assuming a linear trend would have simply predicted a continued increase in oil consumption, but what actually happened was a decrease. Your back of the envelope calculations probably were based on the false assumption of increasing demand.

    President Obama’s clean energy strategy has made concrete strides to reduce petroleum consumption and shift the US economy to a low carbon future through policies like fuel economy standards and tax credits for renewable energy.

    With Trump… ???

    • Cavepainter June 8, 2018 at 1:21 pm #

      And there it is folks, the secular rapture as trumpeted by Janet; peace will reign because there’ll be no distinctions of discord among people, sexually or otherwise, and no matter how numerous we are all resources will be apportioned equally and to all’s fulfillment and satisfaction — “as it is in heaven”. Peculiar how that has a ring of familiarity about it, huh?

      • Cavepainter June 8, 2018 at 2:13 pm #

        Funny, whereas most posters here will most likely snicker and ridicule the preposterous pitches of Bible thumping summer tent revivalist shouting out “sins of the mind” some (Janet in particular) are religious zealots for the Leftist meme contending redemption from the “fail from grace” (Western culture and particularly White maleness), with Trump as the “snake in the garden” and the likes of Obama the Second Coming. Shall I say “Oh God”?

        • Sean Coleman June 8, 2018 at 2:38 pm #

          John Gray classes militant atheism as a (crude) Christian heresy. The late Richard Webster (his Sceptical Essays website is essential reading in understanding the role of fantasy in modern life) argues that it is an unconscious carry-over from English Puritanism and that the modern world is most at risk from powerful witch hunts and mass delusions because it considers itself rational and therefore, unlike earlier ages, immune to them (see his excellent essay Flat Earth News and the Jersey Children’s Home Scandal).

          And then there is evolutionary atheist (or atheistic evolutionist) Jerry Coyne excommunicating Peter Hitchens for being an unbeliever, mocking science and leading astray the simple minded (literally, look at Coyne’s article which Hitchens links to). I think this is the best of the bunch, although Ben Stein interviewing Richard Dawkins (see YouTube) runs it close.

          http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/04/the-mighty-professor-coyne-launches-another-thunderbolt-against-heresy.html

          The Mighty Professor Coyne Launches Another Thunderbolt Against Heresy

          “Yesterday, I gently mocked the sort of person who scans the globe for somebody, anybody, with whom he can pick an angry fight. Unable to find anyone who actually dares to say he is wrong, he lights on someone who says pacifically that he may be right, but then, again, just possibly, he may not be. “That’s not good enough!” he roars, and so, across thousands of miles of vulture-haunted desert, lonesome mountains and tossing ocean, he despatches a furious denunciation, while all his disciples gather round the hem of his robe and squeak ‘Yeah! Way to go, Jerry!’ and ‘Let the Stupid Heretic Have It!’.

          “Well, unable to identify himself as the target of this mild and good-humoured teasing, Professor Jerry Coyne, bless him, has refuelled his heresy hunt and blasted me with a tremendous atheistical thunderbolt, if there can be such a thing.

          “You can read it here (along with the touchingly sycophantic comments of the Professor’s worshippers, choirboys, acolytes, bell-tinklers and incense-swingers), http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/peter-hitchens-responds-to-me-about-evolution-or-rather-doesnt-respond/

          “I imagine that some of the heresy-hunters who come here to denounce me will find this company congenial too, and am happy to introduce them to a club where they will be more than welcome.

          “I have , as I said yesterday, metaphorically crossed the street to avoid the Professor. If he now crosses the street and follows me, I shall cross back to the other side, even if means I have to zig-zag metaphorically all the way home. As I am such an intellectual pygmy, he really shouldn’t worry so much about what I think. I wonder why he does.

          “I would point out that the title of the article ‘Peter Hitchens tries (and fails) to respond to me about evolution’ is a touch misleading. I have not tried, and will not try, to respond to the Professor, for the reasons many times stated. Not having tried, I can hardly be said to have failed. Professor Coyne shouldn’t be too thrilled when I say that I suspect nobody ever wins any arguments against him.”

          • Tate June 8, 2018 at 8:18 pm #

            It’s those intolerant types like Coyne who scare us. And if HRC had been elected President, there’s no telling what false gods we’d be forced to bow to by this point.

      • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 3:10 pm #

        She’s a real piece of work.

      • DrGonzo June 8, 2018 at 7:43 pm #

        Huh? Yours seems an awfully broad-brush and hyperbolic reaction to a post in which Janet (gasp!) dared to point out that smart public policies can, and have, demonstrated success in gradually weaning us off of our fossil fuel addiction. I thought that was one of the goals that JHK has been proselytizing for for two decades. Why the hostile reaction to a small bit of positive news?

        Of course, the Orange Menace has already rolled back those higher fuel efficiency standards that Obama negotiated. Maybe THAT is what you should be wailing about.

  20. FincaInTheMountains June 8, 2018 at 1:00 pm #

    Strategic plan – 20 – 25 years – a full transition to fifth-generation fully-robotized manufacturing plus 100% electrical vehicles powered by new generation nuclear fission reactors capable of burning now not fissionable materials (U238 and Thorium) – and don’t tell me it’s impossible, the technology been here for at least 30 years, just lacking political will – which Trump has a lot, apparently.

    My guess, electrical cars will be priced out of range of mass consumer, but the prices for Uber-type commuting will be kept low and regulated as natural monopolies are regulated now.

    Tactically – shale oil and gas to keep control of the world energy prices and stability of the dollar during transition period.

    Important – securing the raw materials for fifth-generation manufacturing, especially the rare-earths metals.

    Still not resolved ideological problem – what to do with all these extra hands that will not be needed for production, how to utilize their God-given creativity.

    Ideological problems will be much harder to resolve than economical issues.

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    • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 4:45 pm #

      Agenda 2030

      Depopulation

      Sustainability

      If drivers licenses are outlawed, who will drive?

  21. Walter B June 8, 2018 at 1:22 pm #

    “Like many observers here in the USA, I can’t tell exactly whether Donald Trump is out of his mind or justifiably blowing up out-of-date relationships and conventions in a world that is desperately seeking a new disposition of things.”

    Right you are Jim, you have expressed the only intelligent view of the matter, we simply don’t know, do we? Could he turn out to be an evil tyrant pursuing a hidden agenda, or a wily manipulator working a plan to minimize the corruption that has been wrought by sellouts with red and with blue neckties? Only time will tell and while our resident dip-bot will spit, snipe and piss up a storm at even the mention of his name, we understand, at least, he is NOT one of THEM! Entertaining if nothing else.

  22. amb June 8, 2018 at 1:26 pm #

    Don’t agree with these Doom & Gloom prognostications. Man will come up with more and more workable technologies for oil extraction, refining, fuel efficiency, etc. Concurrently working on alternative energy formats. Man will continue to solve his problems and challenges. Man is brilliant as well as stupid. As long as the brilliance is 51% or higher, we’ll be ok.

    • PeteAtomic June 8, 2018 at 2:10 pm #

      I hope you’re right!

      I don’t mind working in the woods as much as the next guy, but gee– forced natural gas heating really is nice, man.

    • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 3:10 pm #

      Cornucopians unite!

      • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:51 pm #

        Give me a Corn Pone Nazi over a Cornucopian, any day.

        • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 11:46 pm #

          Trump is the Corn King, slated to be sacrificed in order to fertilize the field. As such, he is a “type” of Christ. The Pharisees are sacrificing him for their own purpose, but he is really being sacrificed for the People. Caiphas said more than he knew when he said, Is it not just for one man to die that the People might live?

  23. Kevvia Knack June 8, 2018 at 1:37 pm #

    I recently read “Windfall” (subtitle: “How The New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens Americas Power”) by Meghan O’Sullivan (checked it out from the library, certainly never would have bought it it). O’Sullivan is a Harvard graduate and a neocon. I thought people who graduated from Harvard were supposed to be, like, you know, smart. Also recently read “The War on Normal People”. Very good book. Can we please do away with Harvard entirely? Roughly, 25% of Harvard grads to into medicine, 25% go into Finance, 25% go into Technology and 25% go into Consulting. This is pretty much the breakdown for Princeton, Yale and other elite universities. These people are causing so much damage. Even the percentage that goes into medicine, supposedly a noble profession, are on the same page economically–they take the same business courses as other undergrads. I recommend the second book, it’s a good read. I’m Ms. Book Club today…thought I’d share.

    • Georges1202 June 8, 2018 at 1:41 pm #

      Agreed – add West Point to that list. Hard to think of an institution that has produced more dangerous blockheads.

      • Kevvia Knack June 8, 2018 at 2:06 pm #

        West Point’s love of warfare is no secret. The warfare that Harvard is committing is more subtle. It’s economic warfare. Corporate Capitalism. We need a Humanistic Capitalism. I really do recommend “The War on Normal People”. It’s very alarming. It’s a companion piece to JHK’s books. It’s really good. It deals with the upcoming surge in automation and technology, unemployment, and the need for a UBI (Universal Basic Income)

        • Georges1202 June 8, 2018 at 2:10 pm #

          Looks good – it is on its way to my Kindle…

      • Walter B June 8, 2018 at 3:10 pm #

        You might catch a lot of heat for besmirching my Rockland Highland Home, but being honest I would have to say that as far as I saw there in the olden days, West Point turned out some of the finest men this country ever produced along with some of the rottenest SOB’s and a whole lot of in-betweens as well. Today I am not so sure of WTF has happened there but I am not reassured by what I see….

        https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/14301-west-point-terrorism-study-targets-%E2%80%9Cfar-right%E2%80%9D-conservatives

    • amb June 8, 2018 at 1:46 pm #

      Academia is one of the USA’s biggest problems. The stats in medicine, finance, etc. prove that.

      • Exscotticus June 10, 2018 at 12:29 am #

        What do you expect when Affirmative Action rewards mediocrity while forcing out our best and brightest? Lowering the top is way easier than raising the bottom…

  24. janet June 8, 2018 at 2:10 pm #

    It is going to be a hot summer for Trump and his cabinet. Mueller doesn’t seem to be deterred by the hot summer weather. His investigation of Trump’s crimes continues.

    Prosecutors have filed a new indictment against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort that also names as a defendant Konstantin Kilimnik, a close business colleague of Manafort’s who prosecutors have said has close ties to Russian intelligence.

    The indictment includes two new charges against both Manafort and Kilimnik: a count of obstruction of justice and a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, meaning the two allegedly worked together to tamper with witnesses.

  25. My Point of View June 8, 2018 at 2:21 pm #

    Here’s MY totally different point of view….which I’ll get to at the end.

    For starters, religion always was fiction, folklore and fairy tales, which is especially true of the Old Testament (OT). The OT was written by ancient people who, like people even today, crave certainty — they want to know FOR SURE what are the answers to the riddles of the universe and human existence.

    Since these ancients had no science to explain the universe — or birth, life, death, sun, moon, fire, water, wind — and a thousand other phenomena — they simply made up answers to convince themselves FOR SURE where we came from. Thus the OT was born and handed down for centuries by early oral traditions and eventually in written manner. Biblical folklores are laughable and people increasingly shun the OT cartoon to adopt a non-religious existence.

    Further, many young people see the hypocrisy of evangelicals with their greedy “prosperity gospel” and bible thumping hatred of LGBT, minorities, women, and immigrants, and decide they want no part of it. So yes, we see a decline in the number of “believers” but the decline is a healthy thing, and is not behind an increasing suicide rate. But there are multiple factors at work goosing up the death rates, it’s a connect the dots exercise.

    1. More powerful drugs and alcohols get a grip on people who fail to overcome these damned substances. When these people realize they are doomed, with no way out, they end it.

    2. Whether it’s student loan debt, medical debt, or general debt, steep debt-loads doom many to economic slavery; often the only way out of this financial misery is to end it.

    3. The Koch brothers and their network of far right donors have emaciated labor unions, driving down wages, living standards, consumption, quality of life, and savings for retirement. This drives up the debts of workers that is partly to blame for worsening item 2. The increasing sense of hopelessness with no way out of economic servitude causes many to end it.

    4. Huge public high schools are un-manageable, factories of peer pressure and bullying, a prison with chalkboards. The “feel like a number” aspect is real. Grade schools are small and human-scale at a neighborhood level, we knew each other. The best year of grade school I had was in a 4-room rural school where every kid new each other closely, a secure FAMILY existence. In the early 1950s our grade school had a nurse who cared about us, she had a dental chair in her office where a visiting dentist examined every child and sent home a list of dental items that needed attention. Lunches were hot, good and very cheap. They gave us Polio vaccines, too. No cost. Someone had our back, someone cared, we felt secure — priceless to a child. Moving on to increasingly larger middle and high schools was an experience in increasingly stronger peer pressure, bullying, anger, alienation, and a desire to get away from it. Many drop out to get away from it and doom themselves to the lower economic rungs, poverty, crime, addiction, etc.

    5. Finally, the REAL reason I write, the main point behind this tornado of suicides, is the gradual intentional emaciation and destruction of our Federal Government (FG). Born 70 years ago I grew up with a government that had the answers; it solved the dust bowl, tamed flooding rivers, put men on the moon, brought electricity to Appalachia, made the desert bloom, won the space race, stopped Polio, ended segregation, built the interstate highway system, waged the Cold War — and did it out of cash flow and not red ink. The FG was the bedrock on which our national strength was built. It was OUR friend, it had OUR backs. We felt secure.

    Now, thanks to 35 years of lies starting with Reagan, we’ve been told our FG is not our friend, does not mean us well, that it is the problem. Clowns like Grover Norquist and the anti-tax movement castrate the ability of the FG to solve the issues facing us. Our poorly financed highways are old, needing repair and expansion, our railroads burst at the seams with more traffic than they can handle, bridges weaken and some fail. Borders are not secure. Wall Street runs amok and wrecks our economy on a regular cycle of bubbles and spurious investments. There is no long term planning; we still have no FG policy for transport or energy or health.

    Our enemies, foreign and domestic, use the internet to mislead millions to believe all these lies and revert to old bigotries we thought were largely gone; they divide and conquer to make us easy pickings at the polls.

    Without a strong, active FG we are subjected to the GOP’s unwritten mantra of You’re On Your Own, the YOYO syndrome, economic Darwinism. The billionaires love it, they got you by the balls, they get an ever larger share of the pie while your’s shrinks. You are abandoned to fate. We don’t feel secure. For many, the only way out of this dead-end YOYO world is to end it.

    And they are.

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    • janet June 8, 2018 at 2:26 pm #

      The federal government also created Medicare and Social Security, which many who comment here receive. On the other hand, it was a Republican president who warned us of the military industrial complex which consumes half our discretionary budget, intervenes all over the world provoking blowback which makes us less safe.

      • sauerkraut June 8, 2018 at 2:41 pm #

        The MIC speech warned of a specific corporate takeover, advancing a specific agenda. But since then, the FG has been taken over so many times, advancing so many corporate agendas, that the citizen has no voice at all.

        So there is no other hand.

      • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

        Even as he (Ike) was the one to nurture it in its infancy.

      • Walter B June 9, 2018 at 8:21 pm #

        A note on Social Security janet, and yes I understand that you did not say anything negative about it in your post. Unlike welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and all of the other handouts, Social Security consists of money that WE, the working people earned, and that was taken from us by the government with the excuse that we could not be trusted to plan for our own retirements. Those of us that ran our own businesses, paid both halves of the pot. It is OUR MONEY and WE WANT IT BACK! We earned it and damn it, it was the fucking government that proved that it could not plan for our retirements, NOT us! I am not certain that you understand this or not, but in the end, it really does not matter. It is not an “entitlement”, it is OURS – give it back!

    • sauerkraut June 8, 2018 at 2:34 pm #

      You mean that it’s good to have a government between me and the corporate goons? What are you, some kinda commie?

    • Ol' Scratch June 8, 2018 at 3:14 pm #

      I think you’ve got a handle on it, MPV!

    • 100th Avatar June 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm #

      “Starting with Regan” ii =: !! := (eyes rolling)

    • Cavepainter June 8, 2018 at 4:50 pm #

      Your “point of view” is not total in either sense of political polar points, more the confused mish-mash of talking-points that highlight the simple fact that no longer is there a common underpinning of values and beliefs that can be referred to as “nation indivisible”. In terms of civics 101, we’ve allowed ourselves to be divided into warring tribes, forsaking the unifying principles framed within our nation’s founding documents — which, by-the-way, derived from a Western Enlightenment appreciation for the analytic process in examination of history and empirical evidence
      On that account I stick by my point that something closer to a DNA strand in the national conscience has un-coiled. Conventions of peer enforced decorum have always regulated relations between the two sexes and, no less critical, between generations. Not, emphatically, official rulings by prelates.
      Today though, “gentleman” refers to clubs billboarded along freeways, not to respectful bearing toward the opposite sex (emphasis on opposite). Too, that very “concept” by any definition is attacked by the virago feminists as patriarchate condescension, as is patrillineal name in marriage when historically it connoted obligation of responsibility toward the female. Modeled roles matter.
      Quoting you, “many young people see the hypocrisy……….hatred of LGBT, minorities, women, and immigrants”, reducing, thereby, complex issues to simple politicized rubric (which immigrants, legal or illegal?), The subtext is that the impulsiveness of youth in our consumerist society of instant gratification takes a heightened position over wisdom accrued to age — nominally relegated to stock humor about infirmity.

      • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 6:49 pm #

        Yes, women, as natural underlings, have lots of resentment against Men. This has been weaponized, starting generations ago when advertisers saw women liked men being made to look like fools. It sells. And of course “democracy” is simply a black art of the same kind as sales, where the candidates are the products.

        Of course women gang up on men and complain constantly. Some of their complaints may be valid, against individual men. But when they attain power, such as the power to vote, such an orientation is simply ruinous.

      • GreenAlba June 8, 2018 at 8:54 pm #

        “as is patrillineal name in marriage when historically it connoted obligation of responsibility toward the female. ”

        It hasn’t always existed everywhere. Unlike in England and Wales, Scottish women historically kept their own names on marriage right up to the 20th century, when they started to copy foreign habits.

        All that lack of patrillineal naming didn’t stop the Scots inventing many of the things you take for granted, so it wasn’t causing any societal dysfunction.

        And if it didn’t happen in Scotland, I don’t know why I’d assume it happened *everywhere*.

        And I would say it historically connoted ownership as much as responsibility.

        • Cavepainter June 9, 2018 at 1:08 am #

          Oh, excuse me, somehow I’d gotten the impression — can’t understand from where — that the practice was naught but signal of men’s dominance over women.

          • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 8:52 am #

            Not sure what point you’re making to me in particular, Cavepainter, with your ‘excuse me’.

            I’ve just opined (nothing more than that) that a woman being obliged (as she was back in the day in many places, but not Scotland) to take a man’s name on marriage could be construed in two ways: both him being a loving, responsible husband or her being his chattel – or something in between. Life is full of paradoxes – and some of them are more important than others.

            It’s more important, for example, that in Ireland until very recently, a married woman had no right to any portion of a house that only she had paid for!! Who’d care about a name, compared to something as outrageous as that?

            It’s not a big issue for me – couples make their own decisions, as they should. I heard one guy on the radio a long time ago explain that he and his wife had agreed to both use her surname because it was so much nicer than his – these are not life and death issues, as the Scottish example very clearly shows.

            I’ve been married twice, as a number of people on this site will have been. The first time I changed my name, without giving it much thought at all.

            When I remarried in later years, changing my name just seemed a bizarre thing to do for a grown-up, independent person (it’s also an administrative hassle). The person I was marrying didn’t care in the slightest – he didn’t even ask me what I was planning to do.

            in fact it was he who later pointed out to me that it was not a historical practice in Scotland (he’s not Scottish). His sense of himself isn’t dependent on any such variable conventions.

            And it’s this marriage that’s working fine, not the previous one. We live in my flat, so all the service-related bills come to me. Sometimes people connected to these services get him on the phone and call him Mr ‘Alba’ in error. He is not so fragile for this to remotely be an issue.

            Other people in my family have a shared name – so what?

    • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:55 pm #

      ECONOMIC SLAVERY–SI

      The Koch brothers and their network of far right donors have emaciated labor unions, –Not the (((1965 Act)))?

      Public high schools are unmanageable,–Due to NAMs.

      Dust Bowl–that was due to tractors.

      Reagan, told us that our FG is not our friend, ON THIS WE CAN AGREE. Thanks Raygun for that insight.

    • Tate June 8, 2018 at 9:45 pm #

      All I can say is Wow! You’ve got it all figured out there, doncha, MPOV? But if you can’t even get your numbering right, with two count ’em two Number 2s, then why should anyone take you seriously?

      • malthuss June 9, 2018 at 12:51 pm #

        I do not see two 2s.

        • Tate June 9, 2018 at 1:03 pm #

          oops! Haha. My bad.

  26. FincaInTheMountains June 8, 2018 at 3:02 pm #

    Putin Talks

    I remember how in the winter of 2006 I was on a bus from Zheleznogorsk to Kursk, and the whole bus, dying of interest and love, anticipating new times, listened with delight to the voice of Putin, which was heard from the radio of this still Soviet Ikarus bus. Since then, many years have passed, my interest in direct lines has faded away along with hopes for new times and it seems that I’m not the only one like that.

    To begin with, I slept through the entire direct line, since the drugs for eye infection have a clear sleeping action, but from those passages that were showed as the most interesting by the Russian First Channel, I was only interested in the answer to the question of gaining faith in Christ and telling about new weapons systems in Syria.

    But there is one circumstance that struck me after this:

    Two-thirds of the headlines in the Yahoo news feed were devoted to the “Direct line with Putin.” I do not remember anything like that, and it seems that Putin knew about this in advance, clearly targeting his answers for external use. Here are just some of them:

    Vladimir Putin talks Third World War and Russia’s first World Cup in four-hour long TV call-in show
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-warns-against-third-world-104809967.html

    Vladimir Putin Says Russia Will Make Sure Donald Trump’s Meeting With Kim Jong Un Goes Well
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/vladimir-putin-says-russia-sure-142851357.html

    Putin warns Ukraine against military action in east during World Cup
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-warns-ukraine-against-military-action-east-during-121225938–sow.html

  27. Luhrenloup June 8, 2018 at 3:43 pm #

    I come from a town in Maine that was majorly impacted by the industrial revolution. Vast textile mills were built in 1850 and the town prospered and grew beyond expectation. By 1950 the mills were dying or moving to less expensive labor markets. The old brick mills still stand, mostly abandoned. The town maintained for a couple more decades with a number of small factories, but it is now impoverished, barely able to keep head above water, its people despondent, drug addled. And much of the country is in similar straights.
    There is no solution as yet how to correct the industrial revolution’s demise, if it is correctable. What measures have been taken to date are desperate attempts to finagle the system into a financial Ponzi scheme of ever widening gyres. The hegemonic schemes to hold on to global power are backfiring (this summit ought to be a doozy.) The situation is such that one hopes for the crash that will bring an end to the madness. We have a government that, to all extents and purposes, is completely corrupt and useless to address the country’s woes. And it will get worse as an army of AI’s will shortly be deployed as the new workforce.
    Yet, I see hope. We live in a false world which is destroying basic values of respect, privacy, moderation, thrift, laws. In order to change course, current principles of industry which holds perpetual growth as given have to be chucked and a new paradigm set up that gets us out of the factory mindset where one works oneself to death. Hopefully, allowance will be made for leisure, creativity, art, spirituality.

    • malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:59 pm #

      Straits not ‘straights’–after all its Gay Month.

    • elysianfield June 8, 2018 at 7:07 pm #

      ” Hopefully, allowance will be made for leisure, creativity, art, spirituality.”

      Luhren,
      Leisure, creativity, art and spirituality? You can see it in real time on any street corner in the Ghetto on weekends.

      Humans do not handle idleness well, nor extended periods where a lack of adversity is an issue….

      • Luhrenloup June 8, 2018 at 8:07 pm #

        elysianfield:
        Humans lived for millennia before central government without the help of factories or offices to fill their days and they left behind great pieces of craftsmanship, powerful cave paintings, beautiful tools. That modern humans can’t handle idleness well is a byproduct of the system they live in. There’s no need to create adversity it’s a natural part of life that one learns to cope with. Why add more?

        • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 8:48 pm #

          Quite so. Modern Culture would only justify itself if it was able to delivery the leisure of the primeval past – and to create people capable of relishing it. There is no High culture without it.

          • Luhrenloup June 8, 2018 at 11:37 pm #

            If you like your modern culture, you can keep your modern culture!

          • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 11:40 pm #

            You are obviously idealizing the stone age. Study the modern remnants – many of them cannibals. The Aborigines hunted people from other groups as game.

  28. malthuss June 8, 2018 at 6:56 pm #

    You tube is pushing Gay Pride MONTH…now its a month.

    • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:32 pm #

      A month? It seems like all year.

      • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:40 pm #

        And let’s be clear what they’re celebrating.
        Penetration of one man’s anus by another man’s penis. Then — often in the same session — that man whose anus has been penetrated, putting his mouth on that man’s penis which has penetrated him.

        And now they want to teach these filthy disgusting practices to school-age children. There is no longer any reason to believe there can be compromise. These people have to be identified, arrested, sent to special treatment facilities, and if they won’t repudiate their former life-styles, chemically castrated & lobotomized.

  29. janet June 8, 2018 at 7:22 pm #

    COLLAPSE IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER

    “As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.” –Chris Hedges

  30. FincaInTheMountains June 8, 2018 at 10:05 pm #

    Neither Trump or HRC possess thatmuch power == Ol’ Scratch

    Excuse me – the unknown person said softly – in order to manage things, you must, after all, have an exact plan for some decent amount of time, at least. Let me ask you, how can a person manage things if he is not only deprived of the possibility of making any plan at least for a ridiculously short period of time, well, for example, a thousand years, but can not even vouch for his own tomorrow? And, in fact, – here the unknown turned to Berlioz, – imagine that you, for example, start to manage others and yourself, in general, so to speak, to get a taste of it, and suddenly you have … khe … khe … sarcoma of the lung … – here the foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the thought of the lung sarcoma gave him pleasure – yes, sarcoma – scowling like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word – and now your management is over!

    No one’s destiny except your own interests you. The relatives begin to lie to you, you smell the rat, rush to the learned doctors, then to charlatans, and sometimes, to fortunetellers. And the first and second, and the third – absolutely meaningless, you yourself understand. And all this ends tragically: the one who until recently believed that he was running something was suddenly lying motionless in a wooden box, and those around him, realizing that there was no more use for him, burn him in the oven.

    – It will be necessary to object to it so, – decided Berlioz, – yes, the person is mortal, nobody argues against it. But the fact is that…

    However, he did not have time to pronounce these words, as the foreigner began to say:

    – Yes, a person is mortal, but it would not be so bad. The bad thing is that sometimes he is suddenly mortal, that’s the trick! And in general can not even say what he will do this evening.

    – Some ridiculous statement of the question …- thought Berlioz and retorted:

    – Well, there’s an exaggeration here. I know this evening more or less accurately. It goes without saying that if on Bronnaya a brick won’t fall on my head…

    – The brick for nothing, – interrupted the unknown man, – would never ever fall on anyone’s head. In particular, I assure you, it does not threaten you in any way. You will die another death.

    – Maybe you know which one? – Berlioz inquired with quite natural irony, getting involved in some really ridiculous conversation, – and will you tell me?

    – Willingly, said the stranger. He measured Berlioz with a glance, as if he was going to make a suit for him, muttered through his teeth something like: “One, two … Mercury in the second house … the moon is gone … six – misfortune … evening – seven .. – and announced loudly and joyfully: Your head will be cut off!

    Bulgakov, Master and Margarita

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  31. Tate June 8, 2018 at 10:09 pm #

    Anthony Bourdain was screwed up. He was a junkie who said that his well-off middle-class secure suburban existence drove him to drugs. WTF! He also said that there was no religion in his family life growing up.

    • Janos Skorenzy June 8, 2018 at 11:38 pm #

      He said he’s like to poison President Trump. Imagine if a celebrity had said that about Obama. He’d be off TV in a N.Y second.

      • malthuss June 9, 2018 at 1:23 am #

        do not shed a tear.

      • janet June 9, 2018 at 11:53 am #

        Trump may be learning from Putin. Perhaps it was not a “suicide.”

    • Tate June 9, 2018 at 12:52 am #

      I wanted to clarify something. What I wrote above may sound harsh. But I’m not judging Anthony Bourdain. I feel sad for him & especially for his family. All I am trying to say is that he must have started with a rotten family life, which often includes an absence of God.

  32. malthuss June 9, 2018 at 1:26 am #

    I clicked link, got to next link.
    What did Alex bloviate?

  33. ozone June 9, 2018 at 8:53 am #

    JHK sez:
    “Shale oil is not a miracle so much as a spectacular stunt: how to leverage cheap debt for a short-term bump in resource extraction at the expense of a future that will surely be starved for oil. Now that the world is having major problems with excessive debt, it is also going to have major problems with oil. The quarrels over trade arise from this unacknowledged predicament: there will be less of everything that the economically hyper-developed nations want and need, including capital. So, what’s shaping up is a fight over the table-scraps of the banquet that is shutting down.”

    Sooooo, I’m left wondering why the hell it’s so terribly hard for sky-ghost believers to focus on this preview of coming attractions. Pray harder; maybe your Great Gifter will grant you unlimited energy for your memememe drives here on a planet you clearly intend to destroy… as well as a place of unending dopamine squirts forever and ever.

    O ye blind — look to the shenanigans surrounding the Nordstream 2 and its financing while the US pretends it can take over supplying all of Europe’s gas “needs”. (Astride the World — if only those benighted fools could realize our wondrous righteousness and adopt our “values”!)

    And Remember, O ye of severely limited imagination, the fossil fuel era is naught but a blip on the timeline of human history and untraceable on the timeline of life on Earth.

    If Thou Persisteth in kissing the asses of priests, that will be all you’ll ever see in front of you, instead of any messy meshing and grinding of the gears of the universe.

    • ozone June 9, 2018 at 11:02 am #

      JG,
      If this is intended as a “response” to my excoriation of fantasists and purveyors of superstitions, you’ve very handily missed the entire point. Good job!

      The beginning of helpful humility is the realization that no one is coming to the rescue but your fellow humans or your own inner resources. How those resources have developed as the result of aeons of environmental pressures is surely an interesting study and should (but often doesn’t) reinforce the understanding that nature has the final say. This is all about striving *within existing natural and practical restraints*, not “giving up”.

      • GreenAlba June 9, 2018 at 12:07 pm #

        I would add, to your first post, ozone, that there are a couple of religious attitudes that have positively made it harder for people to confront what awaits us (not thinking of anyone on here at all – I mean in the wider religio-sphere).

        One is the tempting feeling that ‘God wouldn’t let this happen to us – he’ll fix it for us’. I used to know an evangelical woman who prayed to God about whether or not she and her husband should sell their car. So if he cares about that (while he’s not worrying about starving Yemenis) …he’s not going to keep on hiding all that extra oil that must be lurking somewhere.

        And the other actively wants it to go full Armageddon because It Is Written.

        • ozone June 10, 2018 at 2:28 am #

          GreenAlba,
          Well now, you’re touching on thing that peeps would generally not want touched upon. Namely: Nature has the final say; and You (collective of You-mans) ain’t shit when it comes to the ultimate accounting of: Shall they live, or shall they expire?

          No apologies from the Creator are expected or exposed on our radio dials.

          (What I’m finding especially humorous is the resistance and vituperous-ness that my silly and spare posts engender. Am I really that much of “the enemy” of goddamn *anything*? If that be the case, ALL you fuckers better duck-n-cover.)

          ***Respect to the Alba of the Green. Apologies to others that have gone to the darkest reaches and have found enjoyment there. May you be rewarded for your faith.

      • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 1:30 pm #

        But the masters of living close to nature are all religious. Talk to some Indians – none of the traditions believe as you do. To deal with this difficult dimension of existence, the aid of higher dimensions is needed.

        • messianicdruid June 9, 2018 at 8:46 pm #

          “When the nations got angry, you became angry too! Now the time has come for the dead to be judged. It is time for you to reward your servants the prophets and all your people who honor your name, no matter who they are. It is time to destroy everyone who has destroyed the earth.”

          People who are honoring His name [ authority ] are not destroying the earth. Those who are destroying the earth do not acknowledge His ownership of what He has created, no matter what labels they wear. We are stewards.

        • GreenAlba June 10, 2018 at 11:59 am #

          MD

          We are stewards whether God exists or not. It is not ‘our’ earth to despoil. Our descendants – and the descendants of other species – await their turn (metaphorically speaking).

          But I like the idea of stewardship, nevertheless, used by religious people. It is much preferable to ‘dominion’.

          Even way back in the 50s and 60s, when I was a young’un, the talk from the pulpit in my neck of the religious woods was of stewardship more than dominion. And dominion was only for the purpose of stewardship!

    • Tate June 9, 2018 at 12:59 pm #

      Ozone, wtf are you being so preachy about? If folks, regardless whether they’re believers or nonbelievers in a God, want to be optimistic about the future, let them. A growth dynamic is built into our society. That’s not going to change. Dissenters to this ‘secular religion’ of Growth will always be precious few & far between. So far as I can tell, the only people who ever made a success at collective planning for Less were the Han Chinese with their ‘one-child’ policy & that left a lot of unhappy campers. The ultimate arbiter nevertheless will always be God & nobody I know thinks He’s going to ride in at the last minute in His sky-chariot & fix things so we can go on living the life of air-conditioned comfort & colonize distant planets.

      Actually, I do know some people who believe something like that, but let them have their happy delusions.

      • ozone June 10, 2018 at 2:08 am #

        Tate,
        A perfect resolution of delusion! I’m interested in this; let people believe in superstition (known as nonsense in some sectors) though it bring their physical and societal destruction. Verrrry little “preachin” involved. Simple, effective and final. Good thinkin’; I heartily agree.
        Let’s roll damnit… we’re Americans ain’t we?

        (Now we’re surely havin’ some off-topic fun.)

        • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:31 pm #

          What’s the alternative? State repression? Isn’t that called *gasp* Fascism?

  34. Cavepainter June 9, 2018 at 11:45 am #

    GreenAlba: You’re correct, my syntax was clumsy, so let me try again. The practice by women within recent decades of refusing to adopt the surname of a bridegroom (in the US particularly) has been one of the battle flags lofted in the heroic charge to liberate women from…uh — how can I put it — oppressive patriarchy? In the gender war fray that has been taking place (contemporarily) all divisions between the sexes have been cast aside, essentially obliterating historically peer enforced behavioral decorum between the sexes.

    Metaphorically the war has been one of carpet bombing into rubble traditions such as the (now quaint) concepts of “gentlemanliness” and “lady like behavior”. Both sides now “give no quarter”, so legal magistrates have stepped in to act as a mediating UN or tribunal, constantly issuing new rulings aimed at balancing a wobbling truce.

    Rather than the existential perils of the past militating how the genders relate to one another and the respective roles to be played it’s abstractions of “justice” against a media imposed illusion that the social milieu of today is “steady state” shop ‘til you drop.

    Maybe you’ll notice though how women still typically present themselves publicly in ways that heighten their feminine attractiveness (dress alluringly or “prettily”), whereas now men’s most prevalent dress mode (especially among the young) seems styled to declare a sexual piracy of impulsive gratification without concession to responsibility, sex being free and the sexes being “equal” and all.

    • janet June 9, 2018 at 11:57 am #

      “The practice by women within recent decades of refusing to adopt the surname of a bridegroom…” –cavepainter

      There are other solutions. The man could take the woman’s name. Or they could mutually agree upon a new name that both take. But the patriarchy has to end.

      • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 1:25 pm #

        No, the Gay Activists are right: if they get all the things they want, there’s simply no point to marriage any more. And they want that too.

        If men and women are exactly the same. And she has a career too, then how are they married? What the glue? She can’t be a mother to young children. They’ll barely have time to see each other as it is.

      • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 2:10 pm #

        Oh btw, the Indians want their lands back. All of them. Big deal right? But allied with the Mexican Gangs, they will be most formidable, their claims being a pretext for a causus beli for the Gangs to take over North America.

        Your multiculturalism is just Liberalism, mid 20th century vintage. It lead to the disaster of late 20th century Liberalism which lead to the crisis of 21st Century Liberalism. It is wrong, all wrong, in principle yet you refuse to See. There can only be ONE, One People or Body and One Culture or Mind. Together they form the social body and body politick. Anything else is madness…..

      • Cavepainter June 9, 2018 at 2:15 pm #

        Oh sweet Janet, dogma soldier that you are, may I prescribe a little measure of the honest, open discussion that took place in philosophy and history classes back in the 1950s before today’s Maoist Cultural Revolutionaries took over campus? Be patient and take a listen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM.

      • capt spaulding June 9, 2018 at 4:42 pm #

        This website IS JHK’s personal property.

        • Exscotticus June 10, 2018 at 12:44 am #

          All forums have moderators. And the comments here are diverse and provocative, and certainly do not reflect JHK’s opinions.

          If you think the censorship here is bad, try WaPo or NYT. Even FBI statistics get banned if they offend…

      • messianicdruid June 9, 2018 at 8:15 pm #

        Is your replacement Matriarchy? NO thanks…

      • GreenAlba June 10, 2018 at 7:22 am #

        JG

        You forgot to add: johngait wants to write the same thing time after time after time after time after time after time… great!

        Not that I mind. I haven’t noticed you saying anything offensive and the couple of times I’ve clicked on your site it doesn’t seem to lack goodwill.

    • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 1:27 pm #

      They try to look attractive by dressing scantily – and end up revealing their flab, tattoos, and ass crack. One wishes they would be more modest about their “beauty”.

    • GreenAlba June 10, 2018 at 1:50 pm #

      Cavepainter

      Just to be clear, I am no fan of gender wars, nor of battle flags or heroic charges, except where clear injustices exist. It is my (admittedly personal) experience that everyday life goes on above, below or beside these issues.

      Also, if a ‘gentleman’ opens a door for me I thank him, with a smile (but I open doors for people too, with a smile, simply because I am polite). It seems to me that many battle lines are drawn for no serious reason – on both sides. Particularly across your way.

      I still think the name thing is not worth fighting over. It is an individual decision and a human being should be entitled to decide themselves how they want to be addressed, within the law. You can only ‘refuse’ to take someone’s name if they are ‘telling’ you to take it. If you want a wife who does what she’s told, then marry such a person would be my advice. That leaves plenty of space for the majority of couples who just decide things between themselves, entirely without drama.

      It is the convention itself that has created the issue – and as I pointed out, that convention never existed in Scotland and outcomes were no different in terms of family cohesion or male self-esteem than anywhere else at similar times. That suggests to me, rightly or wrongly, that is is a non-issue that has been made into an issue – on whichever side.

      If a man’s self-esteem depends on an independent human being adopting his name, his self-esteem is a fragile thing indeed.

      That doesn’t mean in any way that I’m not a fan of happy, stable, functional families. I just think names are neither here nor there.

      Because I don’t want to ramble on too much, I’ll leave the issue of ladylike and gentlemanly behaviour aside, but in the reality of living, I suspect we are not as far apart as you might think.

  35. RobH June 9, 2018 at 1:24 pm #

    Is Mr Tump’s idea that if he keeps swerving and twisting and side-stepping and stirring and all his little tricks, that he will eventually get some other nations into squabbling and eventually create disorder and warring elsewhere and win the game

    …. that would seem like a natural progression of old policy of proxy wars between east and west… but moved up a level to former allies

    It’s certainly a plan

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  36. Newton Finn June 9, 2018 at 1:41 pm #

    While I love to read it and often agree with it, JHK’s commentary is soooooo 20th Century. Same with the musings in my own mind, because I’m also an aging boomer. When older thinkers look ahead, they often see only impossibility and collapse, perhaps a projection of their own immanent demise. Younger thinkers, with most of their lives ahead of them, are more likely to see possibility, an opportunity to awaken from the neoliberal nightmare into a better world. Here’s just one example of this new generation gap:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHpN7X9iK3o

    • Tate June 10, 2018 at 9:18 am #

      I quit watching when Dore characterizes the warmongers as “right-wing.” That’s actually what’s so “20th century.” Ever hear of the Dissident Right, Newton Finn?

      Hello, you say you’re an aging boomer. That tells us all we need to know.

    • Walter B June 10, 2018 at 5:27 pm #

      Well Newton, projecting their impending demise upon their outlook is certainly done but so is denial of it as well, and I find that denial is far more prevalent in those numerically approaching death. Yes, every generation says that the succeeding generations have become weaker, softer or whatever but there is much truth in this observation, especially since the introduction of the technologies that surround us all today. Techno-baubles now take the place of human memory, heck people don’t even remember their own phone numbers much anymore. They don’t have to type or spell because talking into their Dingleboxes is all that is required. More and more is being done by machines and less and less skills and talents are required for the common person that eventually somebody somewhere is going to be seriously questioning why they keep all of these useless eaters around. Man may not decide that man is the problem, but AI may very well come to that conclusion and may have the means to achieve it as well. Heck, it may even be the right choice.

  37. Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 2:04 pm #

    A mile of new land in Hawaii. We’re witnessing the process by which the Earth is destroyed and renewed. Bless the Maker and His works, His coming and going, His destroying and building.

    • janet June 9, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

      “Bless the Maker” –janos

      If I bless Her won’t that just encourage Her and won’t She then continue with all the destruction and renewal? If I don’t bless Her, will She stop?

      • DrGonzo June 9, 2018 at 8:00 pm #

        The Maker is apparently a very jealous god, who inexplicably seeks “blessings” from the people he/she made.

        In the beginning, man created god in his own image.

  38. Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 2:21 pm #

    Vintage Barnhardt. Watching the Kardashians is like crack for women. Before you know it, your daughter will want to get butte surgery to look like Kim. So if you don’t want to pay or don’t want her to look like a whore or become a whore, don’t let her watch it. Cut your cable before you daughter gets cut on the operation table by a dancing dermatologist.

    I recently attended a conference about Catholic ethics, and toward the end discussion opened up a bit. An upper-middle class suburban woman (an uber Neo-con Kathy) raised her hand and complained that her 13 year old daughter persistently wanted to dress like Kim Kardashian, I believe the word ”whore” was used, as the daughter has been regularly watching the Kardashian filth on TV and wants to be just like Kim Kardashian, who is, for those of you who do not know, a sociopathic moral degenerate and de facto prostitute and porn star, who is also teetering on the precipice of being mentally retarded.

    I tend to keep fairly quiet in venues such as this. If I am not ”the speaker” then it is my job to listen, but since discussion had opened up, I did lean forward and asked this woman why she allowed cable TV into her home in the first place, and why she allowed her daughter to watch evil filth. Some response was made to the effect, ”Well, I can’t control . . . “ at which point I cut her off and told her that she could call and cancel the cable feed this afternoon, at which she bristled and snarled back at me, ”I’m not going to have this discussion. I’M NOT GOING TO LIVE IN A BUBBLE.”

    Understand, this woman had no clue who I was, so the bristling and snarling was not because she was intimidated by me – it was an organic response to the thought of taking away her precious Marxist-Sodomite agitporn delivery vector – her precious teevee. She then got up and left.

    Had I gone blowtorch on this woman, here is what I would have said:

    Madam, you just raised your hand and volunteered that your 13 year old daughter is emulating as a role model and dressing like a well-known and utterly shameless whore in an effort to elicit sympathy from this group. When I asked you why you simply don’t do the absolute minimum of what any parent should do, namely removing the evil of TV from your home and thus protecting your daughter, you snapped back that you refuse to “live in a bubble.”

    Madam, from what little you have told us, it sounds like your daughter, being 13 years old, upper-middle class, living in the United States in 2012, and already EMULATING WHOREDOM, is well on her way to being lost to hell for all eternity. Her soul and psyche are being formed in profound ways, especially now as she is in the throes of puberty, setting up who she will be and the choices she will make for the rest of her life. And you, her mother, refuse to do what is clearly the BARE MINIMUM to stop your own daughter’s descent into the grips of hell, namely eliminating cable TV from your home, because you don’t want to “live in a bubble?” You would watch your own child be lost to hell before you would go without TELEVISION? Do you realize that in this you are also putting YOUR OWN SOUL at profound risk for eternal damnation?

    I don’t know your daughter, and probably never will. I don’t know you, and to be frank, I don’t like you and we will almost certainly never be friends on this earth. BUT, for some reason which I cannot explain, I CARE whether or not you and your daughter go to heaven or go to hell. I am not indifferent to your fate, and am intensely desirous of both of you making it to heaven. In fact, it appears that I care more about the eternal fate of your daughter’s soul than you do. This is charity: not being indifferent to our fellow human beings. (The fruit of the Second Joyful Mystery – the Visitation: love of neighbor) I do not like you, nor am I obliged to, but I am not indifferent to you, which IS my obligation.

    Madam, you are the walking personification of the Marxist goal. You are a totally sensuous, self-absorbed person who can only see the world through the prism of your own faux-victimhood, so much so that your self-centered sensuousness even takes precedence over the eternal fates of the souls of your own young children. The last wedge, the wedge between mother and child, has been driven home, and you are the proof of that.

    Madam, that “bubble” that you refuse to live in, that “bubble” that simply asks of us that we reject evil, is what the rest of us call “The Sacred Heart of Jesus”, pierced and burning with love for you, your daughter and everyone else. But, if you don’t want to live in that ”Bubble”, then I can promise you Sister, YOU WON’T. EVER. If you find the “Bubble” too boring, too isolating, too embarrassing and too socially awkward; if you hold that “Bubble”, all who dwell in It, all those who seek to dwell in It, and those who are truly desirous of you and your daughter dwelling in It, in scathing contempt, then Madam, I can promise you that you will never, ever have to experience It.

    barnhardtbiz.com

    • janet June 9, 2018 at 3:23 pm #

      “BUT, for some reason which I cannot explain, I CARE whether or not you and your daughter go to heaven or go to hell.” — janos

      How Christian of you. Heaven and hell do not exist, so your concern is faux concern.

      Cutting the cable would do zero to accomplish your Christian goal. Ever heard of OTA TV? Free of charge, available in urban and rural America. Ever hear of the Internet? Cell phones?

      You cannot control what a 13-year old is exposed to by cutting cable. When they become teenagers parenting becomes a spectator sport. If you want to be a helicopter parent, expect an even stronger rejection/rebellion in the not distant future.

      Your oppressive patriarchal parenting suggestions might have worked in the 19th century, but won’t work now.

      The patriarchy must end.

      • Tate June 9, 2018 at 5:52 pm #

        You can control a lot of what a 13-year old is exposed to by cutting cable. But by that age it’s too late. You should have been controlling all that starting when they were 2.

        I think that was Ann Barnhardt he was quoting.

  39. janet June 9, 2018 at 3:09 pm #

    “he will eventually get some other nations into squabbling and eventually create disorder and warring elsewhere and win the game” –RobH

    Trump is going against white European democracies who have always been our allies. Why would he want to alienate them and create disorder with white Europeans… unless that is what Putin wants.

  40. janet June 9, 2018 at 3:36 pm #

    TRUMP, STOP WHINING AND LISTEN TO REPUBLICANS

    Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska said Trump’s complaints that other countries have taken advantage of the United States are unfounded, adding that he recommended “less whining on the global stage.”

    “The simple fact is that more trade has been overwhelmingly beneficial to U.S. families and to net U.S. job creation for 75 straight years, and pretending America has been taken advantage of — that is, pretending that we’re losers — isn’t true.

    “The constant victim-talk doesn’t help anyone,” he continued. “It doesn’t help trade negotiations. And it doesn’t help U.S. citizens understand the disruption in our economy that is actually coming from more technology and more automation, not from free trade agreements — which have overwhelmingly benefited American families.”

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    • DrGonzo June 9, 2018 at 8:02 pm #

      The “constant victim-talk” stirs up the Trump base. Because we are all victims now. “Citizenship”, with the rights and responsibilities that entails, has fallen by the wayside. Just watch 30 minutes of Fox News (if you can stand to), and you’ll see what I mean.

  41. FincaInTheMountains June 9, 2018 at 4:33 pm #

    It so happened that the drugs that I have to take for my eye infection, to put it mildly, promote a good sleep, and I overslept a direct line with Putin. Doctors generally believe that all these infections are a consequence of insomnia, but I know that I picked up this insomnia from Bernie Sanders when the latter lost sleep, surrendering the primaries in California and recommending Hillary Clinton to the post of US president.

    By the way about the primaries, the day before yesterday in the United States, primaries were held in 8 states, and the fact that this very remarkable event coincided with the direct line with Putin is a pure accident, which is known to be one of the major resources of the Lord.

    Only I managed to write the above lines, as the replay of the “Direct Line with Putin” began which I will listen and write about the primaries. So if you think that I’m talking about the US today with Putin’s words, then it will be true – his voice really sounds in my ears.

    And with this in mind, and also with the fact that such a topic does not fit into one post, let me introduce the preliminary results of the day before yesterday’s primaries in the United States.

    As I have already written, Clintonoids were forced to admit that the impeachment of Trump with such a composition of the Congress and the Senate became impossible, including because those whom Hillary planted into the Republican Party (for example, Republican leaders in the Senate and Congress Mitch McConnel and Paul Ryan) discredited themselves.

    It went so far that the former Republican speaker under Obama
    John Boehner felt it necessary to make a statement that the Republican Party no longer exists, there is Trump’s party.

    This statement can be understood in two ways: as regret that Trump killed the Republican Party and created from its remnants the Trump’s party or as a joy about the fact that the Republican Party became the party of Trump.

    By the way, the story of how Boehner and Obama stopped the collapse of the printing press in 2013 and why it made Merkel to rush with the coup in Ukraine ahead of schedule is key to understanding why Boehner so slyly rejoices at turning the Republican party into Trump’s party, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

    Since then everything has become somewhat simpler and more primitive: the Clintonoids, without philosophizing slyly, set themselves the task, which was called the Blue Wave.

    According to this plan, the Democrats were to massively win in the midterm elections and be subject Trump to impeachment. And just a few days ago this plan seemed very realistic, and how the Clintonoids were going to reach this goal revealed the whole structure of the Deep State, which should become the material of a separate post.

    But after the deal between the US, Russia and Israel over Iran in Syria, this is no longer the case. The Jewish lobby does exist and it is now working in concert with the notorious Russian hackers, right up to the defection of a number of media outlets to Trump’s side and the appeal of former acting director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, asking for immunity from criminal prosecution in exchange for cooperation with the investigation in the case of an inappropriately mild investigation of the ServerGate case of Hillary Clinton.

    Speaking of Russian hackers: Hillary Clinton’s initial plan after Trump’s victory was his immediate impeachment on charges of collaboration with Russian hackers = spies during the election campaign with the full support of a large portion of the Republican party, then, when the latter began to fall away from Mitch McConnel and Paul Ryan, on the forefront was put forward arranging the provocation of a conflict with the Russians in Syria to compromise Trump in the eyes of his voters who regard the Syrian “freedom fighters” as Islamic terrorists, and only then came the Blue Wave, which has just been called into question by the deal in Syria, the economic success of Trump and the possibility of success in negotiations with North Korea.

    Along with the Blue Wave has changed the threat from the Russian hackers – after cooperation with Trump in 2016, the sneaky bastards have crawled into the future and from there began to threaten to publicize the forgery of the midterm elections, just as they in 2016 allegedly gave the WikiLeaks the forgery mechanism in favor of Hillary Clinton of the results of the primaries, extracted by them directly from the server of the Democratic Party.

    From this it follows that the results of the midterm elections will also be determined by the balance of fear of the election commissions before the possible punishment for the aforementioned forgery, and the fear of the Deep State and Hillary Clinton, and the result of this struggle is determined by the course of the Mueller’s investigation.

    And since he can not arrest Trump now, everything has come down to his ability:

    1. To catch some Trump employees on certain violations that has nothing to do with the topic of the investigation, and force them to give testimony against Trump under the threat of imprisonment to the maximum. And for now most of these charges are lying to FBI investigators.

    2. Call Trump himself for interrogation and force him to lie under oath in response to this or that provocative question – the so-called perjury trap.

    Therefore, now the main struggle between Trump’s lawyers and the investigation team of special prosecutor Mueller consists in a theoretical discussion of Trump’s ability not to appear for interrogation and pardon those employees of Trump, whom Muller threatens with dozens of years of imprisonment.

    Trump justifies his reluctance to answer Muller’s questions with the bias of his commission, and also disputes its validity on the grounds that it was created on the basis of evidence fabricated by Hillary Clinton and the director of the FBI Comey.

    Therefore, the head of the Trump lawyers’ team, the former Mayor of New York, Giuliani, wrote letters to Muller, in which he engaged in a theoretical discussion of such constitutional rights as President’s right to pardon himself and to close any investigation as the head of the executive branch.

    At the same time, he explains to the press that Trump can not appear for questioning as he is busy preparing for negotiations with Kim Jong-un and Mueller distracts him from eliminating the nuclear threat to US.

    And Mueller supports him, leaking to the press his letters, in which Giuliani claims that the president is generally invulnerable, and if Mueller issues him subpoena, Trump will challenge it in court, and Mueller will be fired for insolence.

    How it will actually develop is still unknown, but now his arguments are mobilizing the Republicans around Trump in the best way possible, especially his accusations that the FBI was spying on his election campaign. Trump tries to raise this accusation to the level of the Watergate scandal and requires the appointment of a second Special Counsel, but while the investigation of this case is being conducted by the Inspector General, as part of the verification of the investigation by Hillary Clinton conducted by the former director of the FBI Comey. And when Trump fired Comey, he was succeeded by Deputy Comey McCabe, who is now seeking immunity from criminal prosecution in exchange for testimony in the case.

    And if this leads to the appointment of a second Special Counsel, then fear to get jailed for forging election results will clearly take over the fear of Hillary Clinton.

  42. FincaInTheMountains June 9, 2018 at 5:13 pm #

    All this is being watched on TV not only by members of election commissions, but also by the registered voters who in the 8 states came to polling stations the day before yesterday and took part in the primaries. Naturally, everyone looked at the Republican turnout, as it allows them to predict their turnout for midterm elections, where 10 seats in the Senate will be at stake, which Democrats won in the last interim elections in the states that traditionally vote for Republicans.

    That is, before Trump’s Appearance to the People, when everyone did not give a shit one way or another due to the inevitable victory of Hillary Clinton.

    And if the Republicans come to polling stations in November in the quantities they came in the day before yesterday in the primaries, then Republicans, as a result of the midterm elections, will gain a majority in the Senate of 10-14 votes, and not as now just two votes, one of which belongs to McCain.

    The primaries for nominating candidates for the Congress are somewhat different from the elections to the Senate. Now the Republicans have the majority of 240/195, and mid-term elections will be held in a third of polling stations. But the Democrats have real chances to win in 50/60 sites located in the so-called Suburbia, where graduates of colleges and universities who have found high-paying work are living.

    Which again highlights the problem of English 101 and oddly enough the best friend of Donald Trump became the crisis of the Western scientific method.

    Really sane optimistic Democrats hope to win the minimum majority in the Congress in 216/219 during the midterm elections, but in the Suburbia the victims of English 101 are voters who can bring victory to the Democrats and at the same time those who are going to manipulate them in the Democratic Party headquarters.

    They convinced themselves that Hillary Clinton really won the majority in the 2016 election and apparently will spread funds between 60 sites, forgetting that half of them voted for Bernie Sanders and the English 101 is working against them, not for.

    Because of the loss of the scientific method, graduates of universities are simply not able to realize that these elections are held in emergency circumstances and allocate funds in accordance with old developments, ignoring the factor of Hillary Clinton, who acts as a red rag on the bull not only on Trump supporters, but also on supporters of Bernie Sanders, up to the fact that they voted in 2016 for Trump.

    And this is despite the fact that Republican candidates who won are those candidates who swore allegiance to Trump most convincingly and actively used Hillary Clinton as a scarecrow, and a way to activate the Republican voter.

    And those who stuttered about the legitimacy of the investigation of Mueller and the need for cooperation with democrats (bipartisanship) fell flat like plywood over Paris.

    As I have said many times there is a civil war in the country and the bitterness of the fighting is growing.

    Democrats are trying to counter the Red Republican Wave with the female factor, that is, the movement of women who finally learned that the roles of the actress are obtained during the “couch trials” and are determined to stop this disgrace.

    All this is a parrot reproduction of the home cooking of Hillary Clinton, who at the crucial moment of the election campaign threw in a recording of Trump’s talk about the women, during which the future president showed that he was not just a young man, but more or less feels like a 16-year-old teenager discussing female classmates in the locker room.

    It was after the throw-in of this video that Mitch McConnel and Paul Ryan finally got exposed, essentially calling for voting for Hillary Clinton, and that would cost them dearly when (if) the mid-term elections pass like the primaries passed.

    All this gave Trump confidence, and he brought these contradictions to foreign policy, attacking his “allies” that support Hillary Clinton and special prosecutor Mueller. Not only did he introduce tariffs for steel and aluminum (the latter recently became the object of sanctions against Deripaska imposed on him by Clintonoids), he imposed these sanctions on the basis of the national security law that protects American producers from imports from countries that pose a military threat to the United States.

    And when Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau was outraged by this, he reminded him that it was the Canadians who burnt the White House during the 1814 war.

    Against this background, one can only marvel at the mourning of Russian political commentators who sobbed at the sad fate of the Fourth Reich of Angela Merkel, who provoked the Maidan in 2014 and declared sectoral sanctions against Russia in 2015, allegedly under pressure from Washington.

    Especially after Trump opened, or rather closed the G7 meeting by proposal to return Russia, which was expelled from the G8 for the return of the Crimea to its native harbor and the refusal to hand over Donbass to Bandera.

    A more transparent hint of the US readiness to recognize these acquisitions was difficult to come up with, but I have no doubt that tomorrow Russian Channel 1 anchor Solovyov will pour another tub of mud precisely on Trump.

    And for some reason it seems to me that they all love Europe not entirely free of charge.

  43. Luhrenloup June 9, 2018 at 5:39 pm #

    Janos & Elysian:

    You are both missing the core of my post. I am placing my hope for a better life to come out of the present crisis-fraught times, which are heading for a serious crash.
    What I gather after reading both your comments, is that leisure and well-being is something to be seen on a ghetto street corner on week-ends and Aborigines resorted to cannibalism to pass their leisure hours.
    What are you talking about?

    • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 9:06 pm #

      No, they didn’t “resort” to cannibalism for fun, they ate people because they were hungry.

      Boasian Anthropology distorted the record in an attempt to equalize other cultures with the West. Cannibalism wasn’t rare, but very common throughout Oceania, Black Africa, Central America, etc.

      • malthuss June 9, 2018 at 10:00 pm #

        You might enjoy this find—
        You tube, Doreen Dotan,
        comment on a talk;

        I fell into (or was placed) with a witch working in the executive suite of the largest Swiss Pharma company in 2016. She pretended to be Christian – but later confessed she was not even present at our sessions.

        She taught me what I now understand to be VRIL (the Nazi Occult) and which oddly, is also Babylonian Mysticism.
        Later I discovered the Aryan’s came from the URIEL mountains in Russia & spread their dark magic – including the swastika – which is SUN worship, to India, Persia, and Egypt after the Great flood.

        I had visions of Semiramis by a lake in blinding gold. I learned the Chakra system and how to draw energy from the earths core.
        Also she placed 3 voices into my mind during a session, and gave me 3 days seeing the world from the illuminati 3rd eye.
        It took me another 3 days to rid myself (Christian Deliverance) of the parasite she placed inside me.
        Its pure demonism.

        I rejected the teaching – which is opposite of Moses teaching. Babylon calls the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life. Lucifer – the illuminated one, claimed Adam and Eve could be like God. Man attempting to life forever – by his own proud hand, with the aid of demon technology & science & mysticism. The real Tree of Life is a free gift from God, and cannot be attained except by devotion to God and Torah. As a GOY, my only choice is being grafted into the vine via His Son (Messiah). We battle the same dark forces. Jerusalem marks the end of the Gentile age – and very few Christians exist anymore. The ‘Lord’s Prayer’ is a contract to bring God’s Kingdom to earth. Very Clever Jesus is.

        The Pope changed that prayer last month. Rothschild is tied to Vatican via the Jesuit Knights of MALTA. –

      • Luhrenloup June 9, 2018 at 10:16 pm #

        Yes, but my point is, who cares, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand. So what if these people are cannibals? We’ve got our own weirdos to contend with.

        • Janos Skorenzy June 9, 2018 at 11:27 pm #

          The point is that the LACK of high Tech doesn’t solve everything. It doesn’t eliminate war or evil. You think it does and I proven you wrong. You don’t like that so you’ve forgotten your original premise. Very clever you are.

          • Luhrenloup June 10, 2018 at 11:07 am #

            I never once mentioned high tech, and the problem is not high tech. I did say that for millennia people were able to manage leisure and be creative. It doesn’t mean I want to go back there. We took a wrong turn at some point and as the path we are presently on seems to be heading toward the cliff, hopefully, a new direction where well-being and purpose will play a more central part in people’s lives.

        • Janos Skorenzy June 10, 2018 at 4:01 pm #

          I think we agree then. Just watch out for cannibals and non-Whites. Uh Oh, we disagree again!

    • elysianfield June 10, 2018 at 10:55 am #

      Lugren,
      A free-ride promotes sloth. People without a work ethic many times will take the path of least resistance. How is a work ethic promoted? Ask that to the “manor born”…few answers will be forthcoming.

      Ghetto street corners are rife with those who have never held a job…and yet they do not starve, and seem to be able to indulge in various habits…ditto the halls of the country club….

      • Luhrenloup June 10, 2018 at 1:40 pm #

        You are not going to like this answer, elysian. There are people, cultures, and let us put judgment aside for a moment, who do not value mindless work. But as the 70’s adage, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, ascertains, the free lunch turns out to be pretty costly. These street corner folks you mention are made to pay such a heavy government toll to maintain their destitute lives that most would rather avoid it.
        Are these people bad, worthless scum to be eliminated? What’s to be done with them? Prison? That costs more than the money spent now to maintain them. I imagine your fear is that “free shit” will turn us all into slackers. I don’t believe that. If the rich are able to receive welfare with no strings attached, why not the poor?
        When kids start shooting each other up in schools we can safely conclude that our present system is collapsing along with its harsh and punitive values practices. Let’s hope for better.

        It’s Luhren, not Lugren

        • elysianfield June 10, 2018 at 6:56 pm #

          “It’s Luhren, not Lugren”

          My apologies, it was a typographical error at an inopportune time….

          Luhren,
          I was not moralizing about any particular culture…it just is what it is, and is endemic in the human animal. Your referencing a “heavy government toll” I do not understand.

          What is to be done with them? I have no idea, other than a comment I have made before…the government can either employ them, maintain them, or kill them…there are no other options I am aware of.

          Permit me a personal example;

          I have a friend of 40 years standing…call him…Leroy….
          Leroy has played the system since the late 70’s…always on some dole or another. When he has no money, he will work like a devil…to the extent that he will dig a trench for a water line with a claw hammer…no joke…and do so for less than minimum wage for cash.

          He began collecting metalworking machinery in the ’90’s, with a view towards making and selling a small product. About a year ago, he finally received a full ride from the VA…several thousands of dollars a month, tax free. All his moneymaking schemes and plans stopped…full dead…won’t even put surplus stuff on Ebay as he had planned…nothing…nada…zilch.

          You may consider this superficial, anecdotal, arbitrary…I see this regularly.

          The old pawnbroker

      • Janos Skorenzy June 10, 2018 at 3:58 pm #

        You haven’t developed enough cross linkages. You have supported free universal income in another discussions in other contexts – remember? If you can, you will have formed a cross linkage. If you get higher, you will be able to see everything all at once.

        Read Dos Passos, Orwell, London, Dickens, Sinclair Lewis: working hard for peanuts for assholes is a killing recipe. Stress, on all levels, is a killer. Don’t conflate distress with eustress, please – because that is what you are doing. Most people will choose good stress or exercise in order to earn more money for things they want. Jobs will be more valued than ever because of their scarcity. Many will still work hard for careers, etc. And yes, scum will still be scum. You saw too many of these, of course. An occupational hazard.

        As you said, feed them or kill them. I don’t say this is the best path – THAT WAS NEVER EVEN AXED. I only say it’s the best path from where we are. As to the Good Place or Willoughby? As they say in Maine, You can’t get thar from he-re.

        Capitalism is by and for assholes. That’s why under Fascism or National Socialism such people are kept on a short leash. Not killed or persecuted (though of course they may think so!) as under old Marxism. It’s mind boggling that people don’t care to know the difference. Needless to say, such uninquisitive people shouldn’t be voting.

  44. janet June 9, 2018 at 6:11 pm #

    600 days ago Trump said he knew more than the generals, that he had a secret plan which he could not talk about, you know, so as not to tip off the enemy. But he promised he could eliminate ISIS. No more messing around. He was going to be a tough guy with his big military.

    Well, 600 days later ISIS has launched what is described as their biggest offensive in Syria of the year. Another broken Trump promise.

    • FincaInTheMountains June 9, 2018 at 7:59 pm #

      He, he, a Blue Wave of Liberal Jihadists…

      And our boys at SU-27 controls were just getting bored…

    • DrGonzo June 9, 2018 at 8:04 pm #

      Trump was also going to give us a beautiful, beautiful health care program that would give everyone wonderful health care for a fraction of the cost of ObamaCare. For $25/month, if I recall correctly.

      Um, that seems to be working out really well.

      • janet June 9, 2018 at 8:40 pm #

        And the wall… the one Mexico was going to pay for, the wall Trump promised would be built so fast it would make your head spin, on time, under budget, big and beautiful and paid for by Mexico. All lies.

        You have to be an easily conned deplorable to vote for and continue to support such an egomaniacal narcissistic serial liar. And if they voted for Trump out of their economic pain, what is their excuse for supporting him now? Trump’s trade war is hitting hard at the heartland of America.

      • janet June 9, 2018 at 8:55 pm #

        Yes, Trumpcare was a lie from the beginning. It was pointed out during the campaign that it was a lie. Just like birther-gate lie that Trump invented and sustained and orchestrated for five years, then finally admitted it was a lie. The pathetic racist deplorables were so easily conned out of their vote. They deserve Trump and the painful economic collapse Trump is now orchestrating. Trump is sowing division among our white European G7 allies, achieving a goal Putin has had for years.

  45. janet June 9, 2018 at 8:33 pm #

    President Donald Trump on Saturday accused Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of making “false statements” and said that the US will not endorse a G7 communique. Trump is following Putin’s wishes to divide the EU and G7, to cause chaos among white Europeans, to keep Putin from releasing the pee tape.

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    • messianicdruid June 9, 2018 at 9:14 pm #

      Tate wonders, “OTOH, maybe the climate is changing over the long haul due to human release of co2. It does make sense on a rudimentary level but what counterintuitive forces are in play?”

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zEJLtSDXA7U

      There are many.

    • Exscotticus June 10, 2018 at 2:09 am #

      Conservative estimates are that the USA has killed hundreds of Russians in Syria since Trump took office. So by libtard logic, this clearly indicates Trump is Putin’s puppet.

      The only peeing in evidence is from libtards on our legs as they tell us it’s raining.

  46. janet June 9, 2018 at 9:50 pm #

    THE SUMMER OF CANADA’S DISCONTENT

    Trudeau also said Canada will “move forward with retaliatory measures” on July 1 in response to the Trump administration’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, the European Union and Mexico.

    “I have made it very clear to the President that it is not something we relish doing, but it something that we absolutely will do,” Trudeau said. “Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.”

  47. Tate June 10, 2018 at 12:41 am #

    Now they’re trying to normalize drag queens for children,

    brought to you by Netflix, evil to its core:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERQ9wN8uXWw

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECkkoZyggH4

    https://twitter.com/BRANDONHILTON/status/996503040386531328/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanconservative.com%2Fdreher%2Fcoming-next-woke-pederasty%2F

    “If you don’t want the Third Reich, don’t welcome the Weimar Republic.” — Raskolnik

    • janet June 10, 2018 at 1:18 am #

      One of the essential movements of Christianity is transformation. Christians are called to change or in the Greek, metanoia. Like Saul of Tarsus Christians go through changes and become new people. They have conversion experiences that help them live more faithfully to God in a way that is true to the personality that God has given them. Drag queens are a clear example of what transformation looks like.

      Drag queens remind Christians of joy. Christian holy text is filled with verses that remind Christians to play and be filled with joy. Ecclesiastes 8:15 is one of those anchor passages which expresses, So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.

      Drag queens remind us to laugh, have fun, and enjoy life.

      • Tate June 10, 2018 at 1:28 am #

        Folks shouldn’t joke about this sort of thing when the lives of young children are affected.

        • janet June 10, 2018 at 1:59 am #

          Folks should not use children as an excuse to foment fear and hatred toward LGBTQIAPK.

          • Walter B June 10, 2018 at 5:39 pm #

            I do not, nor do I know or have I even heard of a single human being that has any fear or hatred of QRSTLMNOP’s. Why the paranoia? They are all fine and wonderful and should continue doing whatever they do to have fun. It’s fine by me.

      • Janos Skorenzy June 10, 2018 at 4:03 pm #

        St Paul said that the effeminate will not see God. Roller Coasters are fun until you go off the rails. Enjoy life? As in AIDS?

        • Walter B June 10, 2018 at 6:36 pm #

          There is only one way to lead Janos, and that is by example. Free Will was extended to our species for a reason and you and I both understand what that was. What shall be will be, we are only responsible for our own Spirit. Many shall be called, few will be chosen.

  48. janet June 10, 2018 at 1:05 am #

    In this summer of discontent Mr. Trump should listen to discontented Republicans:

    “To our allies: bipartisan majorities of Americans remain pro-free trade, pro-globalization & supportive of alliances based on 70 years of shared values,” McCain tweeted late Saturday. “Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t” — maverick Senator

    • elysianfield June 10, 2018 at 11:05 am #

      Pro-globalization….

      “And I hope that you die
      And your death will come soon
      I’ll stand on your casket
      In the pale afternoon
      And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
      Into your deathbed
      And I’ll stand on your grave till I’m sure that you’re dead” ~ B. Dylan

      How could McCain not be considered a “Master of War”?

  49. Tate June 10, 2018 at 2:21 am #

    President Trump, in a characteristic act of strong, forceful diplomacy, has instructed his negotiators at the G7 summit, not to endorse the final statement, after the forked-tongue PM of Canada, Jistin Trudeau, complained that he would “not be pushed around” after Mr. Trump had already left the stage to fly off to his historic meeting with the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jung-Un.

    Trudeau, not daring to state his positions in a man-to-man face-off with the American leader, gave Trump no other choice but to disavow the tentative tariff accords reached at the high-profile meeting of the heads of state of the G7 nations.

    Finally, we have a leader who will act in the interests of the USA, and not be bullied by its ostensible allies.

  50. janet June 10, 2018 at 2:45 am #

    “Finally, we have a leader who will act in the interests of the USA” –Tate

    Mr. Trump is working in the interests of what George W. Bush called the axis of evil. Trump is protecting the interests of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, and Syria.

    G7 Summit statements of Trump:

    “We really think that North Korea will be a tremendous place in a very short period of time.”

    “And we will watch over, and we’ll protect, and we’ll do a lot of things.”

    “I have not spoken to Vladimir Putin in quite a while.”

    (“Indeed, Donald Trump and I have, firstly, met more than once at various international venues. And secondly, we regularly talk over the phone.” — Vladimir Putin, earlier this week.)

    “Some people like the idea of bringing Russia back in.”

    “I will blame them if they don’t act smart and do what they have to do — because they have no choice. I’ll be honest with you, they have no choice.”

    To sum up G7:
    a) Trump doesn’t blame leaders of other countries for taking advantage of the US
    b) They won’t be able to take advantage of us anymore
    c) They have no choice
    d) Again no choice

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  51. tucsonspur June 10, 2018 at 5:20 am #

    It’s the Summer of Trump’s world shaking Intent. Both beast and man quake before the King and the I.

    We can no longer afford the Pecksniffian, pusillanimous politician.
    We can no longer afford the folderol of the fatuous, the lunacy of the Left, or the odious, oppressive, obsequious obnubilations of the One Worlders regarding race and nation.

    Political correctness is on the wane, despite the logorrhea of the Liberal Left and its lubricious legerdemain. And the coup attempt seems doomed to fail. We must continue to shed the lesions of the Left and heal ourselves with irrepressible, ignescent Trump Intent.

    See here what we may have avoided in the not too distant future with the timely, Trump Twist of Fate:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2542662/Footage-emerged-cannibal-eating-leg-Muslim-Central-African-Republic.html

    Foment with Intent and don’t Relent.

    MAGA not MAKA

  52. FincaInTheMountains June 10, 2018 at 10:11 am #

    Trust D.E. – The Moment of Truth

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trust-D-I-Ehrenburg/dp/B001I6ZR5S/ref=sr_1_15/262-3316672-1505406?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1528639211&sr=1-15&refinements=p_27%3AI.+Ehrenburg

    I, when I wrote the previous post about the results of the primaries in the USA, had not yet seen this photo, but to some extent foresaw it, having written:

    All this gave Trump confidence, and he brought these contradictions to foreign policy, attacking his “allies” that support Hillary Clinton and special prosecutor Mueller.

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DfRCpxtWkAEJx1c.jpg

    The most interesting is that

    1. This photo is an illustration of the theory of Colored Projects

    2. Although I indicated correctly the direction that the primaries set in the US, I clearly underestimated their importance for evaluating Trump’s position in the world.

    3. This photo clearly shows that Merkel was put forward, and Trump looks like a Lion, and Merkel obviously imagines herself a Bear, and the Gallic Cock is kept just behind her, but Trump looks clearly at him, and behind them looms the bald head and wig of the English Black Project, the very Englishwoman that always does it in the eye.

    4. The greatest pleasure from the situation gets Bolton, and Abe crosses his arms in anti-Trump gesture.

    4. Angela Merkel posted this photo. I wonder to which of these moments she wanted to draw the attention of her supporters?

    • FincaInTheMountains June 10, 2018 at 12:24 pm #

      Trust D.E. History of the death of Europe

      The 1923 book by Ilya Ehrenburg, the writer who, according to Stalin, was worth 10 divisions.

      The only mistake Mr. Ehrenburg made was he depicted France as a citadel of Nazism, not Germany.

    • janet June 10, 2018 at 5:43 pm #

      Trump got dressed down by Merkel. Trump managed to alienate the white Europeans who have been our allies for 70 years. If he wants a trade war, he will get one. Canada is not backing down. Neither is Mexico. Trump has sown the seeds of his summer discontent.

  53. janet June 10, 2018 at 12:32 pm #

    Bill Maher’s comment was wrong. In January 2009, the recession was taking hold and unemployment was climbing. Obama was President-elect. Rush Limbaugh said he had four words to share his view of what he wished for Obama: “I hope he fails.”

    Limbaugh was wrong to hope for the suffering of Americans, just as Maher is wrong to hope for the suffering of Americans. Just as Trotsky was wrong to hope that increased suffering would bring on a revolution.

    Let’s stop celebrating the worsening of conditions and vote out those responsible for the worsening conditions. No more wars, no more trade wars, no more bullying of white European allies with threats and tariffs. No more drone assassinations.

  54. BackRowHeckler June 10, 2018 at 7:52 pm #

    Jim, this shale oil production in NDakota and Texas, are you saying it isn’t profitable even at $80 per barrel? IBD ran a front page story last week about deep sea drilling, which was largely abandoned when the oil price dropped to $30 per barrel in 2013, but now is starting up again.

    Drilling for oil in 5000-6000 ft of water seems like a pretty desperate measure, but who knows. Chevron claims they can make money this wway even if oil drops back to $50.

    Speaking of our summer of discontent, here in Capitol City its been smoking semi autos, hot lead, chalk lines on the sidewalk, screeching sirens, anxious police, and all kinds of explanations and excuses from the Big Dems who run the city. More after school programs are needed, more treatment centers, more playgrounds, more jobs, more money blah, blah, blah, etc, etc, etc. Same thing we’ve been hearing since 1968 when they burned the north end of the city to the ground. What’s actually happening is State Police and ATF coming in to patrol alongside City Police. This happens every 3 or 4 summers. Then at least the mayhem is tamped down a little bit, to acceptable levels.

    brh

    • janet June 10, 2018 at 8:33 pm #

      Shale oil production now costs $50 a barrel, so $80 makes a profit. But then JHK’s argument is that under $70 will stop production and over $70 will crash the economy. There is no rosy scenario in CFN land.

      • BackRowHeckler June 10, 2018 at 9:22 pm #

        Hey Janet my humble apologies for calling you ‘corrupt’ last week.

        It was uncalled for, not sure why I said it.

        brh

        • Walter B June 10, 2018 at 9:45 pm #

          Apologies can only be handed out by those who have strength, well done! We must always remember that those who spout words or ideas that are questionable or even ridiculous must be who they are because they have no other option and any difficulties that ensure from their issues are theirs alone to deal with and not ours. As they say, move along, nothing to see (or do) here.

          • janet June 10, 2018 at 10:15 pm #

            “As they say, move along, nothing to see (or do) here.” –Walter B

            Exactly! Thank you, Walter B.

        • janet June 10, 2018 at 10:14 pm #

          Thank you, brh. Your apology is accepted with no hard feelings.

          • kaneroberts963 June 27, 2018 at 2:07 am #

            I would love to share my testimony to all the people in the forum cos I never thought i will have my girlfriend back and she means so much to me. The girl I want to get marry to left me few weeks to our wedding for another man. When I called her she never picked my calls, She blocked me on her facebook and changed her facebook status from engage to Single, when I went to her place of work she told her boss she never want to see me. I lost my job as a result of this cos I couldn’t get myself anymore, my life was upside down and everything did not go smooth with my life. I tried all I could do to have her back to all did not work out until I met a Man when I travel to East to execute some business that I have been developing some years back. I told him my problem and all I have passed through in getting her back and how I lost my job, he told me he gonna help me, I didn’t believe that in the first place. But he swore he will help me out and he told me the reason why my girlfriend left me and also told me some hidden secrets’ was amazed when I heard that from him…he said he will cast a spell for me and I will see the results in the next couple of days..then I travel back, the following day and i called him when I got home and he said he’s busy casting those spells and he has bought all the materials needed for the spells, he said am gonna see positive results in the next 14 days that is Thursday. My girlfriend called me at exactly 12:35pm on Thursday and apologies for all she had done. She said, she never knew what she was doing and her sudden behavior was not intentional and she promised not to do that again. It was like am dreaming when I heard that from her and when we ended the call, I called the man and told him my girl friend called and he said I haven’t seen anything yet… he said I will also get my job back. And when its Sunday, they called me at my place of work that I should resume work on Monday and they gonna compensate me for the time limit I have spent at home without working…My life is back into shape have my girlfriend back and we are happily married now with a baby boy and I have my job back too. This man is really powerful…if we have up to 20 people like him in the world, the world would have been a better place…He has also helped many of my friends to solve many problems and they are all happy now…Am posting this to the forum for anybody that is interested in meeting the man for help. You can mail him to erika_raven_temple@ religious. com, I can’t give out his number cos he told me he don’t want to be disturbed by many people across the world…he said his email is okay and he also have a web site if you want to visit him there’ he will replied to any emails asap..Hope he helped u out too…good luck. His web site is ericaraventemple. webs. com

  55. FincaInTheMountains August 31, 2018 at 2:25 pm #

    Obviously institutions have much longer memories than individual humans, but still lasting a few hundred years at most.

    Ideologies, on the other hand, have life spans of millennial and are in the work of arts, literature and architecture, philosophic writings and, probably, in some secret knowledge passed from one generation to another.

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    • FincaInTheMountains August 31, 2018 at 2:26 pm #

      For example, Black Project during the Crusades was mostly represented by the Templar and Teutonic Knightly Orders with ideological support coming from Cistercian monastic order.

  56. FincaInTheMountains August 31, 2018 at 2:27 pm #

    In our times: The Thule Society, NSDAP (now ODESSA), in United States – the Council on Foreign Relationships (former Inquiry), the Clinton Faction of the Democratic Party.

  57. FincaInTheMountains August 31, 2018 at 2:29 pm #

    there are certainly different fractions.

    • FincaInTheMountains August 31, 2018 at 2:29 pm #

      Obviously institutions have much longer memories than individual humans, but still lasting a few hundred years at most.

      Ideologies, on the other hand, have life spans of millennial and are in the work of arts, literature and architecture, philosophic writings and, probably, in some secret knowledge passed from one generation to another.

      For example, Black Project during the Crusades was mostly represented by the Templar and Teutonic Knightly Orders with ideological support coming from Cistercian monastic order.

      During the more modern times it was represented by certain Masonic lodges (not all of them).

      In our times: The Thule Society, NSDAP (now ODESSA), in United States – the Council on Foreign Relationships (former Inquiry), the Clinton Faction of the Democratic Party.

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