JHK’s Three-Act Play
Zeez European politicians unt economists all zound like rocket scientists wiss all zeir charming euro-chatter. But zey must be quite dumb to machen zuch an unglaublich scheiße sturm of zee système financier. Che cazzo è?
Surely all the pretending nears its dire conclusion. Everybody is broke and everybody is in hock up to his prefrontal lobes and everybody is whirling around the drain over in the grand continental theme park of lovely cities and great eats. I’m sorry, but I don’t see how they can stop the hemorrhaging as we slide into the season of holiday enchantment.
Every bank (and its uncle) is dumping everybody’s sovereign bonds as though they were discovered to be croissants imported from a leper colony. Feh…! Folks of all stripes and accents desperately seek to move their money to some safe harbor – but where is this cozy mooring? To the US for the moment perhaps; but what happens Monday morning when the markets react to the weekend news that the US Senate super-committee has been utterly unable to agree on decisive action that would forestall the scheduled massive automatic budget cuts built into this red-white-and-blue doomsday machine – not to mention the ratings agencies threats to knock UST-paper down another notch upon such failure. Oy yoy yoy!
Just to be plain here: nothing is working. The global system of accounting control fraud has completely unraveled. Nobody will lend money to anybody anymore because everybody suspects everybody else is lying about their ability to meet any obligation. The whole world has become a daisy chain of schnorrers and schmiklers. All those hundreds of trillions of dollars in credit default swap insurance (ha!). Worthless and pointless, because now that a Greek default of at least 50 percent, officially, has failed to ignite a payout, then no default will. Instead, you’ll just get cascades of un-hedged defaults. All the lawyers who ever lived could litigate until the sun turns into a red dwarf and they will never resolve these swindles, and the money represented in them will be so far gone that not even Ray Kurzweil in full Singularity mode will encounter a trace of it in his eternal travels through a zillion parallel universes.
So much for the hedge fund industry. I hope the folks who ran those cute operations enjoyed their years in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Saddle River, New Jersey, because in a few weeks they’ll be disguising themselves as OWSers in some makeshift urban encampment in order to line up for three-day-old bagels. Personally, I look forward to test-driving a few $5000 “must-sell” pre-owned Lamborghini Sesto Elementos, not that I’d actually buy one. The nimble might even score some bargain beachfront property in the Hamptons.
It’s been about a fortnight now since John Corzine’s MF Global fund went up in a vapor, including a reported $800 million or so (rumored to be actually more like $2+ billion) filched out of clients portfolios that cannot be accounted for – though there are additional rumors that it constituted a batch of collateral that was liquidated a micro-second after its arrival at JP Morgan, which had lent Corzine’s firm enough money to buy the rope that it hung itself with. Notice, the story has completely disappeared from the mainstream news media (while the Kardashians soldier on).
Even poor Gerald Celente, chief of the Trends Journal forecasting group, arch-nemesis of “the white-shoe boys” got snookered in the action when MF Global somehow ended up with custodial care of the Gold ETFs Gerald was collecting and his shit just vanished! I heard him fulminating over it on a podcast and he is not somebody I’d want to be on the bad side of. Up until now, Celente was only commenting on the prospects for revolution in the streets. Now, I daresay, he’ll be out in front leading it (or perhaps rappelling down Jamie Dimon’s security wall with a straight razor clenched in his teeth).
The MF Global case has fast-tracked the evaporation of trust in all the places, large and small, where American One-percenters stash their cash. The redemption orders must be flying through their transoms like radioactive black swans. By lunchtime tomorrow this could include all the TBTF banks. That’s what the pundits mean by “contagion.” Where will that money go now (if they can get it out)?
I don’t see where else it can go now except to shiny yellow and white metal, and maybe some oil positions. But the mechanisms of the precious metals trade have also been monkeyed with, and you’d best be careful where you place your order. As for oil, if lending really does seize-up, then letters-of-credit will not be issued and tankers will not be moving any product. More to the point, the global revolving debt system has depended on colossal transfers of ultra-short-term borrowed money. If short-term borrowing is simply unavailable, things could go south very quickly – and by that I mean food stops arriving at the supermarkets, which hold just a three-day supply. Wouldn’t that make for an interesting Thanksgiving?
I have admittedly painted an extreme picture this week. But this week presents the most extreme convergence of events the world has seen since September of 2008, and perhaps a good bit worse.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
New Paintings from the 2022 Season
Barrel Racers, Cambridge, NY
The Jeff Greenaway series of novellas. These rollicking, short books depict the misadventures of an eleven-year-old boy growing up in New York City in the early 1960s
Other Books by JHK
The World Made By Hand Series:
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Dear Jim:
Another incisive commentary, as usual. It makes me wonder whether there is ‘any place left to run’; and who on earth would want to be an ‘investor’ anymore, if investing is rigged against you?
Likely the best protection for us now, is for ordinary citizens to band together to support each other.
Oh, and if Pour Politicians would start jailing their Banker Buddies, that would be a nice Bonus, so to speak. But I’m not holding my breath.
Abrey
Hey J, I see yer post is early. Blue bus indeed. This is the End!
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I’ll never look into your eyes…again
Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need…of some…stranger’s hand
In a…desperate land
Lost in a Roman…wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There’s danger on the edge of town
Ride the King’s highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake…he’s old, and his skin is cold
The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we’ll do the rest
The blue bus is callin’ us
The blue bus is callin’ us
Driver, where you taken’ us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and…then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door…and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother…I want to…fuck you
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
C’mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock
C’mon, yeah
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
listen hear:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoBFhdeR9PE
Perhaps that link was short . Sorry. here is a longer version.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGmAmJFUvzM
Three days until we have empty store shelves is a time-specific prediction, one that we can test by going into a grocery store this coming weekend. We can look for ourselves to see whether this coming week is the week TSHTF.
I’m going out on a limb and say it won’t be any different this coming week than any of the last 250 weeks of CFN’s dire predictions (war with Iran, 4,000 DOW, etc.), which have not come true.
I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm.
.
.
http://market-ticker.org/post=197702
==
As I said to you in the past, things will unfold slowly until they don’t. We are coming to the part where they don’t.
And on the other hand, Jim, it was SRO at the local shopping mall mall this weekend, restaurants had lines to get in, and grocery stores had to add extra staff and hours.
We may be f—–d, but we don’t know it yet.
–WSP7
Yep, fire sign theater was right so many years ago. We are all bozo’s on this bus. Be it blue, red, white, or green and its name is no doubt “Further.” It is really to bad that with all the millions of years of human evolution things are going to end very very badly. At least for those of us that do not believe in the rapture.
Now if they would ‘stop lovin Sarah’ as well!!!
Some NASCAR fans boo Michelle Obama
Politico (blog) – 3 hours ago
First lady Michelle Obama didn’t receive the warmest welcome at NASCAR’s Sprint Cup finale in Florida on Sunday. Amid cheers, there was some loud booin……………………..
JIM……..
Elaine Supkis was down, maybe even mocking GC
in her Blog last week!!!
Yes ‘ Gerald Celente, chief of the Trends Journal forecasting group, arch-nemesis of “the white-shoe boys” got snookered’
Not sure if it’s made news in the US, but Obama made his first visit to the far-flung and sunny shores of Australia last week. He timed his visit to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the ANZUS Treaty. And sure enough, he travelled to Darwin, a small town at the top end of the Northern Territory (where the Crocodile Dundee films were set) to announce plans for a permenant US military presence of 2500 US Marines.
I don’t want your Jarheads over here thanks! How can the US afford to keep being the world’s police? Being a global stickybeak and other-peoples-business-minder is an extremely expensive hobby. Pack up and go home fellas.
Metuselah said European collapse is imminent due to: “massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days…”
========
I am loving these specific and measurable predictions, yours and JHK’s, on a time horizon of days.
If the collapse does happen tomorrow, the people in the best position to survive will be those like Tripp who have developed a permacultural base.
Metuselah said European collapse is imminent due to: “massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days…”
==
I said no such thing. That was a direct quote and I provided you with a link to the source.
Per usual, you are being deliberately daft. I really don’t know why I even bother with you. You are obviously a troll.
Thank you for an entertaining few minutes. I’m reading Satyajit Das’ “Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk”, and my progress through the book pretty well matches the denouement of your tale told on the way to the Blue Bus. Many are pretty sure this baby is going down, though how soon or how badly and thoroughly could be debated. It may be that the system is so systemically hidebound that it can’t work up a good once-and-for-all crash, but has to come down one shattered limb at a time.
US Navy keeps seas safe-er so China can freely
ship its goods.
Direct quote from Metuselah: “things will unfold slowly until they don’t. We are coming to the part where they don’t.”
Good. So why did you feel that you had to so blatantly misrepresent my post?
I apologize if you thought I “blatantly” misrepresented your post.
What I am understanding from this week’s post, and from your response to it, is that tomorrow the markets collapse in Europe and they bring down our North American markets. Food deliveries to grocery stores will stop and in three days the shelves will begin to show emptiness… by Thanksgiving Day this will happen.
I hope that is not misrepresentative.
Apology not accepted. I don’t want your apology. It is as meaningless as the million other apologies you gave prior. What I want is, for you to stop with your idiotic nonsense. The scenario is VERY clear. When things will finally unravel, they will unravel very quickly. And it looks like the domino cascade might just be starting.
Vlad:
Go to Drudge and check this ‘womans’ Mugshots out!!!
KELLI KENNEDY
Associated Press
US Video
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Buy AP Photo Reprints
MIAMI (AP) — A woman who wanted to work at a nightclub started searching for someone who could perform plastic surgery at a cheap price to give her a curvier body. Police say what she found was a woman posing as a doctor who filled her buttocks with cement, mineral oil and flat-tire sealant.
The suspect – who police say was born a man and identifies as a woman – apparently performed the surgery on herself, and investigators say she may have victimized others. Oneal Ron Morris, 30, was arrested Friday after a year on the lam and has been charged with practicing medicine without a license with serious bodily injury.
Police photos show Morris as a small-framed woman with bee-stung pouty lips………………….
Lone wolf, Jose Pimentel, 27, latest Muslim terrorist is an Immigrant!!!!!
El sistema es roto, y quizas nosotros somos arruinado tambien. ¿Es posible que este gobierno pretendería que ellos tienen dinero por siempre?
“it looks like the domino cascade might just be starting”
=================
That is what you have been saying for years, since before the 2007 domino cascade that wasn’t a domino cascade.
2007 was a warning and money funds have built up extra capital as a buffer. Asset management executives also say that changes put in place by the Securities Exchange Commission at the start of 2010 already have made the funds much more robust than during the 2007 crisis, including tightening credit quality standards and imposing liquidity requirements.
The money market funds with significant exposure to Europe will be covered.
Then we will go on to the next proclamation from you that the situation is very CLEAR and things will be falling apart “in the coming days.”
What the hell are you talking about!? I’ve been posting here for maybe a year or two. Never did I venture any opinion as to when I expected a collapse to happen. All I said is exactly what I said just above: Things will unfold slowly until they don’t. You want to continue with your idiocy and daftness, you do it without me.
I believe you were posting under the handle “Mika” back then.
From JHK’s post of May 5, 2008 called “The Risk Economy”:
“…all this fucking nonsense will only make the eventual unwinding much worse. Personally, I doubt that it can go on more than a few more months.”
That was over three years ago. The predictions of days become months, and the predictions of months become years… and the years become decades, but the weekly fear fest never stops.
What is this starting to look like? 45 years ago I worked for a farmer who reminisced about the 1930’s when most of his farm was cleared by people willimg to work for meals and shelter. Now rarely a week passes that I am not approached by someone willing to work on my farm for meals amd shelter.
In Gurdjieff’s “Beelzebub’s Tales” he predicts the Russia would be destroyed by disordered thinking – Communism is nothing other than that. He also predicted that America would die because of bad food and weird sex. Surely injecting cement into your body to look more feminine qualifes – among many, many other things.
Asoka said:
From JHK’s post of May 5, 2008 called “The Risk Economy”:
“…all this fucking nonsense will only make the eventual unwinding much worse. Personally, I doubt that it can go on more than a few more months.”
*************************************************************
Oh, Asoka!!! Who cares about JHK’s numeric predictions? Has he or has he NOT been generally absolutely correct about the general direction of the economy? On May 5, 2008, the Dow was at 13K!!! By the reckoning of us NON-nitpickers, JHK’s
prediction was SENSATIONAL. It fell, in less than a year to HALF
that value. JHK should be running a fucking MUTUAL FUND!!!
How could anyone have predicted the precise nature of “kick the can down the road” stopgap measures that would be implemented to hold this shit together IN APPEARANCE ONLY for some unspecified number of additional years?? You must have written 8-10 posts critiquing his forecasting record. Even today as the market stands at 11.8K, if you had avoided Wall Street altogether and earned a ONE percent interest rate (I got 4% in 2008) for three years, your return from May 5, 2008 would be +3.5% and NOT -10% which you would have gotten by believing in stay-the-course “market mavens”.
It is an IRREFUTABLE TRUTH that the pessimists who’ve avoided Wall Street or even shorted it, even after a recent HUGE rally, would be AT LEAST 13.5% ahead of the stay-the-course folks. You have to measure JHK’s pessimism against a reasonable baseline … like OTHER dopey financiers.
I don’t take Jim, or anybody else, seriously as regards TIMING of moves. It’s the GENERAL ECONOMIC DIRECTION, which plays out over LONG periods of time due to Fed meddling, that is nearly the SOLE determinant of final results. And I think I’ve proven above that you cannot make a cogent argument that market optimists would have done better from that 5/5/2008 date than market pessimists like Jim.
And, please, don’t argue that if someone had made X move on Y date they’d have “outperformed”. I started with the date YOU gave and simply assumed “hold” versus “sell”. The pessimists have been winning since 2000 and I think they’re going to keep winning these arguments through brute force of numbers … UNTIL OUR REPUBLIC IS DISSOLVED INTO MARTIAL LAW.
E.
Vlad said:
Surely injecting cement into your body to look more feminine qualifes – among many, many other things.
*************************************************************
I’m surprised that in this day and age of Viagra that men haven’t summoned the services of cosmetic surgeons to get cement injected into their penis. 🙂 🙂
I just had to inject a small bit of levity. Carry on.
E.
E. said: “How could anyone have predicted the precise nature of “kick the can down the road” stopgap measures …”
—————-
They couldn’t and that is exactly my point. We might go another 15 or 20 or 60 years on stopgap measures, as unexpectedly as we have lasted over the last 3 years.
BTW, when you say the DOW was at 13,000 … that was the year JHK was predicting it would drop to 4,000.
As far as making 8-10 posts about predictions that did not pan out. I have not responded to a tenth of the failed predictions made week after week after week.
PS, as long as people insist on using numbers and time horizons, I am going to continue to point out the failed numbers. Numbers mean something and should not be used carelessly.
The thing about debt is that the creditors and the debtors must balance out – it is impossible for everyone to be in debt. Indeed, there is definitely plenty of ‘wealth’ (let’s define this as broadly as possible as “tools which can be used to increase one’s ability to pursue one’s goals, whatever those goals may be”) out there – London of today, say, is clearly not 15th Century London, which itself was more than just 100,000 people squatting naked in a field.
The question, therefore, is who *owns* what, and who *owes* what to whom. Consider some hypotheticals. If it was simply decided tomorrow that all debt (and debt-like obligations) worldwide were simply cancelled, who would be better off? Who would be worse off?
Asoka said:
They couldn’t and that is exactly my point. We might go another 15 or 20 or 60 years on stopgap measures, as unexpectedly as we have lasted over the last 3 years.
****************************************************************
You will find out very soon that it won’t “go another 15 or 20 or 60 years”. The problem is that ALL stopgap measures have a natural termination point: 1) A country’s credit is so bad that it cannot borrow, 2) A country’s currency is so debased that it must drop out of international import/export markets because it’s impossible to price their exports or figure out how much to charge for exporting to them, 3) They default on their debt unless they engage in massive currency debasement, or 4) All creditors trust NO debtors and so all constructive economic activity ceases.
There’s no magic “line in the sand” where this happens. It’s a “metastable state” where you have equilibrium and sanity one minute … and a military takeover of the government the next. Timing is the trickiest aspect of any forecasting, social or economic. However, all studies of economics show that people are MUCH better at LONG TERM FORECASTS than they are at SHORT TERM FORECASTS. In other words, we know DIRECTIONS pretty well but we don’t exactly know how long it’ll take to get there.
We’ve gone pretty damned far downhill in just THREE years so I don’t think it takes the extrapolation skills of an actuary to figure out what happens in five or ten years … much less 20 or 60. You would have to extrapolate in MORE political rationality than exists in the world at present whereas most of us see less.
Peak INTELLIGENCE is one of my pet “peak” observations.
E.
Asoka said:
PS, as long as people insist on using numbers and time horizons, I am going to continue to point out the failed numbers. Numbers mean something and should not be used carelessly.
***************************************************************
Yeah, like we needed to be told that your mission is to continue to be a pain in the ass. Why “announce” what we already know? What you fail to see is that the “when” part of a forecast is less crucial than the “what” part. If all your numbers show THAT your ship is going to hit an iceberg you must make evasive maneuvers now and not get too preoccupied with the “when” aspect, within reason. Moreover, we want to make the evasive maneuvers ONCE, not TEN times.
Similarly, the USA’s economy is going to hit an iceberg and who cares WHEN?? All we know is that we’ve got to engage in fixes NOW while we have the time for “evasive maneuvers”. We want these “maneuvers” to work NOW and not need fifteen tweakings because it causes political stalemates every three months.
Roubini’s massive infrastructure spending is the plan I like because then at least we have better utilities, urban plumbing, and decent railways to show for it. As things stand now, we have NOTHING to show for $2T of spending.
E.
James,
Looks like Obama is ready to take on China now, economically and militarily. It seems the hegemony just keeps pushing ahead, unmolested. Meanwhile, the OWSers are keeping up at least minimal pressure here on the homefront. To what avail, we are not certain.
http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/the-civilization-of-our-discontent/
And, the way to buy gold is you get cash, one hundred dollar bills, then go to the coin shop and buy a one ounce gold bullion coin, then hide it somewhere, or perhaps stash it in a safe deposit box at the bank if you are worried about burglars. Then that money no longer exists: you blew it gambling at the local Indian tribe’s casino.
JHK,
Quel surprise (ha) to see you posted last night.
After seeing the 60 minutes profile of Christine Lagarde I was thinking along the same lines.
This is a tsunami originating from our economic fraud, called free market with no regulations, hitting Europe and oh, my boomeranging back to us. I have only one word for you, KARMA and it’s just in time for the holiday season.
In the meantime, just to pour more salt in the wounds, we have ideologues who haven’t recognized that the train has left the station and are still fighting for those billionaires to lower their taxes even more.
They are fatally ill, but are unable to ascertain that they are about to die. Unbelievable even now fighting the fight of the 1980’s. The super-committee is an abject failure, which we knew it would be from the start.
But as Kuturecritic just said, the war games continue. Will it be Iran? Will it be China? Stay tuned for the next episode of Pax Americana. Disaster Capitalism must march on…..
JHK sez:
“Just to be plain here: nothing is working. The global system of accounting control fraud has completely unraveled. Nobody will lend money to anybody anymore because everybody suspects everybody else is lying about their ability to meet any obligation.”
James,
I’m “glad” you keep pointing this out to those who don’t want it to be pointed at!
The erosion of trust in this Griftocracy could come to no good end, and we’re on an event horizon of it smacking us clean in the face, whether we want to peek through our fingers at it or not.
When lying, cheating and stealing become an acceptable way to “get ahead” and “do business”, your society is well and truly fucked. …Especially if you desire to EXPORT this dream of never-ending free stolen cookies all over the fucking world! Goldman, curs-ed be thy name and all thy progeny…
Saaaay, didn’t those hedge fund deals seem a tad too risk-free to be risk-free? There’s nothing us “little people” can do now but witness the devolution. As kindly Senor Fred ruminates: Whoever shall we find to transcribe the manuscripts? Technocrats and fascists have a tendency to “revise” and “redact” anything they get their hands onto and minds loosely wrapped around.
Woe betide thee, Land of Grift and Dumbfuckery…
This latest mess is probably the last real stopping point on the way down the toilet. From here on out, there is going to be less and less interest in new of collapsing finances, because it simply don’t matter to people who’re trying to find some sort of shelter in the coming storm of collape.
Visit the Leibowitz Society at http://leibowitzsociety.blogspot.com/ for ideas and discussion about the coming collapse, how to prepare for it, and most of all, how to save our important knowledge before it gets lost in the chaos.
“We may be f—–d, but we don’t know it yet.”
–WSP7
Ha, good one!
Rarely has a pithier observation been uttered!
(This is why I’ve desperately been trying to get my “machine work” completed. I have “inklings”.)
E.,
Thanks for trying.
I hear what you’re “on about”, though denial appears to be a powerful drug. ..Until the inevitable “downer”, that is.
Very telling, indeed.
Nathan,
Sorry for the infestation.
Perhaps a serious lack of funds will make it go away?
Ps. Not letting them use any of YOUR money would be helpful.
Saw the movie “MARGIN CALL” over the weekend.
I keep imagining MADMAX with SOLAR PANELS
Please post the link to enlighten me to FOOD STORAGE, I’m ready to stock up.
Cheers Clusterfuckers.
PUSH ON. DO GOOD. KEEP SMILING.
I’m sorry, Nathan, that you and your fellow Australians have to put up with our jarheads. I got nauseous when I heard about this. Just when we should be shutting down our overseas military bases we add another one to expand our hegemonic empire. I was wondering if you could comment on how the majority of Australians feel about this.
You’re in a really goofy mood if you’re doing dialects and accents. As for me, I’ve been busy swatting Objectivist hornets, both on my blog and in real life.
Crazy Eddie’s Motie News
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/
Jim
A real (honest) economy would indeed implode, faced with the current reality. The world economic “leaders” resemble a gang of vampyres that have little fear of death, (being mostly there anyway). Even as “adequate feedings” are harder to acquire, they maintain their facade of life. True, they are doomed, they know it; and they won’t want us around much longer, after the blood snacks dry up.
Perhaps they will try a purge of some kind that saves only their sheep?
What seems more likely is a final orgy of feeding before the survivors are forced back to the crypts. Doesn’t look like that will be today, might be friday, might be next year, or longer.
Market’s gunna crash in about 10 minutes, yet silver and gold are way down, and the 10 year UST is at 1.97%? All I can say, is WTF! How is that even remotely possible (ETF’s/commodity speculation/the almighty $dollar$ fed printing press)?
It’s time for the fed to quit giving bogus 0% interest free money to the TBTF banksters. It’s also time for all the them (corporations/USgovt) to stop cooking their books – time to take all those toxic assets as losses finally. This house of cards reminds me of an old image from the Guinness Book of World Records, where coin stackers place hundreds of coins on top of one that is on its edge…
As to the 1% no longer able to trust each other in terms of investment – all I can say is “Hah!” – what comes around, goes around. Apparently they aren’t as immune as they thought, in their MegaMansions, yachts and luxury vehicles…
Looks like Obama is ready to take on China now, economically and militarily.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Yes a fake or real war with China could take out scads of “usless eaters” and justify a police state for the remainder. Not sure that’s the plan, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Corzine will walk away scot-free. When has any of the upper mismanagement of Goldman Sachs ever been prosecuted? His tight relationship with the DNC will also ensure that Obama will pardon the guy if any prosecutions start.
another good one E; i especially like “peak intelligence”…
The Eurozone could lean on the ECB to buy up “PIGS” sovereign debt using expansive monetary policy. The Fed did this, in effect starting in late 2008 and it has staved off collapse and bought time for more fundamental reform, though that time had been mostly squandered. But, the Eurozone isn’t likely to do so until it is either too late, or almost too late. And the reforms, if ever adopted, would need to be fairly drastic to be sustainable. See Krugman in today’s NY Times.
I think JK is still suffering from a amssive case of cognitive dissonance, if that is the correct term.
His comments are spot on about things that he has researched and understands, such as land use and and architecture. However, even if he does now live in Saratoga, not exactly small town, as it is a suburb of Albany, he is still a high urbanite internationalist at heart. He simply cannot bring himself to admit that all us provincial white sox wearing do-it-yourselfers were right all along, and his fun, intersting, cosmopolitan internationalist buddies were wrong.
JK seems to me not to understand the fact that when things get seriously out of hand, such as happened at UCDavis, the cosmopolitans, like the UCD Chancellor, haven’t the faintest idea what to do about it. Any of us nobodies out here could have told her: Fire the dope with the spray can. Now. Tell his union rep you will see him/her in court, but get out of your office because you have serious work to do. Take the school’s money out of B of A which is due to fail pretty soon anyway. Put money in local banks, which gets you some local support, something you might soon be needing. Designate an area for protest, and designate a representative to coordinate with people excercising their First Amendment Rights about things like trash collection and sanitation.
I doubt that grocery stores will be empty before Thanksgiving, but I also suspect that if you have extra money, agribiz and retail grocery chains is not a very good place to put it.
I have no fears, or not too many, about grocery shelves being empty, because, like a lot of rural raised types, I have a garden; there is food in the freezer; and I belong to a buying club which buys directly from local farmers.
Gee, I remember the name of the VD free clinic back in my bad old college days was “Blue Bus”.
http://www.Thesisa.org/
As someone who thought peak oil doom was rather imminent, I stand corrected and urge all to beware a bit of projecting our sense that things are terribly wrong onto the workings of a very complex world.
However, the timeline may be wrong for Jim, as it was for the “Limits to Growth” people, but in the grand scheme of things, 10-20 years is a blip in the downfall of an empire.
what I think is hard to factor in, be it energy analysis, financial analysis, climate analysis, is the “chaos factor”, something that I see first hand in some of the neighboring countries in Central America where I live…especially in the larger cities.
There is no metric to accurately document–or predict– what is occurring due to failed states–Haiti comes to mind, the massive dislocations caused by “free-trade” treaties, the narco/political/economic nexus, in addition to the blindness and foot dragging of entrenched elites as every passing day cries out louder for a new “development” paradigm.
Taking into account many of Jim’s observations in The Long Emergency, I tried to go very local, while paying attention to the global trends, as sketched out in this article for the Oil Drum:
http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/5714
Best to all in these interesting times.
I’d be interested to hear JHK’s views on this article by Edward Luce in the Financial Times.
Entitled “America is entering a new age of plenty,” it sounds like fracking to me.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a307107c-1364-11e1-9562-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1eIJsN1UD
Hi Jim
Loooved your post today, the European spectacle just gets better and better. Particularly with that trader Alessio running around saying he thinks things will collapse by January. Remember Alessio? He’s the one that came right out and said Goldman runs the world, personally I am surprised Alessio wasn’t overcome with “suicidal ideation”. I am also really looking forward to watching Nigel Farage administer another searing tongue lashing to the EU miscreants right out in public. The mugs of those Eurocrats after Nigel gets through with them look like pickpockets who have been caught with their hand in everyone’s pocket, come to think of it, that is exactly what has happened.
Well, all the argument here about time lines is pretty fruitless. The old economic saying ” debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid”, witness Greece, will settle all arguments. I just think we are in for many thrills, chills and screams before we get to the very end. So, prepare as much as you can, after all not all of us can afford to run away to a little hidey-hole in the hills, and then just sit back and watch the show. It is going to be a BLOCKBUSTER !
loveday
just sit back and watch the show. It is going to be a blockbuster!
“The ECB, read: Germany, doesn’t have the means and wherewithal to save the entire Eurozone. It could opt to put itself on the hook for $2-3 trillion, just to keep up appearances for another year or so -if that long-, but after that, countries and banks would be trick-and/or-treating at the doorsteps in Berlin and Frankfurt anyway.” -AE
This can-kicking is exactly the wrong approach to a “fix”, so we can infer that it’s exactly what will be implemented.
The final upshot will be a fire-sale of assets for pennies (or ha’pennies) on the dollar (which would be the desired “result”).
Here ya go. (Research the “cred” of the various folks quoted, in case you may think it all a tissue of lies.)
http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/11/november-20-2011-why-germany-is-right.html
“Elaine Supkis was down, maybe even mocking GC
in her Blog last week!!!
Yes ‘ Gerald Celente, chief of the Trends Journal forecasting group, arch-nemesis of “the white-shoe boys” got snookered'”
Mr. Celente ‘got snookered’? If you bother to learn the facts, he had been doing business with the Lynn Waldoch firm for years without a problem – ever, only to discover that LW was somehow swindled into the disgraced and fraudulent Corzine MF Global group. I don’t think ‘snookered’, as it implicates, being dumb or greedy or both is the correct semantic. Being caught in the middle and fucked over by an alleged, (yet to be proven-it’s early yet)criminal enterprise run by another former Goldman Sachs disgusting pigfucker is more accurate.
You would do well reading the Trends Journal. Mr. Celente is neither dumb or greedy that’s for sure. Nest time you see him in the street, why not TELL HIM how he ‘got snookered’? Have your emergency room coverage paid up in full.
Elaine Supkis who?
Happy Thanksgiving Rubes. Do YOU know who ‘owns’ YOUR bank? Didn’t think so. You’re Next for fleecing. Think what happens to the Thanksgiving turkey. That’s what’s coming to you.
Arbeit Macht Frei
You thinkers on this site think Jim is pissed off now, wait until he reads the article on http://www.bloomberg.com Monday about the billionaires not paying their income tax, and getting away with paying 50 cents on the dollar owed IF they get caught.
MF Global stole from it’s investor’s accounts. Guess who’s holding the loot? http://www.youtube.com/user/HammeringTruth#p/u/0/HrVAa4Q0ZyY
just sit back and watch the show. It is going to be a blockbuster!
==
Bah! Another limp dick who “likes to watch” because that’s all he can do. What a nation of losers you are.
We can’t continue to be the world cop. We are neglecting security concerns within our own border. plus we don’t have the money.
Pat Buchanan’s new book advocates closing the majority of US overseas bases. He also is for bring troops home from Japan, Korea, the middle east and Europe. Redeploying them on our own southern border.
But if I were Australian, a few jarheads and close alliance with the US would be preferable to Chinese troops there of their own volition. Don’t think it couldn’t happen.
James: Perhaps you ought to consider limiting comments to 140 characters like Twitter so that we won’t be obliged to slog through quite so much to get to the lucid comments?
http://www.Thesisa.org/
I just have to add this, as I am sickened by the 0.1% savings account rates available to clients now (why would *investment* [financial?] banks want to borrow money from clients, when they can get 0% interest rate from the fed printing press, or naked short it for free millisecond-style?). Aside – I remember my economics 201 class teaching me something about savings rates causally linked to inflation rates – how are those annual health insurance/college tuition hikes treating you (what inflation)? All of my food and utility costs have been on the rise for the past decade, on the order of 5% or so per year (oh yeah, that’s why they call it *ADJUSTED* inflation rate – have to remove the “noise” caused by food/energy). OK, just tell me to “babble on, moron!” (I’m getting to my point…)
I remember daze gone by – the 70’s, 80’s, early 90’s, when people were taught the virtues of saving money. People opened savings accounts as children, and earned at least 2-3% annually. These poor kids today – what are they taught? To go as deeply into debt as possible, via credit card/loan sharks? To gamble on the fraudulent market, where 70% of the trades consist of TBTF microsecond naked-short trades?
Pathetic, really. The financial system is a handy illusion. It’s failing as the illusions that underlie it get revealed for what they are.
But it sure has been handy.
On the other hand, the US Congress is based upon an illusion of governance that has failed us since at least the Reagan Era, with the re-emergence of 1840s-style partisan lunacy. That all cloaks the pocket-stuffing of men and women of both parties with funds from corporations and lobbyists.
Our illusion of governance is decidedly not handy, and I’ll be glad to see it go. Makes one wish for angry and bipartisan mobs storming the Capitol when the Super Committee invariably fails and markets tank…the DOW is down more than 230 points as I write this: just another normal day on Wall Street since 2008.
Gerald Celente “rappelling down Jamie Dimon’s security wall with a straight razor clenched in his teeth” is a funny image. Thanks again for the infotainment.
The scenario is VERY clear. When things will finally unravel, they will unravel very quickly. And it looks like the domino cascade might just be starting.
—————————————–
Uh huh…..well, don’t be too surprised if it’s still “unraveling” twenty years from now.
remember the ali g show? sasha cohen got him to say we went to war over ‘blt’s…and at the end of the interview made him say, “i be pat buchanan, and i be knowin’ nothin’ about nothin’ “…really, look it up…
Eleuthero, you’re absolutely right, and I thank you for pointing it out. Reading commentary on various articles makes it clear to me that most people get lost in the details and never see the big picture. Like well trained botanists in a forest, they are proud that they know the genus and species of every plant. They too often are unaware that they are in a forest or that a forest even exists. Warnings of an approaching forest fire go unheeded since they don’t know what a forest is. Instead, they point out that fire is not possible based on moisture readings taken by “experts” on fallen leaf samples.
I may be a simpleton, but I know that corn begets only more corn, and corruption will not produce a crop of prosperity or good will. I need no numbers or specifics to know what to do. Focus on details usually points to denial or stupidity, and what’s the difference?
Greetings,
I would like to comment on all the other commentators that argue about “time” and “dominoes” and predictions.
I think that most of you just do not understand the nature of a Black Swan event. I’ll try to explain.
Lets say that a guy named Bill is diagnosed with diabetes – is that a Black Swan event? No, diabetes is fairly common and anyone looking at Bill’s history and diet could probably predict diabetes in his future.
What if his diabetes leads to the loss of Bill’s legs? Is that a Black Swan event? No. Again, the loss of one’s legs, while horrible, can happen to someone with diabetes.
Poor Bill. He is only 45 years old and has no legs and is confined to a motorized chair. He has a terrible chronic illness that requires the use of daily medical intervention to survive.
One night a faulty gas main breaks and Bill’s house catches on fire. Everyone with legs and not weakened by diabetes escapes but not Bill. Bill is thus killed by a Black Swan event.
Kunstler is not writing about the event that will take us down as it is impossible to predict. Kunstler, and this blog specifically, talk about how we’ve weakened ourselves (just like Bill) and how that makes us more at risk to the Black Swans that are circling on the horizon.
When the event does come it will be something that no one has prepared for.
I love Gerald Celente, this Italian American and his “white shoe boys”, he’s well aware Italy’s allegedly corrupt ways have nothin on Wall Street. Nothin….
Hey, Asoka.
Thanks for taking the dissenting position here on this blog. I too can’t help but recognize the constant number of dire predictions that fail to reach the extreme outcomes imagined. But I also notice that what is predicted usually reflects the truth of the situation. So I guess what I’m asking, really, is how do “they” get away with kicking the can down the road so often? I think I’ve heard you describe these phenomena as a “negative feedback loop.” Does this mean that once we reach the threshold, the collapse will be as devastating as the fear mongering suggests?
I appreciate skepticism and any other insights to be offered, so keep them coming!
Cheers.
I know…. I can clearly see Gerald and his straight razor, scaling the wall mumbling ” white shoe boy fucked with the wrong guy”. Absolutely priceless!! I will still be chuckling over this for awhile.
Methusaleh, lighten up, have a chuckle while we can, things will get real serious soon enough.
loveday
Funny you should mention gold, it’s taking quite a nosedive in the markets as I type this comment. I should also mention that while outfits such as BullionVault and Goldmoney are honest and reputable in and of themselves (as far as we know, anyway), one should still be careful of putting the bulk of one’s money into gold through these outfits. If gold is in a bubble, which there is reason to believe it is, the gold one owns through these outfits must be sold to be converted back into cash should the bubble (assuming it is indeed a bubble) pop, and such a market in gold would be a buyer’s market to the max.
I have a friend who works in the City in London who is very well informed. He told me that during the 2008 credit crunch, Tesco, a huge supermarket chain here, came to within 12 hours of running out of cash and not being able to stock its shelves. He also told me that he and his colleagues withdrew all their money – millions, no doubt, he’s loaded – in cash, and many bought dwellings with moats and weaponry. But it all turned out all right, that time.
It’s not a black swan that will sink the fascist US petrodollar empire, it’s a the famous butterfly effect. Only it’s not a butterfly this time around, it is a flock of giant pterosaurs coming your way, called karma.
That’s some funny stuff. Wish I had a moat with crocodiles and such.
Two things are baffling me (and perhaps I am not alone). First, where did all that money go? Corzine lost $2 billion where – who’s got it? During the Iraq war, pallets of cash ($8.8 billion) vanished without a trace. Somewhere there are unaccountable trillions, all of it missing from various investments from 401K funds that collapsed in 2008 to the value of housings (much more fiat). Is this even real money? The interest on those retirement accounts vanished with a touch of a keystroke, the value on housing was never real in the first place. Or is all this loot (this massive, uncountable, unaccounted loot) actually hidden in a deep, underground vault somewhere in a tax-free island? Nothing is working and no one is held accountable. Ever. Even when caught red-handed.
Secondly, why is the US putting a military base in Australia? Australians strike me as being tough enough and organized enough to defend themselves and their allies on their own territory. Why are our soldiers being sent there? To keep unemployment from going up? There is plenty of work to do here. Security firms everywhere are hiring former military men to protect the paranoid uber rich from dangerous OWSers (nerdy college kids, vegetarian hippies and 84 yr. old grannies). The uber rich want to know how much money they should keep in gold and if a submarine can be kept on hand to help them escape when the government collapses. I kid you not. Here is the NYT link — http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/business/protests-are-a-payday-for-security-firms.html?adxnnl=1&ref=businessspecial3&adxnnlx=1321891543-YufwOdnih3EvyLmO/RHFQQ
None of us know nuthin bout nuthin including me. So I don’t know what Pat B. knows. But his book is a good read, and has some sensible proposals. IMHO.
‘Elaine Supkis who?’
Culture of life News/ Blog
Good blog, She also lives in upstate NY and watches the Banksters and their friends at the NY Times with a careful eye.
Vlad….did you see the trannies pictures? with the hude butt? Drudge.
Metuselah,
why do you think it is that no one has been able to pinpoint the doom date with precision?
Anyhow, I check out stuff from Michael C Ruppert now and again, and I listened to him argue in his defense that someone calculated that better than 80% of his forecasts were accurate. What huge emotional toll guys like Mr. Kunstler and Mr. Ruppert must pay for taking the positions they do.
I guess even for falling short with their claims, they’re more courageous than most.
“how do “they” get away with kicking the can down the road so often? I think I’ve heard you describe these phenomena as a “negative feedback loop.””
Actually, it is a positive feedback loop. This can be seen/measured, as the “bailouts” become more and more frequent, and consist of larger and larger quantities. And, the debt grows larger and larger, and the printing presses produce ever more inflated *MAGIKAL* money-paperz.
A negative feedback loop is when something goes too high, then it is regulated back down. A positive feedback loop produces exponential growth (until it hits the “cliff”).
I need no numbers or specifics to know what to do. Focus on details usually points to denial or stupidity, and what’s the difference?
————————————–
While the overall thrust of your post is not riduclous, the above statement is the sort of muddled thinking that leads people to ignore reality. Once you can disregard the “details” with impunity, then you are operating the zone of pure belief. Good luck with that.
I see Ix,
thanks for the clarification.
I guess my next questions should be, then, don’t these leaders have any incentive for seeing the writing on the wall. Is there not a shred of decency to be found? Are there any genuine efforts to right the wrongs in the socioeconomic system?
“This week presents the most extreme convergence of events the world has seen since September of 2008, and perhaps a good bit worse.”
I think you are right and I think it is going to be a bit worse. We are all standing beneath a tree that is falling on us. But we just stare at it cause we don’t have a clue what to do.
“many bought dwellings with moats and weaponry.”
OMFG, LULZ!!! That is *priceless*!!! I hope they stocked the moats with alligators (or crocodiles)! I *ASS-U-ME* they had some acreage inside the moat for crops/livestock?!…
Did you folks see the guy with the ‘Tame, pet’ Hippo was killed by the hippo?
Theres video of him playing with it and feeding it apples prior to it going wild.
IM not so HO, buchanan is a political whore who will say anything you want to hear, for a buck; which i think was ali g s point…seriously, look it up and watch the episode
I know – bizarre. And over here buying weapons is incredibly extreme as well. They were probably American fund managers who thought it was normal…
The can is not only ‘kicked down the road’ by TPTB; it’s kicked by those invested in this ecosystem of an economy that we have. Which is just about everyone, including JHK – who will buy his books if a collapse occurs? Your average American home owner doesn’t want his house value to plummet; the in-debt college student covets a good old fashioned job after graduation; the Social Security recipient wants to find that check in the mailbox each and every month; the artists wants patrons that are willing and able to buy their work.
There is a collective psychic/emotional/philosophical/political/economic investment in things working out. A staggering amount of invested momentum that transcends the can kicking scenario of a few elites pulling levers behind the curtain.
In reality, the only reason any cans get kicked down the road is because the majority covets the continuation of the status-quo.
I thought about buying guns, but started to teach myself to garden instead. Truth is, if TSHTF to the degree of firefights and small skirmishes, I’m completely unprepared. What a thought.
ix, will you please satisfy a minor point of curiosity: wtf is ‘lulz’? i ve been unable to figure it from context…preesh…
Any suggestion that Gideon Osborne isnt a top notch Economist is bang out of order. His bankers are Hoares, for goodness sakes. This? man is a member of the Bullingdon Club in good standing, and briefly? worked in Selfridges department store, folding towels, before becoming UK chancer-lore in his early 30’s.?
His copy of Economics for Dummies is one of the most well thumbed in Britain, and I am sure that he will be balls deep into the economy, driving ever more deeply into recession, until? such time as he is removed from this orifice.
So Buck,
does this mean it’ll take a ground zero type calamity to instigate the type of deep changes necessary? Or, will us lemmings continue marching to the cliff-side?
It was even worse: he said they bought castles, not dwellings (that was my little editing). I mean, how many castles with moats are there? And how many for sale? But that’s what he said.
I believe that “lulz” is the plural of “LOL” in contemporary Internet vernacular.
It’s not a one day event. It is a process of cascading events. These cascading events feed on themselves until eventually the activation energy needed for the reaction to occur is overcome. Every day that passes the number cascading events increases, that is undeniable. In my opinion, the catalyst for the reaction is the global awareness to the evil that is the US/NATO/Vatican/Islamo fascist alliance. Once that awareness and knowledge is out, it is out. You cannot bring it back in. I said it many times before, the world will vomit the blue-eyed devil dogs out of existence.
“Citing the strategic importance of the U.S.-China relationship, in November 2009, President Barack Obama announced the “100,000 Strong” initiative, a national effort designed to increase dramatically the number and diversify the composition of American students studying in China. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially launched the initiative in May 2010 in Beijing. The Chinese government strongly supports the initiative and has already committed 10,000 “Bridge Scholarships” for American students to study in China.”
Now how is sending HOSTAGES to china a good thing? Seems to me that it weakens national security.
Mr. can’t wait to get my picture on a coin also seems to have no issue being a Boeing salesman on his recent far east trip. Conflict of interest apparently produces no conflict. A president of corporations and the global elite he’s not going to get tough on China. He’s going to get tough on you instead and with so many not paying attention to what is going on he’s going to keep on doing it for four more years.
You’ll be broke without a job but rich kids will soon be enjoying spring break in Shanghai.
The documentary “Lifting the Veil” can still be found online. If you want to understand Obama and the OWS movement watching this documentary would be a very good place to start.
As I write, Egyptian revolutionary fires burn brighter.
I’m wondering if we are certain to see an American Spring in just a few months? Perhaps this IS the culmination of events folks like JHK have been writing about for so long. The positive feedback loop realized?
what it s about is an overt move to try to show china that we (US) are in the neighborhood…surely you ve heard of the rise of the chinese military presence, presumably in preparation for claiming oil, natural gas, control of shipping lanes and resupply bases on the area islands…can t remember the name of it, but US navy recently announced “exercises” on an island of one of our ‘allies’ that is very near to one that is disputed by viet nam, i believe, and mainland china…how the report is worded is something like, china should not be “worried” by our beach landing simulations; we re not preparing to attack, just helping our friends make sure they are prepared “in case”…or some bullshit such as that…
Metuselah,
“US/NATO/Vatican/Islamo fascist alliance”
Squished a lot of stuff together there, no? Flew right over my head, sorry. Not sure what this means exactly. Sounds a bit conspirational, but what isn’t these days?
Dog,
Lifting the Veil produces several results on YouTube. Which documentary are you referring to? Please don’t say the one from Alex Jones.
thanks, yo…i m sort of a caveman when it comes to computers & the internet…this stupid little smart-phone fell in my lap a coupla months ago and i m trying to get up to speed- apparently, judging by current events and commentary, none too soon!
Remember, folks, Christmas is in only 34 days!
I think we’ve past the point of no return some time ago, but right now what you’re seeing is a kind of downward spiral as all the BIG investors jump from “safe island” to “safe island” all the while aware that the islands themselves are simply melting icebergs that are getting smaller and smaller.
The first downgrade of the US credit rating sent tremors globally (part of what’s happening now is a consequence of that). A second downgrade, not so much – it just causes the capital flight to veer directions for a day or so. Ditto the supercommittee – if we go into an automatic across the board cut, it will still take time to figure out what gets cut, and then we’re back to square one. This means that Congress just played a game of chicken with itself. It’s a lot like a man being confronted by a mugger with a gun who holds it to his own head and says “Give me all your money or I’ll shoot myself!”
We’ll get through the end of the year without much real effect. Christmas sales will be down – why would anyone spend a lot on presents (assuming they have a lot to spend) when global financial apocalypse is playing in the background – but TPTB will of course want us to go through the daily consumerist ritual to stave off the inevitable for perhaps a few weeks more. By early February, however, I think the wheels will have come off that Blue Bus.
Two bloodless coups in as many months (Papandreou and Berlusconi) have led to both Greece and Italy now under the squishy squidly tentacles of Goldman Sachs, and the “non-violent” protests there will probably have escalated to fighting in the streets by then. OWS, after going into quiescence for the winter, will be coming out with a vengeance by then, and both Republican and Democratic congress-critters will be fleeing from crowds rather than campaigning.
BTW, Americans have never really gotten into the non-violent protest sort of thing, not in the true Gandhi spirit; the culture is just too different, there’s always someone ready to pick up a rock or pack a pistol. 2012 should be a very interesting year.
Oh come on you Doomers! The Good Life awaits you if you’d just stop thinking so negatively!
Take, for instance, this elaborate essay on the sybaritic pleasures of a first-class flight on Cathay Pacific to the Orient:
http://crankyflier.com/2011/10/26/best-flight-ever-first-class-on-the-cathay-pacific-777-300-guest-trip-report/
Now that’s the shit, my friends!
My IQ is 160, my Daddy’s rich, my Ma is good-lookin’, my prep-school GPA is off the charts, my SATs are perfect, and all I have to do is decide between Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or Princeton. After four fun years, (three if I want to rush things), I’m taking my hot bod to Stanford or Cambridge, where I’ll punch the MBA ticket, grab that IB brass ring at Goldman, and live La Dolce Vita, Global-style — yee ha!
Enjoy your yurts, losers!
Absalom, this is the one.
Lifting the Veil: Obama and the Failure of Capitalist Democracy
Since I’m clarifying I’ll add a plug from one of the commentators in the film.
“Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!”
Larry Pinkney
The Black Commentator
This and other comments can be found at:
http://911blogger.com/news/2011-03-12/lifting-veil
actually, to be fair and unbalanced, it s the US/NATO/UN/vatican/islamist-judeo-christian extremist/IMF/WTO/FED/socio-communal-fascist conspiracy…did i leave anyone out?
HA HA HA… Lovin it!
Have CNBC on behind me and none of the hosts or talking heads seem too worried about anything. Yes, the markets are down. But they’re joking around, taking about companies like ‘Research in Motion’, and the ‘Black Friday’ shopping event. Will it meet expectations, that’s the question. Not a word about $50 billion wiped out in the MF Global fiasco. That apparently was last weeks news. They must not check in here at CFN so are not aware of the possible impending doom Jim writes about.
Tripp I must have missed something. Are you abandoning your farm, where you put in such hard work, and headed for the hills? What happened? I’ve followed your progress on your site, which was impressive.
Ibendet, Have been reading Ross Wetzsteon’s ‘Republic of Dreams, Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960’. What a place! All these characters, Delmore Schwartz, Joe Gould, Max Bodenheim, Hart Crane, John Reed, Edna St. Vincent Millay just to name a few. Question, what’s it like down there now?
—WSP7
Watchin’ it now. Interesting, especially the clips of Obama’s campaign promises.
Mr. Kunstler wrote at the end of “The Geography of Nowhere”: “But let’s assume we now face the future with better intentions.” Let’s not. We Americans aren’t ready to face the future with better intentions yet, just like (as Paddy Bauler once said) Chicago ain’t ready for reform yet.
Gerald Celente lost something in the neighborhood of 6 figures from MF. That’s significant for most of us, but for him it’s just walking around money. Still, it hurts to get burned. Maybe Corzine will (out of fear) restore to him his cash.
Jim.
Your writings are a gem.
Thanks so much for your weekly posts.
The only thing I see increasing these days is a lineup.
Most of us in the US couldn’t agree more. Why doesn’t your government tell us to fuck off?
Greetings,
I strongly doubt that it is karma. If or when the US goes then everybody is going down with it. Thousands of thermonuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons and, of course, a heavily armed population will stir things up in such a way that no one on this planet will be safe. Just wait until some of those nasty plagues are released.
Imagine the Black Death but on steroids. Those kinds of weapons are currently being stored and, as the Anthrax attack proved, politicians are not afraid to unleash weapons grade biological weapons on the public.
Well, well we are indeed an unusual group or at least Vlad and I are, never thought I’d see a reference in any media to Gurdjieff although I have been thinking about him and Doris Lessing a lot lately, probably not a good thing.
Last week a bunch of billionaires testified before Congress that they wanted their taxes raised.
The ruling class is not monolithic. Some of them can see that it is better to give some than to have all of it taken.
But parts of the ruling class are batshit crazy.
They are the ones pushing for war. We peons can only watch and guess which country will be the trigger.
Last week Obama explicitly threatened China. Over the weekend they threatened Iran. And drones kill people in Pakistan on a regular basis.
And where are the “dissenters” in Syria getting the weaponry to kill so many police and soldiers?
In the meantime, they’ve destroyed the society of Libya, igniting a civil war, and ruining the lives of people who had the best living standards of Africa.
And there are STILL people on this blog who believe that the US has bases all over the world to protect peace? That we mean to be the world’s policeman? And in the kindly Andy Griffith way? Not the pepper-spraying, baton beating, skull-fracturing way?
Man, it’s hard to penetrate the matrix.
Solaguy said “Please post the link to enlighten me to FOOD STORAGE, I’m ready to stock up.”
I just cracked my Y2K stash, and confirmed what I already knew: food storage can be dicey. 50 lbs of food went bad, mostly beans. Granted, they weren’t packaged in space age containers or anything, or kept in proper, steady temperatures.
But it was a good simulation.
Fire raining from the sky, acid rain falling, I haul the bad beans out from under the house. Being beans, they require bringing water to a boil (huge energy cost). The beans turn out to be bad (crunchy). I’m eating leaves and drippings from the gutter, so I eat bad beans anyway. Haemaglutinin and other poisonous lectins flood my system. Dying, I attempt to dial 911. Am informed that they will be able to reach me as soon as my number comes up. Thus went the apocalypse.
The real downside of survival food is that it implies zero confidence in the system. You invest in insurance, which is expensive. The ROI is negative, if after 3 years you haven’t consumed it. If everyone believes their personal stash will suffice, no one gets on the project of changing their societies’ food systems. Thus, many choose to amplify their personal fat stores- which leads to diabetes. Now you must stockpile insulin. What is the shelf life of insulin? And on etc.
Wow, very well said!
The Hippo? That sir is what we call a Hottentot Venus. One is reminded of Venus’ of Willendorf of ancient Europe. Compelling as hell. What is one’s “White Nationalism” or “Heterosexuality” next to something like that? One moves forward towards the inevitable. God help anyone who gets in the way. The Higher Impulses scream – Danger, Danger Will Robinson….You keep moving forward, eyes fixed in a primodial reptilian glare. Visuals have taken the place of pheremones in the “higher” primate. Danger, Danger, Will Robi – Shut UP! You find yourself still moving forward. It notices you and adjusts itself to meet your advance. Then a large Gorilloid Hominid interposes between you and it. Another lower instinct called self preservation kicks in. Between this and the Higher, our boy is finally stopped in his tracks. Is it joy or sadness that he feels? He laughs – the Laughter his seed of Immortality. He will return home and weave a chrysalis – his catepillar must die before he can fly to the stars.
I agree with the gist of what you wrote. I watched all of the recent soundbites on China and Iran you mentioned, and I thought wow, the U.S is really flaunting a large nut-sack in the face of possibly way under estimated adversaries. Wonder if it’s only a matter of time before them nuts get kicked.
I love’d Doris’s Lessings’s “Shikasta” – the agents of Higher Intelligence are indeed hard pressed. Shammat (Judeo Masonry) is Triumphant but they are begining to sicken too. If we can hang on we may win by surviving.
In a more prosiac mode, Lessing talked about the decline of Feminism; how utterly self indulgent women become when just with each other. How in her youth among her circle, women took pride in not sticking it to their Ex, taking as little as possible. How things have changed, eh?
What’s your Tradition? I’m involved in a strange synthetic Movement called Subud. It’s not a Complete Tradition so I still seek – but mostly inwardly now. But any overt Sufism means Islam – and I cannot countenance the rise of Islam in the West. Sufism would be fine – but real Sufism never comes without its Idiot Big Brother. I’ve tried but I cannot reconcile them. All things are whirling but my orbit is far from the Centre and must remain so – at least to the visible eye. Alas. Maybe the Khidr will take me on. I do love Green. I used to wear green pants in His honor (without knowing it of course).
Goddamn, somebody get him off the meds!
As I said before, our “Supercommittee” is the same thing as the removal of Papandreou and Berlesconi.
They dropped all remaining pretense of elected officials governing in our names, and replaced them with 12 banking stooges. Just because the rest of Congress was left in their offices doesn’t mean it wasn’t an economic coup.
This went pretty much without comment, except for the usual democracy supporters online. There was no corporate media outrage. They blankly accepted the idea, and went on to report on its “progress” without ever mentioning the incredible non-Constitutionality of the entire thing.
The impoverishment of the American people is taking place in slow motion, while we are transfixed by the travails of the 1%, and their stock market.
Sure, it’s taking a long time for it all to unravel, because, indeed, people will go through the motions of normalcy as long as possible.
It’s the reason I go to work, although I know that I will be fired at some point. I would like to eat and pay the bills as long as possible.
And so does everyone else.
But in describing how the Subud Latihan works to restore true humanity Sumohadiwidjojo seems to be describing just another guilt based mind poison to me.
I’m a comin’ for yur Ma, boy. Sharpenin’ my pitch fokh jus now matter of fact.
What happens to Australian governments who tell the US to fuck off?
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/cia_oz/cia_oz1.htm
anyone see where newt g(ett)ingrich said ‘child labor laws are stupid’?! and he is also campaigning for the privatization (stock market) of SS…wonder if he ll ask ron pall to be vp…?
You may be right. What does that long Java Word mean so I can respond?
…and relax there q-check- i spelled his name that way on purpose
If I was a person who believed in mysticism, portents of the future etc. I’d be worried right now. First, watched an old episode of the Twilight Zone very late Saturday night, the topic being how a totalitarian state operates. At the end, Rod Serling made his usual comment, cigarette in hand. This time he told us that any totalitarian state of whatever stripe has the same mantra, rigidly followed:
Logic is the enemy.
Truth is a menace.
Maybe it was the lateness of the hour but it hit home and I wrote it down. Then last night impulsively decided to watch Cabaret yet again, only this time the ominous head bashing scenes and increasing repression and attacks on Jews seemed…not like history but something current.
Left me uneasy. Now today JHK starts his blog using a paragraph of German words.
Is this my own personal Twilight Zone? Or am I on to something here? Just wondering. Something’s not right, that’s for sure, and stocking up on beans and rice isn’t going to save us.
“The end is near!” What end? Isn’t it really just change?
Everything passes…
Outer circumstances change, but does man (humanity) change?
Not as a rule. Not unless his/her motivations radically and permanently change, those that foster the practices that pursue the things of this world, personal gains, short-lived comforts, convenience, and illusory certainty.
What urges a change in the motivations within a person? Suffering, misery, crises, desperation, empathy, unexpected loving kindness received, or other similarly powerful experiences that shake us or wake us up.
Some of us feel it more than others, that is, the “upwising” and the imminent tear down/fall apart that makes way for the creative rebuild.
Metastable is the word. Crushed and looking up from the wheel rut, timing is difficult to predict but trend is not. All these fingers in the dike, duct tape and emergency transfusions are staving off collapse momentarily, but, like the Titanic foundering in the night, lights still on and band playing, it will go down.
At least the robber barons of old actually produced something, ie railroads and factories. The present generation elected to use their money as casino scrip, snort up their winnings and remove themselves to their castles and far from the fray.
As the doctor might advise the patient with an incurable debilitating disease: take a trip to a foreign land, the sun and sea air will buck you up and take your mind off your problms. How about Iran, they need some volunteers, or China – that will keep you busy and the audience well distracted. I’m sure it will work for a while.
Surley you know the latihan kejiwaan (spiritual exercise) of Subud works to restore true humanity according to his emminence Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo the founder. IMHO religions often use a variation of a ‘man is broken’ theme to justify claims of a higher true knowledge. So pick your poison, the choices are endless.
Funny you should mention that extreme sense of entitlement rich kids have. Just visited my pal who’s a map librarian at a big Canadian university and she made a similar comment about some of the students she has to endure. How they just assume they live charmed lives and will sail from one achievement to the next without ever having to even think about failure. She doesn’t care for them much.
The Black Swan Event could be the scale of an Iranian reaction to an attack by Israel/ U.S./NATO/Take Your Pick: a surface-to-surface missile barrage by Russian-supplied equipment that successfully takes out a number of ships in an American carrier group. Apparently, the U.S. has less-than-effective defense against the latest Russian models.
What’s that you say? American stealth fighters will take out those missile sites before any strike on nuclear sites? I guess that implies an American first-strike, even if Israel wants to be “first!”, since Israel doesn’t have the resources to remove the Iranian missile threat. Iran won’t make fine distinctions between Israel and America if Israeli fighters suddenly appear in their skies first. They will strike back at any American resources they can. So an American first-strike on Iranian missile batteries is a given.
Talk of a need for “some” ground troops to clean up after any (unsuccessful) attempt to take out Iran’s nuclear program is laughable. Iran is many times larger, in size and population, than Iraq. They may not like their current leadership (and in fact most Iranians are PRO American, something the neocons like to ignore), but they’ll turn on any occupiers with a vengence. Wouldn’t you? It will take 2 – 3 MILLION troops to have any hope of success. What’s that, our new employment program to mop up some of the millions without jobs?
Ultimately, it won’t matter, because all gaming scenerios with Iran end in failure and many end in thermonuclear war. Short of that, oil traffic from the Gulf is halted and economies tank on $400/barrel oil.
Now, what’s with all those neocons just itching to attack Iran? The ultimate diversion that leads us all to hell?
Just say no!
A little skepticism is a good thing Asoka. As to economic prdictions…
He is a great predictor of economic trends as he has predited 13 of the last 3 downturns!!
How did you get a name that was already assigned?
My Name?
Imagine the Black Death but on steroids.
==
I don’t need to imagine. I’m very familiar with the catalog of works by the blue-eyed devil dogs; So will others, soon enough. That’s why I say there’s windstorm of karma heading your way.
Sounds a bit conspirational, but what isn’t these days?
==
You might want to familiarize yourself with the following historians and their writings:
Carroll Quigley:
The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time
The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis
Anthony Sutton:
Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1917–1930
Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1930–1945
Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1945–1965
National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union
Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
Wall Street and FDR
Technological Treason: A catalog of U.S. firms with Soviet contracts, 1917–1982
Trilaterals Over America
How the Order Creates War and Revolution
How the Order Controls Education
Edwin Black:
The Nazi Nexus
IBM and the Holocaust
John Loftus:
The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People
Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks
Absalom,
One man’s ‘kicking the can’ is another man’s ‘circling the drain’. Actually, kicking the can might be a good thing: If you don’t know what you’re doing, where you’re going, or how to get there, why stamp an exclamation point on an incomplete sentence?
The good sculptor searches, probes, considers…keeps the visual dialogue open as long as possible before hammering out that final undercut into material that once removed, can never be replaced.
Wise people understand the big moves the small and the small changes the big. Unfortunately, the tip of the spear seems to no longer value the shaft and society begins to de-laminate…even those who would rather remain included.
re: This Is The End (song by the doors 1969)
I think I scared my folks with that song on a roadtrip where we were all in the family station wagon, kind of tired- and I wanted to us all hear some of my music (proto-goth teenager attempt at bonding)We slapped that thing in (was it an 8 track) and my parents got really weirded out and treated me different after that. Welcome to the alienation of our culture I guess.
I spose they being of same genetic stock as me, were hypnotised to the same degree by the melody, but there’s a line in there somewhere that talks of killing/raping parents so I suppose it was kind of a poorly thought out decision.
The analogy to the Titanic is often used to describe where we’re currently at right now and in many ways it’s pretty accurate. However, just remember, when the ship went down so did most of its crew in addition to a substantial number of the passengers. No doubt a few industrious types fashioned together some type of raft or simply clung to whatever flotsam or jetsam happened to be around at the time. Unfortunately, the icy waters still harvested its due dispite their efforts. So will be the same when this ship goes down. The best odds will be with those prepared both mentally and physically, flexibility ( stay liquid ) in both these regards will be essential. We all need to be alert ( stay frosty ) and use this time wisely to construct the best lifeboat possible and for fun just say FU to TPTB ( Occupy Anything ).
Now try teaching this to your kids without appearing to be even more deranged in their eyes.
Geez, and I thought teaching him how to drive was going to be tough…
It was is a Dark Stormy Night. And it’s gonna get alot more so before Morning. Lots of Mourning before then I reckon.
Oh his name! I could never get my tongue around it. All Religions say that Man is Fallen. All Progessive, Communist, and Utopian Movements say the opposite. So why are things so bad? They proceed to project ALL of the Evil (and their Evil) onto Conservatives – proving themselves wrong and Conservatives right in how fallen everyone is.
No Hindu /Buddhist teachers do not teach a ‘fallen Man’, thats the old testament.
Vedanta especially does not teach ‘sin and sinner’.
Memories of eight track tape players. So long ago. There was a special name for people who were easily weirded out back then. They were called uptight, and most parents were.
And to quote the other King – Rodney. Can’t we all just get along.
Nathan
I thought you “lived with the Yankee folk in the hills of old Vermont, where what you do all day depends on what you want”?
Have you expatriated yourself to Australia?
–WSP7
I see some parallels with humans and this beastly
‘society’.
The movies are priceless…’hes my son, he eats apples’, humpfry opens his mouth and see the 10″
fangs.
‘Marius Els with his pet hippo Humphrey at his farm in Free State, South Africa.’
see them go for a swim together.
You think with your guts and talk out your asoka.
Are they predictions or a speculations that you reference? “Could” is not “will”.
I’m still laughing, Neil. Great story.
Thanks, Metuselah.
That’s a lot of homework you’ve recommended. I’ve got a ton of material already, and won’t lie to you that I’ll rush to acquire the laundry list you’ve suggested. Also, I’m generally content to trust my instincts when it comes to assessing the breadth and depth of the sinister influences shaping the environment in which I live. I feel the effectors are nakedly apparent and unabashedly state their intentions outright. Not much need for a grand plot, in my view.
I do have a question though. There is a difference between being an Idea Producer and an Idea Consumer. Which do you consider yourself?
There is a difference between being an Idea Producer and an Idea Consumer. Which do you consider yourself?
==
Truth seeker.
Just Like a Human!
Marius Els, a farmer in South Africa, was found dead with bite wounds from his pet hippo, Humphrey. Els had spoken in the past about his relationship with Humphrey, whom he had found as a 5-month-old orphan.
“Humphrey’s like a son to me, he’s just like a human,” Els said.
“There’s a relationship between me and Humphrey and that’s what some people don’t understand.” He was photographed earlier this year riding Humphrey’s back. The animal, however, had scared some people before, once chasing a man and his grandson into a tree and frequently breaking into a local golf course and chasing golfers. Els’s body was found in the same river from which Humphrey had been rescued……………………
The passengers of the Titanic did not die equally, Lenny. And there were lifeboats, just not enough.
There were more first class passengers saved than steerage. Most of the lifeboats from first class did not hold all that they could. Draw from this whatever conclusion you may.
Some conspiracy theorists point out that three of the richest first class passengers to drown were opponents of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. John Jacob Aster, Benjamin Guggenheim and Ira Strauss. Personally, I do not subscribe to this theory, although it is interesting.
I don’t believe most of the owners who economized on steel plate and rivets then sent the SS Titanic out to break speed records were aboard that day, but I’m not a historian. Today the owners have their own corporate jets, castles with moats, private security forces, media outlets and millions of dollars to rewrite history. Today’s Titanic is the poorly built economy and they are busy burning the lifeboats by remote control.
Buck, forgive me, but that last comment seemed like a bit of feigned eloquence. I appreciate the good sculptor analogy, however.
So, will the masses continue marching behind the politicians toward the cliff-side, or, are we seeing the early phase of a real American revolution, perhaps culminating this coming Spring? I recognize any response can only be of an opinion, not an empirical fact; I’m just soliciting yours.
Translate.google.com wasn’t able to translate “schnorrers and schmiklers” as German or Yiddish. What does it mean? (I can kind of guess!).
And thanks for the youtube link for The Doors “The End”.
CharlieFoxTrot said:
another good one E; i especially like “peak intelligence”…
***************************************************************
In daily discussions with my friends, I talk about the world’s predicament as meaning, ABOVE ALL, “Peak Intelligence”. Whether I am in the USA, Amsterdam, Berlin, or Toronto, not ONE of these places feels like it has the mental intensity or even INTEREST in thinking from even one decade ago.
Even though Jim seems to feel that Europe’s population is somehow a bit “wiser”, I think much of that is a pose. When I was in Berlin a couple of years ago, it struck me that there were MORE spike-haired pin-brains THERE than even in a wack city like San Francisco. The “walking down the street mesmerized by your cellphone” phenomenon is also worse, especially in Northern Europe.
Europe certainly has the intelligence to design cities that bring people together instead of tearing them apart as American suburbs do. However, once you’re in those nice spots you find out rather quickly how xenophobic Europeans are. If you speak to strangers there, especially in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, you are seen as a weirdo at best and a psychotic at worst.
Finally, we should be GLAD that our immigration “problem” consists of illegal Mexicans. The large Muslim populations of Europe are a VASTLY greater danger … as Paris discovered a few years ago.
E.
That’s a clever dodge. Not a producer, not a consumer, but rather a Truth Seeker. A vacuous proclamation of one’s sense of virtue? I had a similar conversation with a fellow who described himself as a gypsy truth seeker. I can’t say what exactly he meant by this designation, but I learned he was the sort prone to very well argued yet conspirational type thinking, common for people who have very few original thoughts.
The conversation boiled down to me asking him how he scrutinized evidence, to thus embark upon truth testing. In other words, I was trying to find out if he were familiar with basic rules of logic. He wasn’t. What he meant by truth was really value. Values are typically based upon one’s beliefs, not evidence — big distinction.
Anyhow, I thank you for recommending some things to help a young person ponder these issues.
The people that count are still collecting assets and making money in the markets.
Last nights 60 minutes episode nearly made me vomit.
Luckily, I still had Family Guy and Football to save the evening.
Clearly there are no saviors on the horizon and much of America remains comfortable complacent.
Europe looks to be some sort of continuing proving ground to see how far the the PTB can go in taking over and looting nations of their treasures.
I’m guessing this thing could take another decade to play out. But to be sure, the seeds the rich are sowing will eventually bear bitter fruit.
There may never be justice for many – but there will be violence for some sooner or later.
No need to take JK to task for his impatience. We all feel the frustrations of surviving in an insane world. Now go back to your free-speech zone and hold up your sign that never makes the evening news.
Why Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the Only “Genius” in Economics
******************************************************************
He figured out a simple truth: Economists use a Gaussian distribution (the “bell curve”) to do their forecasts but there is no evidence that market movements are distributed as a Gaussian. Indeed, big gains and losses in market economics tend to happen in very compressed timeframes. The rest of the time, markets hover in trading ranges that seem like random movement.
In other words, market mathematicians (a.k.a. “quants”) abuse fundamental principles of statistics and/or their start with faulty premises. Look at LTCM. It took the US economy for $500B yet it was run by TWO NOBEL LAUREATES IN ECONOMICS!! Their CAPM model (Capital Asset Pricing Model) was the greatest monetary loss associated with an intellectual idea perhaps in all of history.
When are we going to stop lionizing a group of people who, on average, fail to beat a computer-run index fund for any asset class about 82% of the time? We always think that we can find the “geniuses” … who almost always revert to the class mean over time. A “mean” that’s below the averages.
E.
Absalom,
You’re right: that was pretentious as shit. I was trying to formulate a thought and resorted to flowery jibberish based on a recollection of The Black Taoist.
Good eye Abs and I’ll try and respond to your query tonight.
Wage, I didn’t know you had a blog, I’ll just clicked on your name by accident and saw your piece on the Titanic. I’ll check it out.
Yea, unless your lifeboat is a family farm (unlikely, these days) or a marketable skill (craftsman trade) people these days are woefully unprepared for the future. Good chance those in first class will have a better shot at survival but I wonder how many layers of private security will be enough to insulate them from the icy steel.
AZgog, I don’t think the creators of CDSs, CDOs and perpetual debt thought we’d hit the iceberg so soon. And you know, eventually those corporate jets will have to land and I kinda think the natives will be more than a little restless.
Whatever history is written about this time we’ve all got a ticket to the last game of the series. But like all series, there’s always another season (unless the comiss kills the league). And as such the teams will most likey have a different roster. Maybe with a little more training and/or practice we might just make the squad.
Or maybe, how ’bout we take the ball and start our own darn league, no 1% or banksters allowed…
I’ve got to go now, I’m begining to sound like Ayn Rand doing a sports commentary…
I’ve been remiss in actually commenting on Blue Bus Scenario so far, I’m ready now.
JHK seems to think that because things are falling apart financially everywhere that the whole system will necessarily fail. Makes sense but I think this is false and we have been down this road before. Ever tried to get money from somebody who doesn’t have any? It’s not easy and a whole lot of pretending has to go on for a while before any truth is faced up to.
Logic and clear thinking may be on JHK’s side but the ability of the Powers That Be to keep things rolling by passing the buck and other chicanery has been severely underestimated. The race to the bottom will be temporarily slowed by several unfolding games of musical chairs as blame is passed along from chair to chair.
Maybe all the way through the holidays if we are lucky enough. Lets hope so. That’s my prediction.
Eggnog anyone?
Right on.
Chicanery, legerdemain and eggnog it is!
(B’lieve I’ll have mine with a large splash of dark rum… while we can still get it. ;o)
I reject dualities and the box they put you in. It’s an old trick, the Hegelian dialectic. We are all victims its machinations, myself included. This can’t be avoided. It is what it is. I think what you’re really asking is what animates me. It is revenge. I’m Shylock and I’m and going to poke Master William’s eyes out and the eyes of those lords that commissioned him. That’s my contribution to humanity. It is a big one.
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Dear Maomao…
Got gold?
Best,
Debt
Thank you for your opinion.
Mine is a thankless task: going up against the religion of Orlov and the worship of doomsterism for the past 40 years (only 8 on CFN). True believers ignore the data and continue believing.
Like someone said earlier, they are focused on minutiae (trees) of hedge funds, CDS’s, and other macroeconomic niceties, and are not seeing the forest.
E. said not to get hung up on details of the predictions (numbers and such) and look instead at the TRENDS. OK, here are some USA trends for you:
Life expectancy has increased by 30 years during the 20th century.
Infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold.
The number of cases of (and the death rate from) the major killer diseases–such as tuberculosis, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, and pneumonia–has fallen to fewer than 50 per 100,000.
Air quality has improved by about 30 percent in major cities since 1977. I began watching this one around 1970.
Agricultural productivity has risen 5- to 10-fold.
Real per capita gross domestic product has risen from $4,800 to $31,500.
Real wages have nearly quadrupled from $3.45 an hour to $12.50.
Even most poor Americans have a cornucopia of choices that a century ago the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts could not have purchased. Today more than 98 percent of American homes have electricity and a flush toilet. (Don’t downplay this: most of the world does not have such luxuries.)
Those are trends that E. does not mention. He would rather focus on numbers that have 9 or 12 zeroes after them and propagate the fear that this week it is all going to come crashing down: Europe, the USA, and Thanksgiving ruined… this week.
Bah humbug!
I was waiting for the closing bell to post again and the DOW did not go down today anywhere near its declines of recent months. I mean we are nowhere near a DOW of 4,000, which has been the prediction for the LAST THREE OR FOUR YEARS.
The DOW closed at 11547.31 down 248.85 points? (-2.11%?) as of Nov 21 4:03pm ET
Where is the TREND, Mr. E.? Where is the European collapse? Where is the fecal matter that is supposed to have been splattered world wide today?
Whoever said TPTB can string this along for years was right… TPTB do not benefit from a completely broken system. TPTB will continue to kick the can down the road… and you will have your Thanksgiving dinner because the grocery shelves will not become empty this week.
Ozone,
Having the necessary mechanical appertances and plumbing ability to create your own still will be critical to have in the new economy.
And if it doesn’t quite work out, well, hey, next rounds on you.
Splish – splash, There’s always an upside…
Wait a minute — my stock portfolio got hammered so instead of Princeton I went to UC Davis to save money and got pepper-sprayed on Friday by Lt. John Pike, who thought he was spraying his roses for aphids:
http://www.reelseo.com/uc-davis-pepper-spray-video/
Will they still hire me at Goldman or will I be branded a troublemaker now?
Fair enough, I guess. Instead of duality, I see some opt for infinite, rhetorical vagary.
Thanks for writing.
hey really, where in the world do you live? it sure isn t the usa i live in…talk about the forest for the trees…for example: wtf good does it do to make $12/hr when everyFUCKINGthing costs so much more?! do you think Occupy is a fad or a joke? it s because the system has been hijacked- every part of it- and we are cold, hungry, sick, and tired of watching that goddamned can get kicked down the road instead being, i don t know, RECYCLED??!! the fact remains that, as a planet, we have reached the point of (wait for it, class…:) Peak Bullshit- a good five or six thousand years late, IMHO, but hey, you know the expression…
Just for the record I am a big JK fan, read many of his books, AND I really appreciate Asoka’s comments. He is the voice of reason. Since JK failed so miserably at his prediction of Y2K disaster (ie there was none. THAT was embarrassing) I completely ignore his timing estimates. But he does have the trend right and for the right reasons. He also failed to predict what a loser Obama would turn out to be.
Keep, keepin’ ’em honest Asoka.
On Forbes Website today.(BTW, I got this from Max Keiser’s site today.
Did someone at FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) do Crozine a favor and waive his registration requirements?
[Anyone actively involved in the member’s investment banking or securities business must be registered……FINRA’s online records disclose that Corzine was last registered in 1999 with Goldman, Sachs & Co.]—Bill Singer, Forbes
How many times do we have to see this play out. If you’re Madoff, the SEC let’s basic logic and math slide while the officers pass their business cards to the Maestro.(or Monstro)
If you’re Corzine the Govt., likes you so much you don’t need the basic requirements to run a global mutual fund.–Oh boy to be an insider–there simply are no laws–It must be great to be a god in this paradise. No wonder they hate regulations–that’s just for the little people (99%).
Now you see what happens–Oh and Obama wanted to appoint Corzine into the cabinet. Not only did he fail miserably at the global casino table but his clients money has disappeared.
Celente is fuming. I’ve heard more of his rants in the last day or so.
Yes, I have a blog, but I wasn’t able to post for a while, and just started again. That’s kind of funny that I had just written about the Titanic.
The upper class has a plan, but I don’t think it’s going to work out so well for them.
If they all survive, and we don’t – who will be their servants? Who will grow their food and mine their coal?
Doh!
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2004/08/driving_on_the_.html
Wage,
I’m sure they’ll find some useful idiots to carry their water for them–Don’t they always.
As long as they have something someone wants they can get people to do things for them.
rhetorical vagary
==
It’s only that to those who are uninitiated. You live in an emotional and informational cocoon, and so what I say to you does not resonate. I don’t blame you, just as wouldn’t blame a newborn baby for not understanding the universe beyond the need to eat and shit.
…it is also obvious the banksters who have gotten their slimy sausage fingers in the pieholes of “our” leaders have never been aware the true living conditions we labor under because they don t CARE…and they ve vastly underestimated both the power of communication and the strength & community that comes from having nothing to lose and dignity to gain- and if you/they think we can be stopped by crushing our rights, our heads, or turning everyone out in the cold, y all are as stupid as, well, a box of fat, weak, money-grubbing bankers…
Hi,
Some of the money was in equities and houses that lost their nominal value. It never really was real money but asset values that depreciated, so it never was dollars in the bank. Other money did change hands in various payouts and financial gambling schemes, but that pails in comparison, really. The Fed created trillions in new money by lending it at (basically) 0% to various financial institutions. I’m convinced they gave some of that away even if they claim it was all repayable loans. I don’t believe it. Their accounting is quite crooked, IMHO. They won’t even say which institutions got the money in front of Congressional panels.
The money that went to Iraq to fund the reconstruction went into various pockets of US and UK (mostly) defense contractors, whose connections to our leaders such as Cheney is just one big coincidence, I’m sure. The Iraq’s got some of it, like a 10% trickle down I’m assuming.
That’s a start at least…
“beyond the need to eat and shit”
Well, what else is there really, besides the, uh, perpetuation of the species?
I appreciate your contrarian views on this site in which the prevailing view is “WASF’d”.
I was off this site for a few months doing productive things like riding my bike 300 mile/week, gardening & switching to a vegan diet. I really got some good info from books such as “The China Study”, & “Forks Over Knives” (along with the documentary of the same name – “FOK”).
Hi all,
Just back from Vegas, lured into a cheap weekend deal with my wife in return for hearing a timeshare pitch. When the rep got to the ROI portion and asked me how many years I expect to be going on vacation, imagine the look on face when I replied “2 or 3” (I’m 52). So I did a bit of explaining and my wife goes “that’s what I have to listen to at home” LOL. It was good fun. Otherwise, the party goes on with the clueless remaining clueless and those like myself enjoying it while we can. If at all possible it’s getting crazier and crazier with lineups at shows and restaurants, prices through the roof and DJ parties galore.
Then yesterday, still at the hotel I uncharacteristically open CNN and watch the shameless fuck Newt Gingrich berate the OWSers for not getting decent jobs and a haircut. “What do they think, money grows on trees?” says the cynical crook who makes a living selling political patronage to lobbyists. I wanted to punch out the flatscreen TV but that would end up costing more than the entire vacation. Maybe I should have anyway.
Hey let’s have fun while we can because as Jim points out, this is all coming to an end and sooner than most expect. Ooo wee!
Love the stuff on Ayn Rand.
I am not a bit surprised that the idea that American Marines will now ‘ have a BASE in Australia’ is being peddled by the airy-fairy.
The facts. It has been agreed that the marines can rotate thru the AUstralian training base 250 at a time,by 2013, rising to possibly, and I repeat, possibly 2500 by 2017. This procedure has been used for the Malaysian defence forces, the Indian defence forces, the Indonesian defence forces, the NZ defence forces, and quite a few others of which I cant be bothered mentioning. The Usa Marines have been rotating thru this base 50 at a time for a while now. It works well for them and it works well for us, we charge , they pay. Like everyone else. It is one of the worlds biggest training facilities, composed of terrain that is chilling (in a very warm way) in the extreme.
US marines will be subject to AU law, to AU currency, to AU food, to AU social norms, ( which may be one of their difficulties on par with the terrain) but so far the only fatalities of US trainees has been those of the literal Darwin sort, nutso stuff, like diving into pools that clearly are signed CROCS.
We intend to take very good care of your trainees, as we have of all other nations rotaters. They will be fed well, re educated, medically attended to, equipped especially, and hopefully come out of it with a good realisation of their own capabilites and limitations. This is what the base is about. Among other things.
Sharing a military base with other nations has long been a practice in the AU defence forces, it enhances and expands their experiences and our own. GW Bush asked back in 2003 for a base of his own , but that is against AU law. He was surprised at this, oddly. This current arrangement is a gracious gesture on the part of AU in line with our delicate relationship with China which is, you will appreciate, more valuable. Obviously.
So rest easy. Your 250 blokes will be ok. We regard them as special cases, to be somewhat cushioned and guarded, as the Northern Territory is no place for dimwitted or the suburban, they may even enjoy it after a while.
“So rest easy. Your 250 blokes will be ok.”
———–
Hope you guys have some rape crisis clinics near the base.
Wherever USA GIs go, there are rapes of local girls (sometimes 12 or 13 year olds).
Well, what else is there really
==
Everything! Writing our future!
Asoka, I typically enjoy the skepticism you bring to the discussion, but I don’t think the statistics you’ve presented in your post prove your point with any legitimacy. In fact, there are some obvious reasons why those statistics are tenuous support for the advancement, or arguable lack thereof, of the American standard of living for last 40 years; compared to what’s possible, that is.
I’ve heard statements from different academics, as seemingly learned as yourself, that the conditions of slavery were much better in the 18th century than they were in the 16th, so were those facts sufficient grounds to counter the contentions of abolitionists?
And really, we’re all thankful for flush-able commodes, but are you really claiming something like: because we have access to XBOXes and smartphones, we should consider our standard of living better than that of the Rockefeller’s?
Wow. Too much Fox News?
See the descriptions of Kali Yuga humanity. Look at icon of the Dancing Shiva. He dances on top of a little man – the dwarf soul. In the Shaivite Scriptures, the lowest type of man is called “pasu” the beast man. In short, ordinary people are Unenlightened. And generally more or less impure, immoral, and fallen.
The whole Human Race is fallen from its Satya Yuga estate. And each person is fallen from their Divine Condition.
Maybe your objection is about Original Sin – a slightly different concept. The East doesn’t teach people are born evil – just fallen compared to their original state. Impure, Ignorant, Immoral – all a bit different than saying that someone deserves eternal hell.
If people were fine as they are (as K Dog thinks) then there would be no need for Religion of any kind.
Advaita Vedanta is the most elitist and intellectual of the Vedanta Schools. But they have trouble admitting there is a World or Individuals to begin with. Look at the more popular schools of dual or qualified Vedanta as well as Shaivite and Shakti Schools. Before One can talk about whether Humanity is Fallen, one has to admit Humanity exists in the first place. These other Schools and Sects have no problem in that direction.
wage, any chance you can post a link? i think i d like to see what you have to say about a thing or two…
An emotional and informational cocoon? So say you, and that’s fine; I’m glad to see you’ve formulated your own opinion on something, even if it amounts to merely ad hominem condescension toward me.
For the record, much of what I’ve read from you resonated, until the multidimensional conspiracy blurt, which may well have some merit. But when I asked for clarification, I was scolded with a recommendation of 30 books or so, instead of your own delineation of what it was I might not have understood about your large acronym, er whatever it was. Like a Catholic nun who smacks kids with rulers and then makes them copy the dictionary, or something of the sort.
Lastly, you make some sort of recalcitrant remark about my limited understanding of the universe beyond the need to eat and shit, as if you’ve ordained yourself the spiritual arbiter of everyone not like you. A duality indeed.
Sorry for the bruised ego.
And the women refused to row back and rescue the men in the water – men who had let them have their place. Somehow or other you forgot about that part. More Marixst equality no doubt.
The whole Human Race is fallen from its Satya Yuga estate. And each person is fallen from their Divine Condition.
==
No, those who are fallen are those who are learned and dance on people’s souls. They are fallen because they are cruel and greedy and are little more than learned beasts. This perfectly describes all religious organizations, but in particular the Vatican.
No. I was just trying to expand E.’s narrow notion of how to measure a trend to take in a century of time. Things have gotten BETTER in the last hundred years. In human history there are temporary setbacks, and then there are advances.
For example, Argentina defaulted in 2001, and now has a GDP growth rate of 9.2%. Over the long haul things are getting BETTER not worse. But many here think economic collapse or hyperinflation is the end of the world. Iceland, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, etc. say otherwise.
The religion preached here is that no country can indefinitely get away with spending more than it makes. But hyperinflation is not a death sentence, only a temporary (and painful) set back.
Furthermore, quality of life should not only measured by economic indicators. There are things more important than money.
Wow. Too much jumping to conclusions.
I do not have cable TV at home and do not have access to Fox News … unless I am in a hotel or an airport or a barbershop.
“schnorrers and schmiklers”
-James Howard Kunstler-
Wow, JHK, thanks for the new word. “Schnorrers” is a Yiddish term for sponges, beggars, or freeloaders. This word, of which I had never heard, returns 124,000 GOOGLE hits – by itself.
“Schmikler” returns 591,000 GOOGLE hits – although I’m less clear on the definition of “schmiklers,” which does not seem to have an actual definition.
Nevertheless – entering “schnorrers and schmiklers” as a GOOGLE search, in quotes, returns only 6 hits.
SIX TOTAL HITS- –
And EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE SIX HITS is related to this week’s CFN entry.
So, JHK – you get points for creativity.
And you get points for your purposeful look at gloom and doom – every single week.
And why anyone would spend 8 minutes – let alone 8 years – pointing out to JHK’s readers that this gifted, talented, and CREATIVE wordsmith, is sometimes wrong on specifics, and sometimes wrong on his timing.
Gratuitously pointing this out over and over and over – is simply a bizarre thing to be doing.
Especially on JHK’s own website.
Bizarre, I say. And certainly counterproductive – in the larger scheme of human endeavors.
(and perhaps something only a schnorrer would do)
No wonder the internet is generating mostly a bunch of human noise – and no productive consensus.
Crap.
Absalom,
Metuselah is the sort of troll that all blogs with intellectual content have. I think they stamp them out in a factory in Hoboken, NJ. They claim that OTHER people are ignorant, cruel, etc. and then they proceed to decimate not just other people’s OPINIONS but then the PEOPLE THEMSELVES and proclaim himself possessed of Divine wisdom.
This guy has threatened to take a baseball bat to other people’s heads, smash their faces in, etc.. You got lured in because you actually agreed with some opinion that he uttered and then when you didn’t walk the ENTIRE intellectual plank with him, he started to call you names. The threats would ensue later unless you do the smart thing: SHUN him. Do not make ANY direct replies.
People like this are disgusting beings because while being absolutely consumed with an unquenchable rage they proclaim that THEY are gentle, wise, etc.. He’s just another bully. The worst remaining on the site by far. There are a few other pains in the ass but at least the other pests don’t deify themselves before they eviscerate others.
E.
ProCon, did you actually look at the Google results? Or did you just take Google’s word that there were 124,000 results?
I decided to look at all of them. When I got to page 87 of the results, this is the message Google gave me:
When I clicked on the link, supposedly to see the rest of the results, there were none. I was taken back to page one of the results.
In other words, be a little more skeptical about Google. What you thought were 124,000 results was actually only 880 results.
Do the experiment yourself. I have done it with numerous searches, especially those that Google tells me there are millions of results. The truth is there are never more than 1,000 results.
I suppose Google just assumes that no one will ever look through 88 pages of results to find out the truth: Google lies about its results numbers.
I would tell Google what I told E. Numbers have meaning and should not be used carelessly.
So (JH) K. has discerned that we will not be making it to The Castle again this week. This should come as no surprise, seeing as most recent attempts to communicate with the castle, let alone communicate with anyone about the castle, have been met with more weirdness, complicated replies and obfuscation. At times (JH) K. wonders if this trek is worth it, seeing as this vicious circle he treads nears a local cliff … Later in the week he knows the thoughts of the locals will, once again, devolve into outlandish xenophobic ramblings fixating on who should and should not be let in to use the finite resources of the land. K., a land surveyor, will be so tired of these thoughts that he will not be able to lift his head. After all, isn’t the castle the greatest resource? And is he not the outsider who is trying to contact the castle. Stay tuned …
“No wonder the internet is generating mostly a bunch of human noise – and no productive consensus.
Crap.”
====================================================
The net is a big place, blog comment sections not so much. It’s not good not appropriate to confuse the two. It would be a mistake to think blog remoras are capable of much more than being self-satisfied their weekly activity somehow equates to the hard work of real activism.
On to current events –
Wage, and all other conspiracy theorists – – –
For some reason, every time I have seen a TV today, I have seen Michael Bloomberg’s billion-dollar-net-worth face. And he was talking about – WHAT ELSE – that sad deluded Muslim wanna’ be SOLO terrorist. And Bloomberg’s mug was followed by a picture of a couple of batteries, some pipe, and what looked to be micro-Christmas tree lights.
I’m not saying this guy was up to any good.
I am saying that the detection/arrest of this individual did NOT POSSIBLY JUSTIFY this airtime.
So – – either TPTB are using this Terrorist Arrest as a distraction for OWS, Gingrich, Pepper Sprayed College Students, and European Economic Collapse looming on the horizon – –
Or else – the average American news watcher as dumb as a sack of turnips.
That turnip thing – is my best guess, still.
bruised ego
==
It’s very clear that you are an ignorant sob. This is your own admission. You have very limited knowledge of anything beyond the propaganda that was fed to you.
I compared you to a baby, because in terms of your knowledge and experience, and therefore also your emotional programming, that’s what you are. If I hurt your feelings, too bad. That’s part of your education. There’s only one remedy to your condition and that is to read those books. Maybe then we can speak as equals.
Another bruised ego of a gov mafia employee and a hypocrite. You know it, I know it, and everyone with a fair mind knows it.
“once again, devolve into outlandish xenophobic ramblings fixating on who should and should not be let in to use the finite resources of the land.”
-jarrollin-
Ah, great jarrollin – another one of the “America needs 600,000,000+ residents” cheerleaders, I presume.
You do know this is a “peak oil type?” website.
And that prior to Columbus and Oil – the place only supported about 10% of our present population.
Have you ever read Collapse? Or Overshoot?
You need to.
Absalom, while none of us have the scope of knowledge, the penetrating insight, and the certainty about the Vatican/etc. that Metuselah has, all us lesser beings limp along and do the best we can.
I hope you do not allow Metuselah’s insults to drive you away. I have appreciated your comments and hope you continue to contribute.
No cheerleading here. I honestly wish the whole planet would chill out on the baby-making. Maybe if I ask nicely … No wait, that never works. Maybe reverse psychology, “Hey everybody have a ton more babies.” No, that too would be ineffectual. The fact is, overpopulation is what it is on this or that side of an arbitrary geographical border.
I heard some conspiracy theories about the Vatican/Jesuits, the Knights Templar (actually Satan worshippers I’m told), and and the international banks, but now it just seems that Goldman Sachs are our new overlords. Ex-GS people or affiliates are in charge of many (most?) major national banks. This is definitely true in the US, and now after a wave of personnel changes Europe, it is happening there, too. Someone said they work for the Rothschilds. I dunno, really. I for one welcome our new GS overlords.
How about this. Carry around a sign (or wear a t-shirt) that says…
“Hey, everyone. Stop fucking!”
Ok – so – in the book of Asoka. – GOOGLE search numbers are subject to some weird sort of question.
And in the book of asoka. – casting an aspersion on GOOGLE search numbers – is the same thing as actually producing a useful thought.
Doesn’t matter.
You come onto CFN most every week to namecall and criticize JHK and most of his commenters.
You’re a schumck.
Which returns 346,000,000 GOOGLE results.
Asoka is correct. Predictions on this blog are likely too pessimistic and surely poorly timed. It’s always the rioting and systemic collapse will occur next month, or within the next 6 months, and so on. Yet the beat goes on.
I don’t like the bailouts, or the money printing, cause it props up inefficiency, but they can go on for a long long time, especially money printing in a deflationary setting.
Timing, not just trends, does matter. An up trend or a down trend can always be justified by a random starting point. The stock market has gone up every year since 2008, so we are enjoying an uptrend, correct?
Or it has decreased significantly since its high in 2002, so we are on a downtrend, right?
But wait, it has produced a decent return since 1990, must be a long term up trend and the 2002 highs were a bubble now corrected…
If you say…there’s gonna be a recession next year…and a recession doesnt occur for 5 years…the prediction was wrong and the fact that a recession ‘eventually’ occured is worthless since everyone knows there will be recessionary periods after every expansion.
Sure the stock market may go to 4000 someday, but if it is 20 or 50 years from now that doesnt make JHKs predictions good. Timing does matter if you want to be in the prediction business.
And no doubt society will someday collapse, every society does, that is an easy prediction thatwill eventually be proven true.
Those claiming to see the future clearly gain credibility with accurate, timely predictions
Newt Gingrich….now there’s a true schmuck. He divorces his wife while she’s in the hospital with cancer, and he cheats on his other wife and blames it on his love of America. (I have never met a woman named America, but if I did, I bet she’d be fat and depressed.) Then he’s got the balls to champion “family values.” What a turkey. (or rotten stinky elephant as it were)
“The fact is, overpopulation is what it is on this or that side of an arbitrary geographical border.”
-jarrollin-
Except the US uses 25% of planetary resources at our present population.
And we add 1 million LEGAL immigrants per year.
And – mostly because of this – we add 3 million souls/year to the US economy.
And, because of this, the US will be the only major country with a STILL GROWING population by 2050.
If humans or our civilization make it that far.
Which seems unlikely.
Drill, baby, drill.
Bomb, baby, bomb.
Grow, baby, grow.
It’s all the same – in the end.
==============================
Google: Narayana Guru, He built temples for the ‘untouchables’ …check Swami Chinmayananda
You misunderstand much, esp. about the best
Vedanta [not hare krisna with the idols]
‘The whole Human Race is fallen from its Satya Yuga estate. And each person is fallen from their Divine Condition.’………..and this is in keeping with the Divine Condition!
Don’t know if that would work. But with good marketing, could be a hell of a money maker. How about bumper stickers saying, “Stop knocking people up! It’s good for the planet.”
“No wonder the internet is generating mostly a bunch of human noise – and no productive consensus.”
Merely a reflective of our disagreements and dischord in “real life,” I’d say. There’s 7 billion people on the planet, and many billions of them have internet access. Each one of these people is a unique bag of opinions and beliefs (with a lot of this based on irrational hogwash like religion), so good luck getting anyone to agree on anything 100% with you.
That said, I’d just like to put it out there that I agree 100% with whatever asoka says, just for kicks and cuz I’m tired of trying to think on my own. (Hmmm, time to don flame retardant internet track suit now.)
I’m also making a personal pledge to not call any of you any nasty names this week, like fuckstick, asshat, moron, dipshit, etc.
Even if you are one and really deserve it. Gratuitous niceness is chicken soup for the soul. (So I’ve heard.)
This goes for Qshtik, too, who will inevitably piss me off somehow. But I forgive him in advance.
‘most every week ‘
No! numerous times a day, some days.
I may have advised you to ignore the troll, but do what you will!
Keep up the good work warning people about ‘the numbers’.
From a geo-political point of view, this is why it’s good that our economy is waning, enough of this over-consumption crap. Right?
Infant mortality rates have fallen 10-fold.
==============
Groan…here we go again.
Given your statement above, and assuming “fold” means “times,” if infant mortality was 7 out of 1000 in the year 2000 (it was roughly that number according to one site I googled) what was the number of infant deaths per 1000 in the year 1900?
As in high school, to receive credit you must show your calculations.
Reminder: At 3:57AM today you said: “Numbers mean something and should not be used carelessly.”
Gratuitous niceness is chicken soup for the soul. (So I’ve heard.)
==
Just the opposite! Spoiled children are just that, spoiled children.
Jimbo…I’ve lost track of what you do for fun anymore. Maybe you could enlighten all of us?
ProCon said: “And we add 1 million LEGAL immigrants per year.”
============
Yes! Thank God!
Today in El Paso the largest naturalization ceremony happened and they interviewed some of the new citizens, like the guy who is getting his citizenship because he is serving in the Air Force.
You think people willing to die for the nation should be denied citizenship?
Fiddlin.
As in playing hillbilly violin.
Post Script
Today’s new USA citizens came from 22 countries. The more the merrier. Immigrants are job creators. Multiculturalism strengthens the USA.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/business/economy/31view.html
That would mean it was 70 out of 1000 in 1900, yes?
This isn’t a trick question is it?
“From a geo-political point of view, this is why it’s good that our economy is waning, enough of this over-consumption crap. Right?”
-jarrollin-
Concur, jarrollin. And it’s quite likely that almost none of our 1,000,000 US immigrants per year – would come in to the US and stay in the US without AFDC, and Section 8 housing, and all of the other subsidies that LEGAL immigrants are entitled to immediately, and you know, LEGALLY.
========================
Eleuthero – you posted a thought provoking piece late last week on CFN –
To the effect that your LEGAL immigrant college students – had diminished drastically in intellectual quality, for the past ten years.
You suggested that the “Russians,” or whomever, were exporting their undesirables, while the better Russians stayed home. (forgive me if I’m screwing this up – it’s from memory – so please correct if necessary)
============================
Anyway, E – let me suggest that it’s not the quality of immigrant that has gone down.
Rather – it is that the US system is rewarding graft/sloth/whatever – among many citizens and most LEGAL immigrants – or at least among those that frequented your college classes.
That – plus the fact that most of California, where you are?, is so overcrowded and with so few actual job opportunities – that government programs and the resultant problems – are the most likely result, among the population you serviced.
Just a thought, E.
I’d like to hear what YOU think.
===========
And you’re right, anti-soak, and I’ll quit now – – but, DAMN, what a waste of JHK bandwidth RI’s been doing on an otherwise finely gloomy Monday.
Thank you. I have lots more on my home computer, which I’ll start posting later this week. After today’s events, I’m even more inclined to share them.
Q, go back to your spreadsheets. All knowledge and wisdom can be derived from audit spreadsheets.
Asoka, thanks for the response.
Well, it’s stupid to try and argue that things haven’t gotten better over the last 100 years in the narrow senses of 1st-world life expectancy, disease management, and a bidet in every affluent household; these are nominal advancements for a culture as keen with technology as ours. By the way, your earlier post said nothing of “things more important than money” to be considered when assessing quality of life, so I’m only questioning the selective use of economic statistics you’ve offered.
I’m asking: do you deny the notion that prosperity and disparity are inexorably linked, insofar as Global Economics is presently understood, especially considering that a handful of cultures have advanced while others stagnate or decline?
For example, there are far more adults and children dying of starvation and treatable diseases than there were 100 years ago, correct? There is no doubt the ability to reconcile this statistic, perhaps not the will; however, the resources and industriousness do exist like not 100 years ago. I will grant you that.
These things can’t be dismissed as a trivial setbacks of basic economics. There is in my opinion, a deliberateness to the inequity, which seems obvious. You make apple and orange comparisons of the economic ups and downs of various nations, but their economies too can be argued to have been boosted by bubbles not yet burst, so your slippery slope positioning raises a lot of questions.
You seem to have taken the merely contrarian position of martyrdom on this site.
Thanks for clarifying.
Except that it wasn’t a prediction (he said things COULD go South, which is a possibility, not a prediction), and he didn’t say that it would happen in 3 days, he said there are 3 days worth of food in the supply chain. Did you actually even read the paragraph you pasted?
“You think people willing to die for the nation should be denied citizenship?”
-asoka.-
“immigrants are net job creators”
-asoka-
“I’ve advised you to ignore the troll”
-anti-soak-
Sorry, antisoak.
Since he’s against the US military – It’s neat that asoka. wants immigrants to fill military positions.
And since this peak-everything blog is dedicated to the end of the grow, grow, grow economy – It’s neat that the only justifications that asoka. has for US immigration are related to economic growth.
Weird. And a waste of space.
=======================
On another note – –
On another note, and especially to you Australians-
Out of all of the phenomenally expensive US military hardware that has been created and deliberately scrapped out – just a few years later.
And out of all of the men whose lives have been sacrificed to the US military over the years since 1860. (including asoka’s proud and growing immigrant contingent)
I believe that 2500 US Marines will form a very inexpensive and very low-stress asset on your continent.
Their purpose is to serve as a liaison and a low visibility “trip-wire,” and that is all.
Maybe you’d prefer 2500 Chinese Marines, instead.
Give it time.
And meaningless.
I could just as easily say: “Things could go NORTH”
(it’s not a prediction… I’m saying things COULD go North, which is a possibility, not a prediction)
Just as meaningless… unless you muster some evidence to support the opinion you are expressing.
Korea : two US soldiers have been accused of raping local girls.
Iraq: gang-rape of a 14-year-old girl by U.S. troops
Oregon: Two U.S. Army soldiers accused of raping two teenaged girls in downtown
Iraq: An American soldier yesterday pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of three members of her family
Washington: U.S. military personnel have been charged with acts of sexual violence toward local women
USA Army: three things the guys let you be if you’re a girl in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke
Japan: American soldiers are also said to have raped hundreds, maybe thousands, of Okinawan women
Colombia: U.S. Soldiers Accused of Raping 12-Year-Old Girl in Colombia
Hide your local women in Australia!
Thanks RHENRY,
I’ve heard others on this site reference Nassim Nicholous Talebs Black Swan. It’s been some time since I read it, but he seemed to be poking fun at economists and analysts who plot stock market trends on a traditional Gaussian curve. He tried to argue, I think, that fractals are a better way for predicting potential outliers, which contradicted the very idea of a Black Swan event, anyhow. What say you?
Aside from the agreed notion that the economy might just continue to peak and valley for 20-50 years, there’s a new dimension to all of these dire predictions that’s making people wonder more about a nearing collapse. That would be the increasing protests across the globe. In risking the logical fallacy of an appeal to the people: Are all these protesters, whether of the Western or Middle Eastern regions of the Earth just bat-shit crazy? Do their issues, the larger economic issues too, stem from shady banking practices along with Peak Oil claims? Can it be reasoned that these factors will conduce to an expedited collapse, not a forestalled one?
Just interested in the opinions. Thanks for sharing?
ProCon said:
Inexpensive? It is just as expensive as AFDC and Section 8 housing for immigrants, except immigrants create jobs and contribute to the economy. The GIs are just a drain with their free housing, free meals, free clothing, free transportation, free medical care, all paid for by us, the taxpayers.
And, yes, they do take taxes out of my meager but hard-earned (pre-paid in 45 years of work) Social Security, to house soldiers in Australia and all over the globe. A waste of taxpayer money. The military should be cut in half, made more efficient, less wasteful, and stop being world police.
If the Chinese wanted Australia, 250 US Marines are not going to stop them. China is smarter than to use overt force when they can simply gain control over the economy. As of May 2011 the largest single holder of U.S. government debt was China, with 26 percent of all foreign-held U.S. Treasury securities.
TPTB have their heat-seeking laser-guided sights trained on all Black Swans. A Nicholous Talebs Black Swan event will not be allowed to happen.
That was funny. Predator drones on the look out for any off-colored swans. Holy shite!
You just have to link on my name.
Of course, it may appear to be inexpensive to you, progressive. I dont know. Au charges the going rate for all, although, I must admit, that 250 is one of the lowest contingents in recent times that has been allowed to rotate thru the training base, but whether that is due to the cost to the USA or other factors I am unable to say. Perhaps it is. Perhaps 250 is all the USA defence could afford, or maybe its all the AU training base could accomodate in 2013. Lots of nations defence forces rotate thru this base for training. Quite a queue.
Of course , you mention the 2500, but you fail to see that number is not set in concrete and only falls due for consultation in 2017. 7 years from now. A lot takes place in 7 years, as, of all people, Americans should know. AU may, indeed, prefer 2500 Chinese marines by then, one never knows, does one. We might even prefer it sooner. You just never know.. .. Of the Chinese military that have rotated thru here for training, no adverse reports have come forth. I am sure, if there were, they would have.
Asoka still has not figured out where this base is, an event of ignorance that leads him to believe it is in some suburban mall, but hey ho, believe me, I ‘d back the ladies of the Northern Territory any day. Any ladies that are near this base must be tougher than any marine , any soldier or specialist on the face of the earth.
Lets just hope these USA marines get back to you safely, in good health, and sane, this is the fervent wish of all Australians, regardless of political perspective. And this is our mission. To return them to you in better nick than that which they arrived with. Which is what Americans have paid for, after all.
“I believe that 2500 US Marines will form a very inexpensive and very low-stress asset on your continent.- p2c-
“Inexpensive? It is just as expensive as AFDC and Section 8 housing for immigrants, except immigrants create jobs and contribute to the economy.”
-asoka., contributing human noise-
do you even read what you write?
2500 Marines cost as much as the US spends on AFDC and Section 8 for millions of LEGAL immigrants???
And the planet destroying US economy needs to GROW some more?
Sure, asoka.. Turkle’s right – whatever you say, the entire CFN thread may as well agree with.
JHK, too. No point in writing his column every week. Just let asoka. write the thing.
I’m out of here for a while.
Thanks for making CFN more useless this Monday, and for always undercutting our host, who has the brains and the balls to actually write a weekly blog about peak resources.
http://www.kunstler.com/blog/2010/07/my-tea-party.html
Meanwhile, everyone watch this –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0s8eKg2b8I
And send money –
Lest we die, and not live.
One of the main reasons that Mr Obama asked for this rotation of US marines thru this base was precisely because of the growing need to leave/depart/skedaddle/buggeroff/be gone/getout/of Okinawa, for the US.
Due in part to the behaviour of US marines there, which has upset Okinawans to utter fury, a very stupid way of conducting oneself in such an important vector of US security. The phrase ‘ shootings one’s foot off’ comes to mind there.
And of course, we are happy to oblige. Au has supported the USA for nearly a century, and I dont see any forseeable change in that. But we are in Asia, and China is our neighbor, and for that matter, a good one, to all intents and purposes. Screaming about China falls on deaf ears in AU, for very good and solid reasons. The sources that tell you to scream about China should be investigated a bit more thoroughly is the best advice I can give, no doubt rejected, but .. one does the best one can do.
Great article, Jim . yet again.
Any ladies that are near this base must be tougher than any marine
===============
Yes, but the Marines seem to prefer to rape (or gang rape) 12, 13, and 14 year old girls, based on past experience in places like Korea, Okinawa, Colombia, etc.
I hope your young women in the Northern Territory are kept safe. And if the Marines go on leave and do R&R in one of Australia’s cities, hide all the young women.
Well, made it thru another day actually with very little news from Europeans and their myriad economic issues. Instead the focus was on the failure of the ‘SuperCommitttee’ as if anyone expected anything from it anyway. So the Dow down about 250. What do you bet it goes up at least 250 tomorrow? The main interest around here today was the Giants losing to the Eagles! Also everyone is thinking about Thanksgiving and the impending Christmas season. The blue bus might be calling us, but ordinary citizens awareness of it, or interest in it, is practically nil. Show up at your local bar this week, tell the bartender to turn off the NFL broadcast on TV, and start talking about credit and banking collapse in Spain and Italy and how it might destroy American markets. You’ll likely get yer ass kicked!
–WSP7
2500 Marines cost as much as the US spends on AFDC and Section 8 for millions of LEGAL immigrants???
-============
Yes, on a per capita basis. The Marines get all kinds of benefits the immigrants never get, unless they join the armed forces, as many have done.
And thanks for your compliment. Happy to oblige!
Asoka. do you know where this base is? are you aware of the geographical and geophysical vectors of this area?
do you even know the NAME of this base you seem so fixated about?
You are aware, are you not, that this base has been operating for some time? quite some time, actually. 50 USA marines at a time have been rotated at various times thru it for a few years now. Did you know that? Do you know where the nearest civilian community is from this base? Is this the best you can come up with?
Of course, nothing the AU authorites can do about US marines raping each other. That will be a matter for their superiors in conjuction with current AU law and judicial branches.
There has been no provision for R and R activites. The protocol is in for training, back to USA bases. This is not a holiday. Their visa’s do not encompass any off base activity, and in fact are invalid, off base. Off base they become illegal immigrants and will be detained as per protocol. I am surprised you do not know this. I suspect you are living in the 70’s.
Naturally, runners are to be expected, particularly from the US marine contingent. One Indonesian Naval Lieutenant tried it. Unsuccessfuly. A British Brigadier accidentally got lost and wandered off the area, hasnt been found since. But his bank balance hasnt moved either. Searches are still being conducted.
MaoMaoMao, message received.
We wil be waiting for you, dug in on the California beaches, with redoubts in the Rocky Mountains and on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River.
Or are you coming for us north from Canada and south from Cuba & Mexico?
Is there a timeframe for that?
–WSP7
I was going to make some comment ’bout how the USA is going to invade Aussie land. After all if you look at a globe after knocking down a couple of quick beers it kinda looks like an upsidedown version of the US. I remember a skit by George Carlin did about how the Pilgrims kept asking the Indians to “move over, we’re bringin’ the stuff” and pretty soon we moved them nearly clear off the continent. Hey at Aussieland we wouldn’t even need to change the street signs. We could just move right in.
But instead I came across George describing the “American Dream”.
Boy, does he ever nail it…and are we ever.
Here is George Carlin at his best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
It’s like we all suspected, we’re not part of “the club”. Well I say they can stick it, we’ll start our own club.
Thank you for that analogy showing just how irrelevant a Black Swan event would be.
8.3% … Percentage of population who have diabetes
0.00017% … Percentage of population who have diabetes and require amputation of both legs
0% Percentage of population with diabetes requiring amputation of both legs in a building that catches fire
Ipso facto, no need to worry about Black Swans.
do you even know the NAME of this base you seem so fixated about?
=======================
Gee, Pepp, I just kind of assumed that the marines would be at either the Larrakeyah Barracks or the Robertson Barracks in Darwin. As you probably know, Darwin has a population of about 128,000 and I’m thinking approximately half those are of the female persuasion.
I dont see any forseeable change in that.
================
Suggested re-wording of above:
I don’t foresee any change in that.
In any case, the two words I bolded are misspelled.
The spell checker that comes loaded with Windows 7 is very out-of-date. It doesn’t even recognize the word bolded.
Thomas,
If you look on the top of JHK’s site you’ll notice the word “Paintings”. From what I gather, JHK likes to hop on the bike with his French easel(probably a Julian; take a look at a Soltek, they’re expensive but worth it) and spend time in the great outdoors plein-air painting. It’s a beautiful addiction.
” He paints like a man skipping over the top of a hill, singing.” Robert Henri
You’d be wrong then, asoka. Robertson is the Australian air force base. . it isnt the training base, which is where your blokes will be, where every other intertnational trainees are, which is at Bradshaw. Altough I am not surprised that you did a quick google and mistakenly came up with Robertson. A perfectly reasonable error, due to insufficient enquiry. The acronym BFTA ( Bradshaw field training area) should cover it.
Bradshaw was once a cattle station, back in the 90’s and is about 870,000 hectares ( you can do the conversion yourself) near Timber Creek. It can land anything up to Globemasters, etc.
get back to me when you check it out and find out where it is. Then we’ll talk your roaming 12yr olds at risk, ey?
Effective today, having turned 3 score years and 11, I am on borrowed time, biblically speaking.
You don’t think for one moment that the AU defence forces would be allowed to have odds and sods from all over the world training in Au NEAR A CIVILIAN POPULATION do you, asoka?
are you NUTS?
this might help…
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?hl=en&cp=34&gs_id=2z&xhr=t&q=google+map+timber+creek+northern+territory&biw=838&bih=587&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&wrapid=tljp1321937808141028&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x2ca2f0b4a9df8a2d:0x40217a82a254130,Timber+Creek+NT&gl=au&ei=eCvLTvKGMuO0iQe2sbTgDg&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBwQ8gEwAA
Happy Birthday!
Ipso facto, no need to worry about Black Swans.
=============
Taleb asserts[6] in the New York Times:
What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
So Asoka, by definition a Black Swan has an extreme impact, whether positive or negative, and so the negative impacts are indeed something “to worry about.” Of course, we know that you don’t worry about anything, unlike the rest of us.
Thanks, Mom.
ABS,
Personally, I don’t see any mass revolutions around the corner, although I would not be surprised if OWS is stronger than ever this spring. I just see people putting one foot in front of another trying to survive. It’s that descendents of the coffin ship mentality and even though turbulent waters are dead ahead most will seek solace in ways other than street violence. They are still too many believers in America. Take a look at the 8:00 minute mark in the below video as an example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ugiufitm98
Pepp, Bradshaw does seem remote. Perhaps your girls will be safe, though the people of garrison towns like Townsville and Darwin know all too well the social ills USA Marianes bring. The Darwin Centre Against Rape (Ruby Gaea) has found increased incidents of sexual assault during the visit of US Navy vessels to Darwin.
Even after being charged with sexual assault, US military personnel have been free to leave the country. The US military has a long history of making its overseas personnel immune from local and international law, one of the reasons that the places where they concentrate become hotspots of violent and drug-related crime, as well as massive toxic waste and pollution.
I don’t know if you are underestimating the libido of the USA Marines. I suspect you are trusting in the remoteness of the Bradshaw training area to defeat runners. Good luck with that! Timber Creek is only a quarter mile (500 metres) from those hectares you mentioned. About half the population of Timber Creek is probably female. And the population of Timber Creek itself increases during the tourist season.
Thanks for edumacating me!
Q said: “so the negative impacts are indeed something “to worry about.”
==============
Right. I am delegating that job to you, Q.
You are now in charge of worrying about what you admit are outlier events that may or may not be characterized as Black Swan events. I reserve the right to call it paranoia. Each to his own.
SBPDL/Unamusement Park/Alternative Right sites:
Black on white rapes a year in USA =30,000
White on black female rapes a yr=ZERO
Fractals may indeed suggest the increased likelihood of a ‘black swan event’ collapsing the economy. Taleb’s argument that the system is so tightly wound that it is much more sensitive to unanticipated disruptions seems clearly to be the case.
Nonetheless, Mandelbrot (theory of fractals)himself, when asked if it is just as possible a black swan event does not disrupt the system, basically said yes, everything is possible, everything is on the table – that is what makes predicting so difficult.
Which was my point – the predictions here, by JHK and others, have not been good. Specifically, the time frames given for events to materialize just do not happen – rioting and pitchforks in the streets, the end of oil, the end of motoring, the collapse of the system, dow to 4000 by the end of the year, and on and on.
The issues may be real but I don’t feel potential solutions to the issues(whether temporary band-aids or possibly more permanent) are given sufficient weight or analysis on this site.
‘There are far more adults and children dying of starvation and treatable diseases than there were 100 years ago, correct?’
Some would argue with facts!
I have read 1 to 10? million die a year from lack
of water or lack of clean water.
Many of these people are children.
Also see my riposte above this in response to trolls rape ‘info’.
Anti,
There are plenty of folks tossing facts around. My point of contention with Asoka was just that. Factual cherry picking obfuscates many of the ideas behind the facts. But yes, I’ve heard stats similar to the numbers you’ve mentioned. And it’s no secret that these numbers will increase exponentially. The other day on msm, it was reported that the world’s population increased by over a billion from 1999 to 2011.
More people, more babies, more unnecessary deaths due to concentrations of resource consumption at the top of the pyramid; say what you will about the politics and economics of such a phenomena. That wasn’t my point.
My hat is off to progresso and anti soak who carried the red flag of sanity against asoka the last day or two. I don’t know how they keep it up, arguing with a lunatic. Endless arguing where one side is completely irrational doesn’t make for great reading.
I am not sure you are factoring in the libido of the northern territory ladies, asoka. Or the NSW, VIc, WA or QLD ladies either, come to think on it. As I said, though, we hope to send each and every one of your 250 blokes home safe and sound after their training.. healthier, smarter and certainly sunburnt.
what would be the general IQ of USA marines these days?? I ask, not out of purience, but its hard country and stupid wont help. Can they add? spell? latitude and longitude? Mathematics is essential in the outback, surprisingly. Would these be assumed qualities that I might have in relation to their capacities? And they’ll be doing all this upside down , and possibly inside out, too.. ..
RHENRY, thanks for clarifying.
But I’d like to know where in the book, or from whatever forum, you gathered this perspective:
“”Nonetheless, Mandelbrot (theory of fractals)himself, when asked if it is just as possible a black swan event does not disrupt the system, basically said yes, everything is possible, everything is on the table – that is what makes predicting so difficult.””
Either your paraphrasing is terrible, your reading of the assertion made supposedly by Mandelbrot is inaccurate, or both. If in fact, a Black Swan has a null effect, then it is basically a non-event, thus there is no need to even use the term Black Swan.
Found this somewhere today..Is it True?
The EPA report suppression is not the only instance where the Obama administration tried to suppress information.
A soldier at Fort Hood who videotaped the killing spree by Major Nidal Hasan was told by his commanding officer to delete the video. The soldier testified that a non-commissioned officer, acting on orders from an officer, was told to delete the video the same day of the shooting. Now why would anyone want to delete a videotaping of a live crime, wouldn’t it be a great piece of evidence at the trial of the shooter? Is the Obama administration trying to control the situation by controlling the information? No reason for that video to have been destroyed unless someone, somewhere high up the chain of command did not want to lose control of the situation, even if justice was not served in the process.
Finally, consider an Associated Press report that appeared on October 6, 2010. According to the article and a finding by the commission appointed by the President to investigate the Gulf oil spill disaster, the Obama White House deliberately blocked efforts by government scientists to tell the public just how bad the oil spill could become. The article also reported that other missteps and incompetence were also suppressed by the Administration.
It will be rather a shock to these libidinous US marines ( having escaped from BFTA, walked 200 kilometers from BFTA to the town of Timber Creek at any time of the year where the weather is , to state the least, destructive, along bush tracks with no access to water, and in dingo country) to find themselves at the great metropolis of Timber creek.
Oh yes. ‘boys, boys, hey buddy, looky up the track, its Timber Creek!!. ‘…. they peer thru sweat and killing thirst, to see one hotel, 2 caravan parks, an undertaker and the general post office. Of course, I am assuming they make their run in the ‘DRY’.. as opposed to the ‘ WET” the only two seasons in the NT. If they try it in the ‘WET” they will not be found for 6 months. And not alive, either. And they wont be obvious, or standout, either, oh no. Sure.
But forget all that, lets say they do it in the ‘DRY’.. if these US marines have the energy , and remaining limbs left after bashing thru 200 klms of saltbush, casuarina, razor grass and the incredible insect and reptile life to engage in any sort of sexual behaviour, consensual or not, we just might let them add to the gene pool. There are 7 ladies living permanently in Timber Creek and they havent managed to survive there without coping tools you probably have never even imagined.
I just dont think you understand what the Northern Territory is, asoka. Googling stuff just doesnt cut it.
Buck, I think I largely agree with your view that people just continue to place one foot in front of the other despite lurking threats; although, as someone demonstrated earlier today, there is such thing as a positive feedback loop that can push circumstances to a threshold in unpredictable ways.
With this in mind, I recognize that the OWSer movement shares a certain solidarity with the Egyptian revolutionaries, who are now so angry with the continued dominance of the Mubarak era military, mass rioting is inevitable. While here at home, people are no longer buying the narrative coming from Washington and the consolidated news media.
Yeah, the OWS protesters may turn in to revolutionaries if the alleged economic fear mongering coming from persuasive and articulate writers like JHK continues to meet their gaze. Sure JHK’s timeline has been iffy, but let’s not forget that he’s not making claims based on hard, scientific methodology, where strong data interpolation is imperative.
JHK is more of a social science criticizer, in my view, and he’s criticizing the attempt of social-scientists, economists and the like, for believing they can beat natural law and nature’s math with economic trendiness, otherwise known as stimulus.
Time will tell.
If you’re really interested in Peak Bullshit and you want a good laugh, don’t miss the movie “The Yes Men.” It’s from 2003 but could have been made yesterday. The 2009 follow-up, “The Yes Men Fix the World” is also great. The extras on the DVD are also worth watching. The blurb on Netflix does NOT do it justice.
The Yes Men have a website, http://www.theyesmen.org,> where you can find out how to become a Yes Man, should you so desire.
I’ll jump in here … I don’t think Taleb is mathematically doctrinaire that ANY system can beat the market. Surely he has condemned the quants and their statistically illegitimate assumption of Gaussian distributions … which ignores all of US market history.
Even if Taleb didn’t exist, one can piece together truly extraordinary observations. The bulk of bull market gains or bear market losses tend to be strangely agglomerated in very narrow timeframes. Look at our averages in the US in the recent bear and bull markets. Though the drop in the DJIA started in December, 2007 and ended in March, 2009, a period of sixteen months, 77% of the net loss occurred in six months and the other 23% in the other ten months. Put maybe in a better light, 77% of the losses happened in 38% of the time and the other 23%
of losses happened in the remaining 62% of the time. Similar numbers describe the bounce UPWARD after March, 2009.
These figures are rather “par for the course”. Most of the time, meaning 70-80% of the time, markets do almost nothing but bounce around aimlessly resembling “Brownian motion”.
Taleb feels that given the unpredictability of Black Swans, it’s madness to follow standard broker advice to keep 60-70% of your money “working” at all times when the market itself is doing NOTHING most of that time and is FULLY exposed to sudden instabilities. His investing theory is simplicity itself: Keep 90% of your money in absolutely safe, interest-bearing vehicles and use the other 10% to make RADICAL bets when historic benchmarks, on the upside or the downside, are radically violated.
It’s disingenuous for brokers to talk about “average” 9% returns over time when there have been THREE periods in the last 82 years where your return was zero to negative for 14-25 YEARS!!! From 1929 to 1954 your nominal return was zero. From 1968-1982 your nominal return was -20%. From October, 1998 to present … 13 years … your return was zero. None of these numbers are inflation-adjusted which makes the 1968-1982 and 1998-2011 periods even worse than the nominal returns. That means that in FIFTY-TWO of the EIGHTY-TWO years since 1929, betting in the stock market was WORSE than putting it in a mattress. Thus, this “average” 9% return is one of the worst abuses of statistics in history.
E.
Addendum for Absalom: The arithmetic average as a measure of central tendency is ONLY justified if the data are in a Gaussian distribution. If they are not, then either MEDIANS or MODES are better measures of central tendency. But as my numbers above show, when your money is bleeding or doing nothing for 62% of market history with horrific volatility, why bother?
A friend of mine says he is “street smart” which he defines as “Staying off of Wall Street”. Those guys are as bad as the Mississippi Company or Tulip Bulb salesmen only in this era they’ve been LEGITIMIZED as good guys in the print and electronic media. If 90% of the “financial service industry” vanished over night, this country would be one heck of a lot better off.
E.
Advaita is fine – mostly for Monks who can benefit from meditating on the World as unreal. They take the point of view of the Self. For the vast majority of people, that’s not helpful. Now when you hear women coming out of a “yoga” class talking about how they “worship themselves” do you really think it’s helping them? Or is in fact reinforcing the very thing that has to die?
Compared to Kashmir Shaivism and the Shakti Tantras – Advaita is crude and cold. Shankara himself was a great Devotee who wrote hymmns to the Great Mother. His followers today mostly use Tantric Methods although they still honor him of course. These methods are far more accessible than his method of meditation – which only for a certain type among tiny minority to begin with.
At his best, Shankara admits that Maya isn’t simply Illusion but is in fact, the Creative Power. Everything is Real – while it lasts, which may be just for an instant. But some things are more real (closer to Absolute Spirit) than others. That’s what we mean by “higher”. But all things are equally That since there is nothing else.
The Religions of the Far East start with Illusion or the forgetting of our real identity. But they know that such forgetting leads to Sin and is reinforced by Sin – so they take up morality immediately after. The religions of the West start with Morality and Sin. I prefer the Eastern way, but morality is important and is dealt with either way. Some (many) can’t stand this and seek to distance spirituality from morality – sometimes by saying that they want Spirituality not Religion. They only fool themselves and others by twisting the words of the Masters.
Yes pictures of Black soldiers are posted outside US Military Bases in Okinawa. The people are sick, sick, sick of the Black Rapists.
In Japan, loudspeakers warn customers to beware when a Black enters a store. They know about Black Criminality and are not mentally castrated by PC as Whites are in America and Europe.
Another Lie from the Illuminati – that one out of every four women are raped. Most of the women who are said to have been raped don’t consider themselves to have been. The criterion is complete bullshit – it’s been created just so they can say one out of four. This fuels the Feminism which is helping to destroy the West.
FUCK YOU…whether you like it or not and shut the fuck up, jackass- that statement is criminally stupid, beyond any of the fear- driven small mindedness of your rants about race or religion…it s samples of effluvia like yourself that poison life on earth why not just put a pistol in (and out, and in…) Your cocksucker, and put all the rest of us out of your misery…cur…
“If 90% of the “financial service industry” vanished over night, this country would be one heck of a lot better off.”
Now that sounds like some of that thar “karma” I keep hearing so much about.
Eleuthero,
Your post was a great explanation, and it stirred my recollection of Taleb’s book well. I think you demonstrated how Gaussian stats can be easily distorted, just the same as Taleb.
I’ve discussed Taleb with a smart computer programmer before, and he found Taleb’s argument to be bang on regarding the shortcomings of Gaussian curves, but off when Taleb shifted toward a discussion of fractals as superior for determining outliers. The programmer I mentioned basically stated that a Black Swan is random and thus unpredictable; otherwise, it would be called a “Black” Swan.
I’m seeing which voices on this blog have both the experience and practiced skill for sharing ideas. This is a great help to someone like me who has limited experience overall. Reading some of the comments can make you feel like your in a room with a lot of dead red herring being dragged about.
Thanks,
ABSALOM
I just hope your valuable relationship with China doesn’t turn into a Chinese occupation. I could see it happening.
The best thing the US could do is start an organized withdrawal from the majority of it’s overseas bases.Many are holdovers from the cold war. Some the commitments were made by men who have been dead 50 years during a different reality.
Personally, I dont’t give a damn what is happening in Somalia or Sudan. Five minutes after we leave Afghanistan it will be as if we were never there. Osama is dead along with a boatload of his friends. that”s about all we can do there.
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
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I had to admire this introduction to the comments section over at “The Big Picture”, which is BTW, one of the only finacial websites currently available which doesn’t seem to be grinding its axe into powder.
Yeah….I know he’s an asshole, but keep in mind, he’s a sick asshole.
More adults and children are dying of starvation and treatable diseases because there are incredibly more of them than 100 years ago. Less advanced societies were healthier when they were 70% smaller.
Found this somewhere today..Is it True?
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Gee….you found it “somewhere” so I guess it couldn’t be just a paranoid fantasy existing only in the mind of its poster. It’s on “the tubes” so I guess it’s true, No?
Let’s see. Cause, effect, …and karma. I’ll mull that over. I’ve just about reconciled the Holy Trinity and Wall Street, the military, and the government. They’re also one and the same doncha’ know.
“Only a few prefer liberty – the majority seek nothing more than fair masters” — Sallust, Histories
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Now, if you are looking for “enduring truth”, consider this was written about 2,000 years ago.
I wonder which polling service they used?
Ouch! That hurts.
(And I don’t see a whole lotta evidence to refute that. Ouch, again.)
the majority seek nothing more than fair masters
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Yup….that would define the overwelming majority of the employees of corporate America I’ve met.
Boss to Pepp on Red/Yellow Menace:
“I just hope your valuable relationship with China doesn’t turn into a Chinese occupation. I could see it happening.”
I don’t think so, unless they’re pushed into a direct confrontation by militaristic assholes. (Naaaawwwww, who would do such a thing?)
Anywhich, they seem to be capturing a hell of a lot more “flies” with financial promises (or blackmail) than with air strikes and assault rifles. This tactic is diametrically opposed to that of the-greatest-country-in-the-woild (with the smartest peeples too), and seems to be “working” better. Who knew it could be so easy? Diabolical, I tells ya. Promising future gains instead of death threats; enticements rather than aggression. Oh, those inscrutable little yellow folk; they’re after our pie, what’s given to us by da lawd got a’mighty!
Last time we tried honey with the Afghans(?) didn’t they steal a $10 million “snitch” reward? Can we do anything right?
chuckle- and i have to wonder if they were the poles upon which those who wanted freedom were crucified: that would greatly reduce the number of “respondents” who said ‘yes’…
“”More adults and children are dying of starvation and treatable diseases because there are incredibly more of them than 100 years ago. Less advanced societies were healthier when they were 70% smaller.””
====================================================
Boss,
Your using some relative terms that don’t really communicate your point, or, you don’t realize how inane your point is. Your reasoning is circular to boot.
You essentially said, “because there are more people, more people will die on average than in the past.” Well, no shit Sherlock.
Then you said, “Less advanced societies were healthier when they were 70% smaller.” What a keen observation, snore. And the reason is? Did they (the less advanced) have more or less access to what they needed to thrive? Anyhow, that was the road you were traveling, and I’ll leave ya to it.
This is what you missed when you decided to comment on my discussion with someone else: There exist like not 100 years ago an industrious and harnessing of resources sufficient to remedy the problem of rampant starvation and disease spread, despite the tremendous increase in population size, but the consolidation of technology and expertise creates a lopsided effect for the whole of humanity. Certainly, we can argue that it is reckless to produce more and more hungry mouths just because we CAN feed them all, but that’s not my point.
Economic ups and downs are not just merely natural, forgivable lapses in economic or human history.
I do welcome your remarks, please just step up your game.
I also like this excerpt from Umberto Eco regarding the qualities which distinguish emergent fascist thinking. I think it establishes why it is always on the political right, and cannot be conflated with socialism, as the simpleton Glenn Beck so loves to do. The key points:
1. the cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. irrationalism – action for actions sake
4. disagreement is treason
5. fear of difference
6. obsession with a “plot”
7. followers must feel humiliated
8. machismo – disdain for women and intolerance of non-standard sexual habits.
9. Adoption of an improvised vocabulary, designed to limit critical thinking.
Some of these are used by totalitarian systems of other stripes, some are unique to fascism.
For the full article: http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html?source=patrick.net
thing is, with modern psychological treatments, he could easily face whatever feelings for his mother that have obviously translated to mysogyny…vlad, it s not your mother s fault, nor is it yours: she left because your dad was sub-par genetically and could obviously not treat her with the respect she felt she deserved…get yer mind right, son, and while you re at it, what the hell is that dirt doin’ in my yard? fill in that ditch!
I always considered the “poles” to be the moral equivalent of heads on pikes.
E.,
As I’m working today, I keep thinking about your clear and concise description of Taleb and the illusion of stock market trajectory.
Of course, I believe everyone knows how it works, and much of the nonsense you hear from the financial class is just propaganda to get more people to invest in the market. They lie about the incentives for the average person to invest most of their money in a risk climate for a lifetime.
Someday, even if you didn’t earn much through the years your nest egg will be huge. Just hang in there. How would the average person prove it works otherwise?
Much the same can be said about the investment in houses and the non-stop upward value on which to borrow. Same trap with the illusion of gain.
When they switched the economic system from demand-side to supply side and killed the interest rates at FDIC insured banks for savers, they also started lying about inflation.
Keeping the cost of living increases artificially low and holding wages down, the illusion for the past 30 years has been to conceal the losses the middle class has taken and tricking them into believing that the stock market and globalism works for them.
Cheap poisoned goods from China (most recently chicken jerky for dogs) really works while manufacturing keeps leaving our shores, but you know you have to keep going back to school where increases in tuition continue unabated.
The more you hear about how rigged the system is from MF Global to the government–too tied up with the special interests to do their job, it’s no wonder that as with everything else, this system is only for those with the most advantage.
How can anyone trust the system enough to invest anymore? The mattress sounds better and better all the time.
“9. Adoption of an improvised vocabulary, designed to limit critical thinking. ”
9a. Book Burning
I know you must be super smart . And i have limited 3rd world travel experience. But from what I have seen, nothing can help the conditions I saw unless populations are reduced. Redistribution of wealth and technology would not make a damn bit of difference.
I’m just saying, As our hubris is shrinking, their hubris is growing. You know what that leads to.
You know, I realize that this forum hosts people with differing opinions, and that it’s very difficult to change people’s opinions.
But it’s aggravating to point out a factual error, and have it completely ignored.
Sex and reproduction can be separated. Fucking need not inexorably lead to babies.
Reducing the world’s population does not mean convincing people not to have sex.
To pretend that the human sexual drive must necessarily lead to 7 billion people and more, and that we are helpless in the face of it, is disingenuous.
Good reply, Ozone.
It always amazes me when the residents of the most heavily armed and belligerent country in the world point to others, who haven’t invaded other countries in centuries, and accuse them of sinister motives.
I guess it goes along with the firm belief that US soldiers are just spreading joy and cheer wherever they go. And democracy.
When the social safety net is shredded, people turn to individualist solutions, from stocking up on beans and ammo, to investing in 401Ks, hanging onto the belief that they can somehow personally survive the cataclysm.
As I pointed out at an Occupy meeting I attended on Sunday, in 1995, when Orange County’s pension funds were lost by gambling in the stock market, it was considered shocking. The manager lost his job.
Now, it’s considered de rigeur. Our city’s pension funds are invested in the stock market, and any losses are to be made up by the taxpayers, who are also losing their 401Ks.
I pointed out that the reason that Wall Street managers are doing so well is that they are STEALING from pension funds. There is no way that your pension fund will grow when it is being stripped for their profits! We need to invest in our community, not Wall Street.
On another note, Obama is sternly lecturing the gang of 12, the unconstitutional supercommittee, about not coming up with cuts in the federal budget. He causally threw in Medicare as something that would have to be cut.
Why? Anyone can look at their paycheck and see that Medicare and Social Security are funded separately from the federal budget.
So Obama is lying. Again. And no one calls him on it.
It’s maddening to live in a country in which lies and absurdities are pronounced repeatedly, until everyone accepts them as truths.
Wait a minute. An article on fascism? Dale, are you Vlad? If not, I apologize. If you are Vlad, then BE VLAD. I thought everything in America was set up so that you can come on here to BE VLAD. What’s a Sopwith Camel without the Fokker (triplane)? The same goes for Muslims. Don’t chicken out and change your rules just to live in the US. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, there is always France. Don’t be like the Christians. The Newer Testament, Third Edition. On Sale for the holidays at bookstores everywhere!
Where does the money go? In the end, shiny metal is just shiny metal. Prime Illinois farmland is now fetching about $12,000 an acre. The curve is way up the hockey stick blade, heading straight up.
AS I stated earlier, I”m for closing the majority of our overseas bases. Many of the old cold war bases are now irrelevant. And in many places we are wasting time, money and our soldiers lives.
And I could care less about the spread of democracy. Just a smoke screen anyway.
Charlie,
The reason why I TRY to go easy on Vlad is that I DO regard his thinking as a type of moderate mental illness. It is a type that breaks out periodically in humanity, much like a severe flu attack (Germany in the 30s). It isn’t necessarily fatal, and the extent of the damage can vary, but it is clearly pathological. Likewise, it isn’t so severe that the person is necessarily raving, as everyone here can see Vlad is intelligent and rational…..at times.
I’m not suggesting Vlad should be institutionalized (provided he hasn’t done anyone any physical harm, including himself). I think the best way to deal with this sort of anti-social mental illness is simply to offer counseling and reinforce the clear and present reality that such thinking is not in his, or anyone else’s, best interest.
Unfortunately, as a society we don’t value healthy and happy people that much, (just productive and useful) so there is no capacity for this sort of careful and patient counseling. What I am concerned about is any behavior on our part which will exacerbate his problems. When a flu patient has a fever and is hallucinating, you don’t try to argue him out of his hallucinations, that would only worsen his distress.
As objectionable as his warped thinking is, I’m trying to remind myself (repeatedly) that arguing about it with him only suggests that it is something other than pathology, which it is not.
Boss, thanks for continuing the dialogue. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, the more we converse the more it will become clear that I’m more a student than a professor.
First, I’d like you to consider dropping the highly politicized opinion of “wealth re-distribution.” It implies that anyone talking about the need to share technology and generate efficient access to the necessities of life for all is summarily out to take one’s personal property and give it away to others. This isn’t about a Robin Hood complex, nor is it about Communalism or Communism or Socialism. Those are all defunct social ideologies, and so is Capitalism. These are out-dated ways of thinking which keep people engaged in political quackery.
Next, I won’t try to dazzle you with numbers, there are plenty here who confuse themselves with obtuse statistics. But consider for a moment that “advanced” civilizations consume much greater amounts of “things” than are necessary. Even if we as a species wish to maintain our appetite for opulence, it is entirely possible to ensure all others can too. Note that opulence is different to me than wastefulness.
The brain-product of only a small handful of real geniuses that have existed on this planet has allowed billions of complete dummies like me to enjoy a lifestyle never imagined 100 years ago. My main contention is that the lopsidedness of present economic structures is not due to a lack of materials. At least not yet, as resources are finite, especially with how they are wasted now, and human population will run into the wall if the status quo continues. Every civilization has faced natural law and lost, regardless of what historians tell you about the quality of their politics and economics.
Take care.
Pardon me,
I’m just wondering who argued the position you’re railing against? Or are you just brain farting?
You seem pretty proffessorial on that last comment. And I could not agree more. How could it pragmatically be accomplished? That is the main reason I have a negative attitude toward human ability to make something that big happen.
E, just a small correction:
“The programmer I mentioned basically stated that a Black Swan is random and thus unpredictable; otherwise, it would be called a “Black” Swan.”
Should read:
“The programmer I mentioned basically stated that a Black Swan is random and thus unpredictable; otherwise, it [wouldn’t] be called a “Black” Swan.”
Regards
Boss,
I totally share that sentiment. My pessimism about the prospect of the human species is totally what brought me to a blog like JHK’s.
The simple answer is education. I know of an autodidact whose thoughts on education are second to none, in my view. Check out this dialogue between a guy named Paul Lutus and a dickish reader.
http://www.arachnoid.com/reader_exchanges/education.html
Cheers.
Well , I’m working on digesting that article.
You really think one out of four women has been raped? Or is he angry about what I said about Advaita? Remember if men are scum, that means you too preppy. Don’t try to abstract yourself out asswipe. Drink your own poison for a change punk.
Any changes of heart (repentance) about your mockery of the Pygmies being killed and eaten by Blacks?
Elderly Orthodox Monks often practice death by sleeping in their own coffins. You might want to start. Some saints are incorruptible – combine this with sleeping in coffins and the vampire myth was given a big boost.
No for once Dale is not being a dick. He actually used the words Fascism and Totalitarianism correctly. Communism is Totalitarian not Fascistic. Fascism is not just a word meaning “bad”. It’s its own politcal system.
I personally am not convinced that screen persona “Vlad” is mentally ill. And this is not the first time I’ve defended that person. I would not presume to know, but I really question the validity of an “on-line” diagnosis in a forum like this one.
That wasn’t really directed just at you, Bossier.
We are seeing hysterical accusations in the corporate media now against both China and Iran, neither of which has invaded neighbors for decades or centuries.
Unlike the USA.
“…practice death by sleeping in their own coffins. You might want to start.”
You did not just say that to Q. WTF? Should I recant?
Well, prog, I ignored the latest terrorist threat, assuming that it was an FBI sting, like all the rest.
http://www.salon.com/2010/11/28/fbi_8/
But on Democracy Now today, they said that even the FBI didn’t want to get involved in this particular entrapment. Wow. That’s saying a lot.
Hey Chuckles, why don’t fox trot off the edge of the flat earth you inhabit? Not everything you read or hear the news is true you know. Feminists are liars and men have been dupes to believe them. Remember how they used to pretend that Thanksgiving was a day of carnage and rape as men drunk on beer and football reacted with bestial rage when their team lost – or won? They stopped not because they were wrong or felt guilty, but because they realized they had gone over the top and were becoming ridiculous.
Start here, dupe:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100806162305AAUzbhN
More than one person upthread proclaimed that it was impossible to control population because sex is a biological drive.
I guess you’ll have to go back and reread it.
No you are you and Q is Q. Q knows my mentality and will not take offence. He knows that he is going to die. You obviously don’t know that you are going to do the same.
How can you know life and ignore death? I advise you to start visualizing corpses as the Buddhist Scriptures advise. Different kinds of corpses for different mentalities. Lusties visualize green bloated corpses for example. Greedy people use skeletal ones. I’ll look into it if you describe yourself and tell you the right one to use.
And I could care less about the spread of democracy
===============
He meant to say couldn’t care less.
I guess I’m being mr. oversensitive today. My wife says that I think everything is about me. like most guys.
Oh, I follow you now. And I agree with you that it is necessary to divorce the act of sexual enjoyment from rudimentary procreative drives.
Incidentally, I believe this responsibility should land on the shoulders of men. At least in the sense that it is much easier for us men to practice birth control than women. Unfortunately, female reproductive responsibilities are emphasized over men’s practices in most discourse.
Don’t feel bad – I was in my 30’s before I found out that Fascism was an actual political system and not just a synonym for Totalitarianism. Our Professors are scum; just hacks dancing for their dinners teaching whatever they’re told to teach.
They are Mandarins, the hired intellectual guns of the Elite. In Law School they’re trained to argue one point of view and then argue the other opposing one. The Truth doesn’t matter – if it exists, it is unknowable. They are the Sophists so hated by Plato and Socrates.
Some actually do believe what they teach: the Leftists. And they are even more dangerous since they warp young idealistic minds even more. And they are willing to lie and obfuscate too – it’s just as natural to them as breathing. Combine these two types and you have the nightmare of “higher” education.
nKAY. Q just posted and he ain’t trippin’. As for DEATH, dude, combat vet. I don’t have to “visualize” the corpses.
And 90% of the pleasure departs. Absalom, Oh Absalom! You strain the gnat yet swallow the camel of Feminism.
Don’t forget to use a dental dam when you go south. Men are dying from Oral Sex (HPV) but the hetero part was left out. Taste of rubber – so gooood!
The only thing I felt bad about was the possibility of you unnecessarily concealing your identity.
Any changes of heart (repentance) about your mockery of the Pygmies being killed and eaten by Blacks?
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Vlad, I wasn’t mocking their genocide, I was mocking your crocodile tears regarding it.
Look, shit for brains. I’ve purposely refrained from a dialogue with you in recognition that you are not interested in discussing ideas, just trading vacuous opinions generated from your lifetime of fact collecting.
Your comments to others border on threats of physical hostility, so I’m going to respond in kind to you only once with a similar tenor. If meeting you in person, I would hand to you your ass and also offer to you an endless platter of knuckle sandwiches. You’re an an inimical blog site dingle-berry, not even a troll. A lingering piece of shit around JHK’s asshole, and I’m surprised he hasn’t cut you off.
You really think one out of four women has been raped?
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Let me see…..including women, that brings the total of humanity that are your enemies to what?…..about 95% or so? If that isn’t pathology I don’t know how you would define it.
Maybe it hurts Vlad, but it’s true.
How weird. I’ve always wanted to and never had a chance to tell someone about an article I recently (within a year) read in the National Geographic about the Pygmies. It seems that the remaining few have consciously decided not to reproduce. Their “leader” said “We’re no good anymore.” Their health is poor and they’re tired of being picked on. The pictures showed people with gnarly goiters. It is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.
Fascism is not just a word meaning “bad”. It’s its own politcal system.
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Not buying Vladdie, Fascism is a right wing form of totalitarianism. It’s totalitarianism for the corporatists. Communism is totalitarianism for the socialists. In practice…they both suck.
The Fascists always manufacture enemies, the instigators of the mythical “plot” against them, then of course, they must be exterminated. The more powerful they become the more enemies that need extermination. They are only benign in relation to their weakness.
Communism is, I think less a mental disease in that it actually has a rational basis, it just becomes totalitarian in practice.
That’s what pathology looks like Vlad, a constant need for creating and destroying faux enemies.
“We’re no good anymore” That is the saddest thing I have ever heard too. I’ll have to go back and find that article.A people giving up on their existence.
Yup, Xhalor, karma (a.k.a. “payback”) is always a bitch and if history is any guide societies tend to OVERSHOOT with retribution just like they overshoot with adulation. This means that when the final set of disillusionments and feelings of being swindled come about you might see these financial industry maggots being caned in public and stripped of their wealth. Stranger things have happened.
E.
I personally am not convinced that screen persona “Vlad” is mentally ill. And this is not the first time I’ve defended that person. I would not presume to know, but I really question the validity of an “on-line” diagnosis in a forum like this one.
——————————————
You sort of missed my point Bud. I was using mental disease AS his defense. To my way of thinking, to be that fucked up without being mentally ill would necessitate a kind of spritual flaw beyond redemption, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
Formally of course, I’m not able to diagnosis mental illness, online or off. However, there are certain things which are difficult to deny just based on the empirical evidence. I think Vlad has given us considerable empirical evidence that all is not well. That is why I listed the traits of Fascism. That is not a laundry list of a healthy mental view.
Otherwise, I did list a textbook definition of O/C ideation, which he veers off into quite frequently. So….make your own judgement, mental illness is, I think, a continuum.
“you might see these financial industry maggots being caned in public and stripped of their wealth.”
Man, I gonna start taking better care of myself starting now (drains last of the Johnnie Walker), cause if there is ANY possibility of the above happening, I damn sure want to see it.
Best Wishes,
Ralph Nader
You are welcome, Absalom. Actually Gaussian inferential statistics are abused not just by financiers but also by social science and medical researchers. They’ll run such statistics on very, very small and NOT randomly picked samples quite often. The first, and most difficult, job of any researcher doing statistics is SUPPOSED to be to find out if his sample does or does not represent a certain population base. They virtually NEVER do.
E.
you dipshit! did you think i wouldn t go to the link; put it up for posture? i still can t figure why you thought they backed your point up…anyway, i grow tired of you, so fuck off i leave you with the idea that you might get laid, with her permission, and even- gasp what a concept!- active & enthusiastic participation, by treating women with only a modicum of respect and tenderness…which would go a long way towards raising your self image; in turn raising the standards of your own comportment towards, and interaction with the rest of us- getting you even more laid and that makes you even more likable…any way, see where i m going with this? it is up to you to get started; once you have done so, we all benefit until then, see above…
Or more properly, mental “health” is continuum…and where exactly it crosses the line depends on what, and from where, you are observing.
In Nazi Germany, Vlad would be considered a paragon of society, I guess. Except for the fact they regarded his race as parasites and vermin unsuited for anything but grunt work.
….and when you worship those who regard you as scum, that is self loathing in anyone’s book.
Even the FED, not just brokers, are trying to FORCE people into risk assets with the ZIRP (zero interest rate policy). This policy is another indignity being heaped on the America people. Even if your FICO score is 800, your credit card interest rate now is about 16% while the banks get to borrow from the Fed at ZERO PERCENT. I would submit that even with all the personal delinquencies and defaults, the common working man in America is FAR, FAR better at managing his/her money than the TBTF banks have.
ZIRP is just another trick to try to prop up our last “pride and joy” i.e., the stock market. Personally, I won’t fall for it because I see the risk/reward picture as about 15% upside and 60% downside. I’ll take my one percent and sleep.
E.
try stripped of their skin and fed to the dogs in public…and that wouldn t be overshoot for the vast majority of them, IM not so HO…though i can see how, compared to how well we ve let them treat themselves, it might seem a little extreme to the banksters…ungrateful even, considering we DID let it go for 15,000 years or so…
I just read in someone’s (…here?) blog recently that “Get A Job” has become the new “Let Them Eat Cake”. I thought it was cute until I realized how often I had heard it recently. Right at that moment, I looked at the TeeVee just in time to see that reptile Newt say it. Oh man, hold me down.
yo wage, i meant to thank you earlier for the link to joe bageant as a southern man with many of his apparent sensibilities, his essays so far resonate…i too rejected racism as counter-productive and well, unscientific, for example i am looking forward to perusing the archives, and eventually his books and re your blog- keep up the good work; i ll be lurking…
E,
I don’t come across many people with the grasp of scientific methodology you possess. This is especially frustrating as I often converse with social-scientists, who seemingly believe the scientific method can be applied “softly” to experimental design. In other words, the loosey goosey application of experimental methodology in social studies produces a vast array of theories based more on traditional viewpoints rather than interpolated evidence. This feels like the infusion of science and rhetoric — what a disaster.
I strikes me that the vast majority of people don’t recognize this, as when you examine usual blog conversations, people cite an amalgam of opinion based material from the various ideological theories they’ve come to fancy from their years of collecting facts organized by their favored authority figures.
One very bright autodidact I’ve met once wrote, “No amount of scientific eminence trumps scientific evidence.”
You remind me of that guy.
Regards
sorry, let us turn down the creep factor: i look forward to reading said blog with interest…yeah that looks alot better in print!
Guess the detectives in that nondescript car down the street can go home now.
Jeez, maybe you guys should get a room 😉
You’re right about the zirp policy which makes your $ go “poof…it’s gone!” And people are still dumb enough to ask what the owsers problem is.
I don’t know what the average credit card interest rate is for most folks, but mine is 6%, I think. I pay my balances off each month, so it doesn’t affect me anyway. 16% is god awful, especially when the banks are paying 1/4% to 2%interest on cds. May they all rot in hell.
Amendment to above…Investing your $ in stocks and other “investment vehicles” makes it go “poof”. Placing it in a savings account makes it sloowlly disappear with respect to your buying power (little necessities like food, heat, and electricity tend to slowly eat away at it).
A little too much deference, eh MYRTLE?
Never fear, you may one day say something intelligent and someone will reserve a motel room for you.
Keep dreamin’, babe.
One of the biggest howls I got this week was a quote from some big investment firm, “85 is the new 65!” Yeah, right. That’s about as silly as the often heard quote, 60 is the new 40. Please let me know of any of you out there who have reached the age of 60 plus and can HONESTLY say you feel and look as good, are as energetic, etc. as you were when you were 40. Like the song says, “it ain’t me, babe”.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for me to say something intelligent. My teachers gave up on that long ago ;0)
Maybe thats code fer ‘Retire and get SSI at 85’
I’ll take my one percent and sleep.
E.
I took my money out of mutual funds before the 2008 crash and found a 5.5% interest rate somewhere for 5 years. So I’m fine for now, but after the 5 years it will be a very low. The same bank brags that they are 5 times higher than all the other banks a whole.7%. And we’re supposed to be thrilled with that.
I too am glad to be off the roller coaster!
Such diagnosis is called ‘Scapegoating’.
Scapegoating is the practice of singling out any party for unmerited negative treatment or blame!
1. the cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. irrationalism – action for actions sake
4. disagreement is treason
Sounds like a script from various Tibetan Buddhist
uh, groups.
“Like someone said earlier, they are focused on minutiae (trees)…, and are not seeing the forest. ”
Heh, you just made me laugh, Soker. I hope your acreage down there in South America isn’t of the clearcut, concreted, leached sort, right alongside a completely silted river, contaminated by mine/oil runoff…
~40 days to go, before year’s end, and we measure the hottest global temperature on record. And, ad nauseum, ~400 days until the next global temp record coinciding with the solar max (12/21/2012), and another ~770 days until the next, with another ~5 years or so wobbling at/above that solar max peak global temperature. Seen the massive midwest floods going on this week? How about the incoming east coast icy/snow storm? My friend in NC keeps telling me about how it’s been 70’s and sunny for weeks. Maybe Tripp can verify this for GA? Wonder if the freeze will mess with citrus crops in FL?
Just keep believing in your ETF’s, naked shorts, derivatives, collateralized debt, microsecond trades, and that monthly SS check. Some say MAGIKAL manifestation results from the power of belief – if it continues to work out for you, maybe you should direct your belief towards other, more worldly endeavors (make it so, numbah 1)…
All religions? Inlcluding the Pharisees who killed Christ and whose teachings you follow?
So forced redistribution of wealth is Ok in theory – only the practice of it is bad? Oh Dale, you are such a bullshit artist! You are a doppleganger who meets himself coming and going. Have you thought about running for office? Demcracy was made for two and three faced strangers to themselves like you.
Fascism believes in private ownership, business, the market – it only demands that these be conducted honorably. Of course, that means tariffs, the dreaded T word so hated by current economists. Now if all these low lifes hate something that much, it has to be good, it just has to be.
Free trade isn’t free. The only way Americans can compete with coolie labor is by becoming coolies themselves. Europe and China have enforced “unfair” (good for them) trade on us for decades. They refrain from calling them tariffs so as not to give the game away to American Sheeple. Our shepherds insist on this much at least. They have gone to alot of trouble conditioning the masses to a T and they don’t want any Euro Snobs messing up their work of art, the American Sheeple.
So to get along with women a man has to accept that he is inferior to them morally? No thanks Dupe/Slave. I’ll let you have all the “fun”.
You are a coward but at least a humble one. You are not too smart and you know it. Congrats, you have been sucessfully conditioned.
Whites are doing the same thing – guilt tripped into opening their borders and letting the browns have all the babies while they pay for them. You should be even sadder about that – but you don’t see it. It’s too close. It’s hard to convince the fish about the existence of the ocean.
Meanwhile, hard core Lefties like Dale not only know about it, they’re happy about it. Tibetans have a right to exist in his book, but Whites do not.
“Since JK failed so miserably at his prediction of Y2K disaster (ie there was none. THAT was embarrassing)”
Wow! How soon people forget the internet bubble, the Enron/Tyco/WorldCom fraud fiascos, and 9/11…
Besides, I don’t remember JHK hawking on Y2K – that was way before my time with him here. Did he rant about the 8 bit hardcoded date thingy? I remember 2-3 years prior to Y2K, lots and lots of software engineers rewriting cryptic/outdated COBOL/Fortran/Pascal/C code. I expected a few hickups myself, but nothing major – years were spent preparing for this.
The *NO HOPE, NO CHANGE* thang, that Soker so vehemently believes in, still rubs me the wrong way, 3 years later. I expect Soak-puppet to start “babbling on” about that credit card reform and healthcare reform, that were completely in the interests of his corporate lobbyists/sponsors. How about Gitmo/3 ongoing wars? What a joke – I think we need a 50K personnel base in Aussie-land, to complement all of our other bases in Japan/Korea/Vietnam/Germany/Iraq/Afghanistan/etc/ad-nauseum!!!
I hear salmon farms are toxic, due to all that anti-bacterial/anti-viral poison (penicillin anyone?) that goes into their tanks/groundwater… Methinks I’d rather chew on depleted uranium warheads (I hope the Iraqi/Afghani/Paki “terrorists” have gathered those up, and ground them down into dust, for dirty bombs – serves *US* right, dropping that toxic sh!t there, and not cleaning it up ourselves).
“Feminists are liars and men have been dupes to believe them.”
===============
Vlad, men can be feminists. I am a feminist, not duped. Women hold up 50% of the sky, Vlad.
…what Mandelbrot “supposedly” said:
OK, here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLFkQdiXPbo
10 minute video, Mandelbrot and your guy Taleb (they mention at the start of the video that Taleb considers Mandelbrot to be his ‘mentor’).
It is a good video from back in 2008, however, if you don’t care to listen to it all, the part about Mandelbrot saying the black swan event could simply right itself, and that anything is possible, and that predicting the future is very difficult …starts at 9:30 into the video and goes till the end
All religions? Inlcluding the Pharisees who killed Christ and whose teachings you follow?
==
All religions!
Btw, Jesus was a Pharisee who was crucified for the POLITICAL crime of insurrection against Roman rule. The Roman installed quisling High Priest was a Sadducee. Paul of Tarsus was a Roman agent attached to the Sadducee High Priest mafia brigade. You will not understand these details reading the deliberately misleading lies of the Vatican called the “New Testament”. But then, I know you’re not even interested.
whose teachings you follow
==
I don’t. And I think those that do are idiots. But you already knew that. Though the charge of a “Christ killer” would make such a convenient excuse for another genocide. I know you’re already salivating at the prospect, you disgusting blood vulture.
I don’t think Vlad will be ascending any tall towers with a mighty rifle anytime soon – the thorn in his paw won’t allow it.
Only a woman is going to be able to remove it, and maybe she’ll change that George Jones song when she does.
Watch Dale get out in front of the Pygmy issue if the thread picks up. That’s his whole operating principle: see which way the crowd is marching and then try to run up to the front. And try not to seem out of breath – a natural liberal politician.
Nice one over on Prog btw. Apologize but never giving in on the issue you guys were fighting about – the magic number of optimum Americans. Or are you still an “Asokean”!
“Wow. Too much Fox News?”
You apparently haven’t been here long enough to realize who the Soker really is. He is the *penultimate* master-debator, willing to flip sides on a dime (penny?), faster than Newt or Mitt. This guy still lives in his cardboard boxes, full of high-school debate material, stacked 3-4 tall, reliving his high school daze of state debation (more like deprivation)! He’s a 30-year-old Jew, pretending to be a 60-year-old black – always inconsistent, yet always arguing for the *opponent* in every argument he can *MUSTER*…
You don’t believe in the God of your Fathers – just the promise He made (you think) that He would give the Jews the whole world to rule. Thus Judaism is a useful cover for one whole side of the Conspiracy since many others feel as you do.
You are not entirely wrong btw: the Vatican just came out with a decree for a World Bank. They are traitors to traditional Catholicism. The Vatican is not always the same as the Pople. Benedict is all over the place frankly. He enraged these people by bringing back the Latin Mass. But on other issues he’s with them or not far from them.
No. Women (and their male enablers) broke the Social Contract decades ago. Most Men have no idea what these people belive: all heterosexual intercourse is rape, destruction of the family, discover a way to decrease the number of men – and feminize the remaining ones and so on. And men like me who try to them are laughed to scorn. Thus the dispossesion of men and the redistribution of their wealth to their ex-wives continues apace. And now women wonder why men are on a marriage strike!
And who teaches boys in schools? The same kind of gorgons – who teach them to be ashamed of their sex, race, and culture. Cruelty unspeakable. Good people must abandon Public Schools en masse if we are to have any future at all.
Craig Silverstein, Google’s director of technology and the first employee hired at Google said:
I am well aware of Google’s search limitations.
I’m a nationalist. So were my forefathers. The Hebrew Bible speaks against imperialism in no uncertain terms. Our father Abraham escaped Ur and the Sumerian Empire precisely for that reason. As for the promise to Abraham, (on which I presume you base your false charge that god supposedly promised Jews the whole world to rule) it is very specific: From the Euphrates to the Nile. And it speaks about Abraham’s seed, which as you know includes Ishmael — the father of the Arabs. So the promise is fulfilled. It was already fulfilled thousand of years ago. But you know this, and you continue with your nonsense.
I disqualified myself from the debate because it made no sense for me to answer the question. I hate loud, obnoxious people and crowds in general.If I were King population increases would be sequestered to the coastal cities, leaving home, home on the range a beautiful, barren echo chamber devoid of Motor Vehicle bureaucrats and unruly ruffians running wild.
But then again, Medicine Bow, Wyoming would get stale in a hurry.
I am a broken record, repeating myself over and over, ad nauseum (who here *isn’t*?). I really feel for the youth today – they have been sold the virtue of massive debt and gambling, substituted for the uld-skul conservative virtue of thrift/savings (why?)…
Here’s one for us all, about *40 years after*:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvj99sK1Gl0
Three college students caught thrown molotov cocktails in Cairo – how stupid is that? Are they just dummies or Leftists? They look like simple dummies.
Two parallel lines never intersect is not the most pathetic . at least they can keep together side by side . The two parallel lines which intersect the intersection of the more lines farther . two directions to move forward toward the never-ending . Because I love you, ah !
I’m glad you know, but as you know, the Orthodox feels that applies to the Jews only. And their power increases…
And if you’re really so peaceful and shit, why do you say that the sinister Goldman Sachs is doing God’s work?
Goldman Sachs
==
They will bring the fascist empire down. The more they thieve the faster it all collapses.
I don’t believe these “Orthodox” are Jews. They are a very small (less than 5%) part of the population, and most Jews have very limited to no contact with them. I believe they are imposers in the pay of the Vatican, meant to pervert Judaism into an absurdity. These people are anti-Jews and are anti-Israel. They don’t serve in the army and they don’t pay taxes. They are complete parasites. I’m not sure why Israel tolerates them, but I suspect it’s because Israel is afraid of the Vatican, and with good reason.
Those who live simply will do OK. those who have taken money out of the banks and found an even safer place for it close to home, will also do OK.
Those who are resourceful will do OK. For those who are extravagant will suffer. Those who depend on others do the most basic things for them will suffer.
It is a matter of time when a great deal of the whole cloth will become tattered and frayed all around the world.
There is a push for the neo-fascist financial and corporate crime syndicate is pushing Bloomberg and others to try and shut down the #OWS movement because they are scared of these young people. These young people are not afraid of the Brown Shirt-esque cops dressed up in their Halloween costume riot get-ups.
The #OWS is beginning to tear down some of smoke screens put up by the politically connected elite.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
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OMG, nothing about immigrants? You *SHOCK* me!!! There might even be *HOPE* and *change*… ***NOT***
“Those who live simply will do OK”
You have a simpleton view of teh reality we exist *WITHIN*.
You seem to believe there is some sort of *PAYBACK* to the idjits.
Con me once, shame on you – con me twice – welcome to the world of microsecond trades, collateralized debt, derivatives, and massive TBTF ETF trades…
There is no higher ground in this – there is only fraud, theft, scam, and outright criminality. *YOU LOOSE – GOOD DAY, SIR!!!*
Yup, you editorialized Mandelbrot’s words. You’re searching for a casual way to explain away the fears expressed by folks like Taleb, Mandelbrot, and of course JHK. Your not persuasive, but it’s OK to keep trying. I hope you’re successful with baseless contrarianism. It helps those who wear paper bags over their heads get through the day’s ugliness.
You may consider re-watching this video for yourself, especially from 6:14. Here, the viewer’s framing of the notion of turbulence was too narrow; Mandelbrot interjects and alludes to misunderstandings about why turbulence makes predictability more difficult, especially for economics.
Although, both Taleb and Mandelbrot were effectively saying that because of banking industry consolidation, an unpredictable Black Swan could bring an entire economy to its knees; whereas, a Black Swan appearance within a banking system that’s more spread out, less interdependent as it were, may not have much of an effect upon the overall economy. This distinction should have been obvious from the clip you provided to me.
Mandelbrot does cede the idea that anything is possible (9:30) to the interviewer’s paradoxical query, yet Mandelbrot goes on to explain that he uses scientific methodology instead of opinion to attempt prediction. Hence, the title of the clip, “Benoit Mandelbrot thinks we’re all screwed.”
Mandelbrot never disqualified the argument that something potentially chaotic was on the horizon, as you suggest. well, at least the person who posted the clip on YouTube understood its content, anyway.
Thanks for sharing.
As Soker claims, I was Butt-FUCKED by Google/Firefox tonite (some sort of *ONLINE* scan that I disconnected). I just deleted my facebook account, and 14 days from now, I will be free from the “friends” that celebrate themselves/spending/larger-than-thou self-stroking…
This here shit-blog banned me for 2 weeks, weeks on end! I know I can make it through a 2 week ban! *PRAY* (prey?) for me!!!
Muahaha! Family will be concerned – oh well, they *HAD* their chance… Maybe they should have been more *involved* earlier on… Sistah accountant should have realized I talked the truth, back in ’98 (I know she’s *scared* now)…
Newt Gingrich said:
Newt doesn’t know ProCon or the viciousness of racists!
Tax the rich, feed the poor… (YAWN)
Population, keeps on breeding…
I was out and about today: roads full, gas at less than $3.00, stock market DOW nowhere near 4,000, grocery store shelves full, no black swans anywhere in sight.
“Blue bus” was a street name for a powerful painkiller called oxymorphone in the 60’s. It is mentioned in “The End” by The Doors. Those who get excited about the blue bus are gullible suckers easily drawn in by doomster porn.
Have a happy Thanksgiving … unless TSHTF tomorrow, the internet is taken away from us, we are herded into the stadiums or FEMA camps, EMP takes away all our electricity, “they” come to take away all our guns and gold, etc. etc.
You guys really believe all that stuff? Still? Amazing denial of reality!
Senators – stop the wars?!…
“gas at less than $3.00”
RIIIght. $3.65+++/gallon here. I haven’t filled up for 2 months, and only fill up for 1.5 gallons every 2 months (~$5/fillup, every 2 months).
You? How many gallons you guzzle every day/week/month? Come on Soker, you know you’re at about 12 gallons+++ a month, if not a *WEEK*…
Soker – let’s go honest, bare our souls, and all that sh!t. Let’s talk about your South Americal plot.
Is it a clearcut? It is concrete-trampled by mob-grazers? Is is leached of all nutrients? Is it right next to a silted river? Is that river contaminated by mining dredge? Is that river contaminated by oil drilling dredge?
You seem to dodge questions, my *BROTHAH*!!! Feeling lucky? Are you beliefs etched in stone?
WhereTF is *Q* when you need him!!!
You have a warped view of South America, BROTHAH.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXauuFSPMIA
“They won’t even say which institutions got the money in front of Congressional panels.”
The *CRUX(ifiction)* of the problem. We all *babble on moron*, like fools… How do we convince anyone they are wrong, and we are right?!…
Get it yet? They are still the 1%, and they will *NEVER* relinquish that status. Would *YOU*?!?
gas at less than $3.00,
=================
And where would that be?
You must be buying your gas at the same place that sells those 12% yield investments.
I was out and about today too and in central NJ we have a bunch of brand X gas stations that go by the name Raceway. Regular was going for $3.119. All the employees are either Pakistani or Indian, it’s hard to tell. Name brands were $3.189. I never see gas cheaper than here in central NJ.
You should read more carefully. Your comment today:
“this distintion should have been clear to you from the clip” in which you are referring to the greater likelihood of a black swan event nowadays.
My comment to you last night:
“Fractals may indeed suggest the increased likelihood of a ‘black swan event’ collapsing the economy. Taleb’s argument that the system is so tightly wound that it is much more sensitive to unanticipated disruptions seems clearly to be the case.”
You should at least try to comprehend other viewpoints before attacking the messenger.
But that is exactly the point I have been making – the predictions on this site have been poor, by JHK and others, especially related to timeframes. That is just a fact.
And my point has been that many here tend to start with a predetermined point of view (peak oil is upon us, motorized transport is finished, etc) and do not give other potential remedies a fair evaluation.
As I said earlier, although I am against bailing out inefficiency, debt monetization in a deflationary environment could go on for a very very long time.
I agree for the most part that the combination of global debt levels and the speed of information transfer today produce volatility, however, I do not agree with many of the dire predictions and/or time frames continuously provided here.
Many people here also quickly resort to personal attacks rather than straightforward logical reasoning.
Fractals? I should have figured somebody would figure out a way to make things seem even more Godamn complicated than is already done on here.
Jim has warned us about ‘techno triumphalism’.
19-year old Jennifer Fox, who was beaten and sprayed last Thursday at the same OWS demonstration in which an 84-year old woman was sprayed, miscarried her three-month fetus on Sunday.
Isn’t that murder by the police? She told them she was three months pregnant and they beat her on the stomach.
84 year olds, Iraq war veterans, pregnant women…
We all Black now.
One of the main topics this week in the comment section is the prediction of when or if a disaster of our own making strikes us. The truth is there’s no way to tell. The past has already happened & is probably immutable. Many of us don’t even know what’s happening in the present. Stating what occurs in the future is meaningless, because the future does not now exist.
What we can do is plan for the future based on current trends, many possible events and a rough estimate of probabilities. For example, we can observe that there has been an erosion of liberty in America. No rational person can deny this – we can give examples. Knowing this, we have options on how we can deal with it (no need to go into detail here).
So all we can do is develop options (or not, for low probability events) for future possibilities. Talking about what’s going to happen with certitude, or near certitude is irrational. Saying what we’ll do IF something occurs is another matter.
Evidently gas is under $3.00 in several places around the country, not just here.
http://video.wrbl.com/v/48943561/gas-prices-drop-below-3.htm
Alot of people quote Taleb here, who drew alot of his inspiration from Mandelbrot’s Theory of Fractals.
Fractals actually are considered a simple way to understand infinite complexity.
This is a video tribute to Mandelbrot by Jonathon Coulton:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES-yKOYaXq0
As far as “Jim warned us…” its fine to read him but make up your own mind.
The last time I bought gas here in the Boston area – a few days ago – the price for regular was $3.289 per gallon, but I know I could have driven around and found a place for a few cents less. To me it’s not a big deal because on the last fill-up my Prius got 52.9 mi/gal, and the time before that about 54 mi/gal. Since my gas tank’s capacity is 11.9 gallons, and I always fill up with a few gallons left, my fill-up cost is usually around $28 (I fill up after 400 miles or so).
I’m not too worried about the price of gas. If the price doubled to $6.60, I’d still be paying around $56 per fill-up. My Prius is currently almost exactly 2 years old; I bought it new and now have around 24,500 miles on it. That means I burn around 230 gallons a year. At $3.80/gal, which is the price I’ve been paying for a good part of the year, I spend around $875 yearly for gas. Given the hours I save by driving to places I need to go, instead of taking public transportation, the comfort and convenience of using my own vehicle, and the freedom to go on trips it gives me, I feel for me, the $875 per year is well worth it.
Since I buy a new car every 2 years, I’m always on my warranty and my operating costs, besides insurance is mostly for changing the oil. Because Priuses have a great trade-in value, I figure it costs me about $5,000 to buy the new car, or about $200 per month, and I never worry about repairs or my car malfunctioning on the road. My auto expenses also don’t include any costs to the environment, which is a negative, but I’m not ready yet to give up driving.
In my last post I commented on developing options for possible future events. I’m working on that now for the time when it may not be possible to obtain gasoline. But for now, I’m ok with my car.
I suspect my situation is similar for many Americans, which is why the country finds it hard to give up happy motoring. My difference is that I’ve developed plans for POSSIBLE futures.
Knowing this, we have options on how we can deal with it
==
http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6031/6370759251_c79426db5e_z.jpg
I’ll tell you how you deal with this. You make a sign that reads “arbeit macht frei” and another sign that reads “Buchenwald”. Because if you’re not out there with those kids, that’s the future.
10 years after!
Tell me where is sanity?
everywhere theres [censored]
Yr Prius loses 2.5K a year in value?
Absalom said:
I don’t come across many people with the grasp of scientific methodology you possess. This is especially frustrating as I often converse with social-scientists, who seemingly believe the scientific method can be applied “softly” to experimental design. In other words, the loosey goosey application of experimental methodology in social studies produces a vast array of theories based more on traditional viewpoints rather than interpolated evidence. This feels like the infusion of science and rhetoric — what a disaster.
***************************************************************
Much of the abuse of statistics in the social sciences fits into the following two categories: 1) The assumption that a group of people is a “closed system” like molecules in a Bell Jar, and 2) The assumption that whatever personal/societal traits being measured in a group are distributed as a Gaussian Curve.
The first is the worst and most ridiculous assumption. Any human being in a psychology or sociology experiment brings their ENTIRE HISTORY into the event. A molecule in a Bell Jar doesn’t have self-consciousness and its behavior in the Bell Jar doesn’t depend on what it was doing ten years ago. Thus, the “closed system” assumption that physicists and chemists make when interpreting experimental results is an utter absurdity in the social pseudo-sciences. Ridiculous.
The violations of proper sampling methods, improper assessments of sample-vs.-population characteristics, and use of improper inferential statistics merely adds insult to injury. I remember when psych and education grad students would ask me to crank out stats from experiments they ran so they could write their dissertations and get their Ph.D.’s. No less than 60% of the time I refused because their sample sizes and sampling methods did not justify the stats they wanted to run (usually Student T-tests, ANOVAs, and so on). I would guess that up to NINETY percent of JURIED social science “findings” reported in various trade journals are absolute nonsense. The “juries” don’t know any math either!!
E.
I guess so. Like I say, Priuses keep their value. All I know is that the last 2 times I bought new Priuses with Prius trade-ins, it cost me $5,000. I expect, with inflation it will cost me more this time around – maybe up to $7,500.
Well, you’ve done it again. You’ve editorialized with a feeble attempt at paraphrase.
Your representation of my earlier reply:
“”this distintion should have been clear to you from the clip” in which you are referring to the greater likelihood of a black swan event nowadays.””
This is you mumbling, barely a reflection of what I actually wrote, and is not a real point of contention with my personal point of view, nor Mandelbot’s. This man, if I understood Taleb’s book correctly, effectively posits that Fractals are superior plotters for volatility, opposed to Gaussian curves, which are not so good for charting volatility. This was the gist of that portion of Taleb’s thesis, and the primary reason he cites Mandelbrot’s ideas.
Anyhow, the supposed “greater likelihood of a Black Swan event nowadays” is a straw man argument you’ve concocted and attributed to me, but I’ve never said as much. That is your framing, sir, not mine.
==================================================
My actual remark:
“Although, both Taleb and Mandelbrot were effectively saying that because of banking industry consolidation, an unpredictable Black Swan could bring an entire economy to its knees; whereas, a Black Swan appearance within a banking system that’s more spread out, less interdependent as it were, may not have much of an effect upon the overall economy. This distinction should have been obvious from the clip you provided to me.”
Remember for the future: a Black Swan is unpredictable by nature; otherwise, it could not be called a Black Swan. Randomness means unpredictability. A predictable occurrence is not random. To paraphrase the original author: A single observation of a Black Swan is sufficient to refute the conclusion that all swans are white.
So going back to the original topic, I simply explained how your claim referring to comments in this video were distortions. For example, here’s your claim:
“It is a good video from back in 2008, however, if you don’t care to listen to it all, the part about [[Mandelbrot saying the black swan event could simply right itself, and that anything is possible, and that predicting the future is very difficult …starts at 9:30 into the video and goes till the end.”]]
This is a choppy representation of the context of Mandelbrot’s remarks. You’ve flubbed several times now, so I’m going to let you alone on this topic. I agree to disagree with you.
Yeah, you are that autodidact. Or at least his long lost twin. Still taking the time to respond to students I see.
Happy sailing, sir.
“Are you being served?”
“We live in a society where passions are riderless horses, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, in which there is a desolation of decency. In which love has become a jungle emotion, lust exalted to lordship, sin elevated to sovereignty, Satan adored as a saint, and man magnified above his maker.”
And we pretend to wonder why these things are happening to us.
We live in a puritanical, sexually repressed, society where passion is OK for NASCAR and football, but don’t scream in the throes of orgasm.
This is a view consonant with an indoctrinated Puritan who doesn’t know what love is
Puritanical people believe in original sin, in the dualism of “satan/saint” and the dualism of man/maker. Ignorance (in the sense of ignoring) is the source of suffering and ignorance is not sin. The “maker” is just a concept in the mind of man. Man created the idea of a maker.
It is good to recognize pretending, good to wonder, good to be in awe. No “maker” is needed for these things to happen.
Whites don’t realize they are doing the same thing. They just can’t be bothered to have children.
Here at the Jersey Shore, Sunoco on Route 35 is selling gas for $3.05 a gallon (cash price). Might fill up today.
Good post, Asoka. I didn’t think you had it in you.
aah jeez, you almost said something real “love” is seratonin, and our bodies have evolved to recognize a different immune system from our own…that s why we re not attracted to family (different immune systems will combine to produce a child with parts of each; giving each generation a more varied, and therefor stronger immunity) all of the sinner/saint bullshit is just that- the whole puritan thing is not about not fucking; it s about not talking about it- which i suspect was a function of the perversions of church leaders…who else cares if i m bangin’ my wife? somebody who aint getting any and is jealous…one of my precious memories is the note we got on our door one morning from our neighbors concerning just how disturbed they were the night before…being in my twenties at the time; i was ready willing and able to make ’em regret that note the next evening!
therefore…sorry Q-check (that ll be $1.67 please)
Sounds like a script from various Tibetan Buddhist
uh, groups.
—————————————-
Not any I’ve ever been associated with, your experience differs?
our bodies have evolved to recognize a different immune system from our own…that s why we re not attracted to family
============
Right. That’s why incest never happens.
Guess again, Charlie.
I don’t think Vlad will be ascending any tall towers with a mighty rifle anytime soon – the thorn in his paw won’t allow it.
—————————————–
Well said, yes Fascism requires that thorn.
Watch Dale get out in front of the Pygmy issue
—————————————
Yeah….I’m “plotting” right now to get out in front of the “Pygmy issue” (whatever that is)…..Whooh boy (eyes rolling here)
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(?????????:??)
hey, i didn t say it never happens; but that s one reason it doesn t always happen…btw, on an unrelated note: i m tired of scrolling; since you re “here”, didn t you say a pregnant girl miscarried? was her name jenny fox? i ve seen nothing on huffinglue paint, or other M$M about it…
aaaargh! what a waste of screen…james, could you at least set filters for english?
We all Black now.
——————————
I love the comment by the Fox News commentator that there is nothing to worry about, after all, pepper spray is a “food substance”….riiiight.
Using that logic, it’s no big deal if they shoot them either, since lead is a naturally occurring mineral substance.
Fucking Fascists.
i ve seen nothing on huffinglue paint, or other M$M about it…
=================
Which of the M$M would you consider credible? What are your criteria for determining credibility? If I gave you Jenny’s phone number and you talked to her, would that convince you? What if I showed you the Harborview (this was in Seattle) hospital records? Would that convince you? Why do you care? For Jenny? Or for the unborn fetus?
Hey BTownBill, it looks like you’re gonna get casino gambling up there in Mass., 3 casinos! You won’t have to make that drive down to Connecticut anymore.
Happy Thanksgiving, CFNers!
–WSP7
whoa there, cowboy! you misunderstand the enquiry! i was not doubting the validity of your post…to answer your questions: BBC, most of the time…gut instinct and the ‘smell test’…yes, yes again (while i never said i wasn t convinced in the first place)…because i am a decent human being blessed with empathy, i care for them both…i was trying to gather information- kinda curious about, among other things, whether it is known which pig assaulted her; and was the attack caught on evidence- i mean video…thankyou for any further consideration
To whom ever is concerned about Vladdy getting some, don’t worry, from what I’ve heard, he takes care of his carnal longings about every 60 days by taking the money he makes turning in aluminum cans & plastic bottles, in carefully counted rolls of quarters, down to the double-wide at the other end of the trailer park where the meth-whores live.
They hate that he pays in quarters, so they charge him quadruple the regular rate, but they are happy anyway since he finishes in about 30 seconds. Afterwards, he goes home and takes a 60 minute shower, carefully washing with a bar of Ivory Soap, the whitest of course. When done, he pours himself a glass of cheap brandy, and sits down to his trusty P-II, running Windows 98, logs onto his favorite Wite Powr site first, then comes here to settle in for the fun part of the day.
Life doesn’t get any better for Ol’ Vladdy.
On occasion, you may have noticed from his discourse that he appears to go off his meds and/or self medicate, this is when his primary personality comes to the fore. Some think that he was once a university professor at an Ivy league school, but was forced out in disgrace due to an affair with a young female student of his, thus his hatred for women and person he feels may be “more smarter” than him.
When he is back on his meds, he’s just the usual, huggable ol Vlad the Racist.
I hope this helps us all understand just where our fun, lovable Mr Vlad is coming from.
🙂
Oh, OK. Sorry. In that case the story may not be true. It was reported in the Seattle Times and the Washington Post. But the Seattle Police are investigating their own behavior and may claim the woman was lying. Who you gonna believe? And are gut instinct and smell test the only criteria you use?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/seattle-police-investigate-protesters-claim-that-she-miscarried-after-being-pepper-sprayed/2011/11/22/gIQAXtilmN_story.html
Asoka writes;
“We live in a puritanical, sexually repressed, society where passion is OK for NASCAR and football, but don’t scream in the throes of orgasm.”
Are Mr. and Mrs. Asoka suffering from inhibition in the bedroom?
Seriously? You think that God disregards the manufacture and use of depleted uranium bombs, white phosphorus, cluster bombs, bunker busting bombs, drones, Hellfire missiles, offshore drilling leading to mass death among ocean dwellers, police brutality and all the rest?
He only cares about lust? Enough to punish an entire country because some people have sex?
That’s a sick, sick being that you worship.
And you wonder why so many people are atheists.
i figure from what he said about getting laughed at for approaching women, about divorce, and the whole racist bit that he s just an ugly little man with a little bitty pecker, and well, no self esteem…all of which can be helped with a little counseling and elective surgery- so save your quarters up vlika, and remember what stewart smalley said…maybe not true in your case, but it COULD be…smirk…
Gasoline here is $3.45 a gallon. I wonder why it’s higher here than where you all are.
Yes, I love Joe Baegant. We lost a great voice when he died.
I’m glad to have you lurking around my blog. I don’t take that in a creepy way. 🙂
Pepper spray on pizza counts as two vegetables.
thanks- i was sorta kidding; i m unable to pass up a chance at humor…about gas, that is a damn good question it s my understanding that the gas stations only get pennies/gal in profit…
I don’t think that he’s ugly or impotent.
I think that he’s moody and prone to spouting nasty personal digs and insults, which, along with his hateful political philosophy, repels women.
What about Women hating Men? Why does no one, male or female, care about that? Why do Women get lighter sentences for serious crimes? Why do Women on all Women Talk shows laugh about Women cutting off their husbands penis? Why are Men viciously abused in Family Courts?
That you don’t take any of this seriously just shows you are another one of the haters. That men don’t care about other men shows the state our Society. Many men are fleeing this doomed place and going to places where women haven’t been ruined like Costa Rica. But even there, there are women like you trying to corrupt their sisters down to American levels.
No, the Prius loses the $2500 in value (to you)when you take it out the door. After that the depreciation drops off dramatically. If you took it back in a week, the dealer would pay you $2500 less for it, but then sell it again to someone else for the same amount you just paid for it a week ago.
The Chinese trade imbalance is fixed! $12,000 an acre is good. All the money sent to China can come back when they buy our farms.
Q, When you talk to your son, ask him if he would like to go to the Salt and Pepper deli for lunch sometime. I think he will be amused.
That’s true. Some mornings after a good night’s sleep, I’m still as handsome as a god. But the evil out there is very great – and I’m not willing to put up with alot of bull shit anymore. There are some good marriages and relationships, but a man takes a terrible chance now that the laws have taken our rights away. And the popular culture is one long mock and smear against White Men. This does effect the attitudes of women – even if only unconsciously. Women are naturally hypergamous – they have become what they seek. So they end up Alone and Miserable.
The Feminist attack against Western Culture was one of the master strokes of the Communism. There was Feminism before Communism, but Communism organized it into a potent force. Along with the whole Racism madness it has almost destroyed us. So kudos on all that. Enjoy it for what it’s worth. I don’t think you or anyone else is going to enjoy the acutal fruits of all that. But you people were always the “would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven type”. Blacks are like that too. The Blacks of South Africa know that White Rule was better than the rapidly deteriorating situation over there. But they cannot regret what has been done or do anything to stop it. It must run to its natural end now – and that will be the collapse of the Industrial State back to tribal warfare with swords and spears. The Boers bide their time, training in secret, waiting for the hour of Revenge.
Oh and btw, if by some miracle, we were to gain power, women would flock to us in droves. Our “repulsive” ideology would not repel them anymore at all. Sucess is their criterion and what determines what is and is not repulsive. Such is the nature of women. Am I missing that much? You are a rare exception of course. A puritan fanatic whose ancestors exchanged one religion for the communist one.
Trungpa used to get drunk and call himself a king. He had his men tie up a man and beat him. He broke up marriages with his sex orgies.
His “dharma heir” Osel Tenzrin was Gay and HIV positive – he gave over a hundred men the virus. He said: I thought that the Dharma Seal would protect them. A fitting Dharma Son – he exceeded his Dark Master.
But you don’t care about any of this. You’re Dale! Everything you’re involved with becomes righteous since you’re involved with it. But you’re not alone. As Andrew Cohen once said, he never met even one Dharmadatu member who had emotionally dealt with any of this.
Yeah, wow, 3 new casinos. As if we need anymore. Good for Massachusetts revenue, bad for me, and Connecticut revenue.
Bad for me because the Eastern Mass. casino will be too close. Anytime I want I can just go for a 20 minute ride to the casino, not a 1.5 hour, 90 mile trip to Ct. Best analogy: A recovering alcoholic goes to a party, finds out it’s in a bar. He thinks, “not good, but it’s just a one night party, I can deal with the temptation of being surrounded by booze for one night.” He does.
Then he finds that his roommate is going to hold a party every night with lots of booze, in his own living room. He’s a goner and so’s his sobriety.
Jim,
Why don’t you charge people for reading your blog, or commenting.
You are well worth the read!
I don’t think that the so-called feminism triumph of the 70s was left wing at all, of course, Vlad.
I think it was a propaganda scheme by the ruling class to get women into the workforce and keep them there, since women were paid 57 cents to a man’s dollar.
Women traditionally kept their infants with them and nurtured them. But that meant that the ruling class had to pay the men a family wage. Unacceptable!
So a campaign was launched to make women believe that leaving their newborns with paid help was “liberation”.
And the ruling class obtained two workers for the price of 1.57. http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/2010/05/mothers-day-talk.html
And when women obtained the right to participate more widely in the workforce, they no longer depended on the men to provide for them, and they became free to dump abusive or otherwise unsuitable men.
That’s the part you don’t like.
As for women now getting money from men in divorce cases, I don’t know where you get that.
Alimony was dropped along with mothering, a long time ago.
The guy made a living trashing his own people for liberals like you. Of course you’d like him, Judas.
i m an earthling, so you are ALL my people…and that s jesus, to you, my wayward son
Simone De Beauvior said that women would not be allowed to stay at home and be mothers. It’s so self indulgent she said. So many women want to do it. Horrible. This ties in with the detruction of the family as per the Communist Manifesto.
Women are paid what men are in general. It’s just men work longer and harder. Women like the Option to work or stay at home. And of course they need and want time off to have babies. As is right. But they can’t expect to be able to compete with men who don’t take so much time off. The sexes are different and have different destinies. To say as Gloria Steninem did, that the only diffence is plumbing is just ignorant. And most Feminists don’t believe it anyway – seeing themselves as special and superior to both men and ordinary unenlightened women.
A woman who elects not to have children should be given an equal opportunity. But that’s just a very small minority. Having children is the greatest joy for most women. This drives the hard lesbo core of Feminists into a rage. That ordinary women listen to these hate filled freaks is the amazing thing, the tragedy. But women are conformist – and the Establishment at the highest levels is behind the Feminists. Thinking for themselves is about the least favorite feminine activity. So they follow people who despise them and lead them into “careers” (boring jobs) and lives of quiet desperation and sterility. After all, trying to get married and have children in your 40’s is insane – it should be done in the teens and early 20’s.
And you still think the Establishment is against you! That’s why the great foundations have funded Commies in Academia for generations. That’s why Ayers teaches despite his terrorism. It must be great to both a revolutionary and a respected member of society. How you people live with yourselves and believe yourselves is the question.
Your point about getting more workers and paying them less is correct of course. But Communism is just State Capitalism after all. And it is funded by the International Bankers as a way to gain absolute power. You wont like the final result since you have a deep core of decency. But you are too proud and passionate to give up your revolutionary stance and simply SEE that you’re being played.
SECTION IX.–Assassination.
148. The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, any more than the modern law of peace allows such international outlawry; on the contrary, it abhors such outrage. The sternest retaliation should follow the murder committed in consequence of such proclamation, made by whatever authority. Civilized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination of enemies as relapses into barbarism.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/liebercode.htm
I heard 200 got hiv/aids [perhaps spouses of the men].
Well lets see Dale:
Rick Ross cult site/ Scandanavian in cahoots with the fake karmapa.
Lama Sogyal Rinpoche.
And 3rd but not least the young Spaniard who doesnt want to be Yeshes reincarnation, now that really was a hoot.
The Tulku system was misused in Tibet but now, with Segal and that woman in Maryland…
its a f’kin joke.
I read the woman was ‘bringing in alot of Beltway people to the center so they made her a ‘special reincarnation’.
hate filled freaks…that s rich!
You should know that the point about the destruction of the family in the Communist Manifesto, was that capitalism destroys the family.
And it still is.
How can you say that women and men are paid the same and also say that it its true that capitalists get more workers and pay them less if women are convinced to stay in the workforce? That’s mutually contradictory.
And I will just disregard your rant about lesbians, communists and Bill Ayers, as I usually do.
Does anyone know Michelles SAT scores?
I have conflicting info here:
Factcheck:
Easton said the nearly $317,000 figure is “misleading” anyway because it includes more than just her salary. He said the figure “also includes a performance bonus, a one-time signing bonus (she had other, competing offers at the time), and a one-time mandatory payout from a terminated retirement plan.” This is reflected in the fact that her 2006 earnings were less than in 2005.
The first lady, a graduate of both Princeton University and Harvard Law School, was quite accomplished before she joined the University of Chicago in 1996 and ultimately the medical center in 2002.
Her prior work experience included stints as an associate with the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin LLP, assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago’s City Hall and executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies……………
John treed.com
Another test of the application of affirmative action to admit Michelle Obama instead a more qualified would-be lawyer is what kind of a lawyer did Michelle turn out to be?
For sure, a short-lived one.
I could not find the exact duration on the Internet, but the Obama campaign Web site has only this to say about her stay at the Sidley Austin law firm:
…corporate law was not her calling…
Actually, apparently no other kind of law was her calling either. She never attempted to practice law again.
It is at least an even bet that she quit the legal profession so quickly after Harvard Law School because she sucked at it, not unlike the way she sucked at taking the Law School Admission Test. I expect that top law firms like Sidley Austin make extra efforts to recruit black lawyers, but I doubt they can tolerate weak job performance in such a competitive profession…..
That is, capitalism is still destroying the family.
‘That’s why Ayers teaches despite his terrorism.’
Angela Davis was welcomed in and Kevin Mc Donald
was almost [?] banned, after all he was armed with the truth.
This video “Capitalism Hits the Fan” is very good at analyzing our current predicament.
I recommend it to you and to Prog, whose obsession with immigration parallels yours with race and women.
Richard Wolff points out that women AND immigrants, not to mention computers, were used in the late 70s and 80s to destroy the wages of the working class.
Get back to your roots, Vlad.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZU3wfjtIJY
Sick but true….’they’ are buying huge swaths of
Africa, and elsewhere! As is Soros.
‘We’ can work for minimum wage on the heartland farms as coolies for the Chinese millionaires and billionaires.
Mister we could use a man like Ronald Reagan again. His jelly beans were brain food! All of his Cabinet were CFR but he wasn’t. What does that mean?
Are we only an economy?
‘Prog, whose obsession with immigration…’
P2C is right, its the #1 or #2 issue.
‘Vlad, back to your roots’ what roots? The movie about colored folks?
“And when women obtained the right to participate more widely in the workforce,..”
If they “obtained” it then its not a right, but a priviledge. Government cannot grant rights, only recognize and preserve them. All our rights predate our government. It was created by us to preserve our rights, and when it fails in this it has lost its reason to exist, and must be replaced.
So what’s the problem? Send the immigrants back and give women what they want – stay home with the kids. They can go to work once the kids are in school – say in their mid to late 20’s. But many wont want to and that’s fine too. Many (not all) women would give their eye teeth for what women had back in the 50’s.
So Communism doesn’t want to destroy the family? You’re lying. Communism sees itself as completing the arc of destruction begun by Capitalism. Capitalism destroyed the extended family; Communism will destroy the nuclear. And then everyone will be one big family! And people will roam thru the State (rich elite) owned factories flinging their arms in joy exclaiming, “I, Wage, own all of this!
I don’t want to be a tulku! I’m a toy’s r us kid.
You must. You are Lama Yeshe. I don’t want to be. You are.
Lama Yeshe was a nice guy (maybe more) but this is ridiculous.
“And you wonder why so many people are atheists.”
No, I don’t wonder about this. Its obvious to me how someone who thinks God overlooks other forms of evil just because I didn’t quote every form of evil in the world in a comment on CFN, could miss some information that might convince them that He, in fact, doesn’t.
Your problem isn’t that you don’t believe in God, but that you don’t agree with how He is running things, which you foolishly attribute {blame on}to those of us who do believe, as if we were responsible for what God is doing. It will not be until after a while that we will recognize that, none of us are even capable of comprehending all that He is orchestrating to bring about a just resolution to our prediciment.
Ronnie Reagan? Really? Jellybeans as brainfood??
Vald, please, please, start taking your meds again. Self medication with Meth & Booze is really screwing up your head.
I mean, you are really one fucked-up motherfucker.
🙂
p.s. Have you considered penis enlargement surgery? You really should, it might help with all those feelings of inadequacy you have there.
🙂
And as we work our old bones to death marching to work the fields our Chinese overlords will lounge at Starbucks enjoying tea and blond barista servant girls.
Like in Tibet
I’s Chicken George!
I do masturbate – onto my garden on the Solstice and at Lugnasad. I’d be glad to do your garden too – free, but you gotta pay my airfare. No guarantees now – I’ll have to take a look before I know whether I can play ball. Airfare is non-refundable.
I met Alex Haley once. He was a very pleasant relaxed and easy going man.
Pepper spray on pizza counts as two vegetables.
————————————-
Now that’s funny.
” Oh and btw, if by some miracle, we were to gain power, women would flock to us in droves. Our “repulsive” ideology would not repel them anymore at all.”
If you mean power in terms of being a “protector” I have to agree with you. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I recall a distinct vibe change between the genders. Career women suddenly seemed a bit less independent and metrosexuals were like bull elks in rutting season. Perhaps I Aeven saw a damsel in distress hanging on your arm, but I might have been hallucinating…stressful times, you know.
Is this kind of crap really necessary, I don’t like a lot of what Vlad Kranta says, but how is it really worse than Wage bragging about her mother or aunt or whoever having fourteen abortions, or these smart ass atheists that try to shove off their non beliefs on everybody else. Or the leftists that treat the society that prodiced them like it was an outlet mall.
There was some idiot on here a few weeks ago that looked forward to the day when all the races would disappear and everyone would be a nice light chocolate color. Yech.
And I don’t remember them taking the kind of abuse you’re wanting to dish out.
Well lets see Dale:
Rick Ross cult site/ Scandanavian in cahoots with the fake karmapa.
—————————————-
I asked about “your” experience, not whatever you could dreg up on the web from “somewhere”.
It’s no surprise to anyone, myself included, that there are people who abuse things….what’s new?
I can speak from personal experience, having met a number of Buddhist teachers in multiple traditions and the worst I could say about any of them is they were a little hide bound by traditional ways of doing things.
I actually spent five days with Sogyal once, not my kind of teacher, but a good writer on the dharma nonetheless.
Speak at least occasionally from your own experience, we all know how to find things on the Web, truth or not.
I do masturbate – onto my garden on the Solstice and at Lugnasad. I’d be glad to do your garden too – free, but you gotta pay my airfare. No guarantees now – I’ll have to take a look before I know whether I can play ball. Airfare is non-refundable.
Ewwww….. no thanks, I don’t want you slapping the pickle in my garden.
Get back on your meds, please.
🙁
I said that about wondering about atheists because you complained about lust in America, and seemed to attribute our current problems to said lust.
No, you didn’t mention every crime that the US commits. Just that people in the country like to have sex.
Different people have different morals.
Different people have different morals.
Is that your way of sayin ‘different strokes for different folks’?
There you leftists go again! Always about the sex!
Perhaps so, I am a but a man after all. Yet in a world without god we are all reduced to celibrate humanity and sex does this rather well.
For those drinking a flavor of kool-aid I’d like to point out that god created sex in your world and he/she/it did not create something repulsive in their own eyes.
Only a twisted mind links lust to sin. Lust may be inappropriate, that’s all too true but lust is the most natural human passion we have and in it’s place beautiful. Disparagement of sex is disparagement of self or disparagement of god. Take your pick.
This does not mean that Vlad is free to masturbate in my garden. Gaelic holiday or not. Unless he was being metaphorical in which case I don’t have a garden, that’s twisted.
You really seem to place a lot of faith in wild internet crap….to put it bluntly. I can’t imagine a worse thing to place your faith in.
BTW, this is what Lama Yeshe’s reincarnation actually had to say about his time in Tibet.
“That experience was really good and I so appreciate it. However, certain media find ways to sensationalize and exaggerate an unusual story. So I hope that what appears in news print is not read and taken too literally. Don’t believe everything that is written! Experience shows that however hard one tries in interviews to sincerely and honestly convey key information, the printed result can tend towards sensationalism to get the most attention. FPMT is doing a great job and Lama Zopa is an immensely special person – very inspiring and a great yogi. […] There is no separation between myself and FPMT
CT..thats a funny post!
Osel Hita Torres.. ‘They dressed me in a yellow hat, they sat me on a throne, people worshipped me … They took me away from my family and put me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a lot. It was like living a lie.’
dale, compare that with the post you posted that
started this, about some TV or radio guy [I forget which]..see the similarities?
Found it:
. the cult of tradition
2. rejection of modernism
3. irrationalism – action for actions sake
4. disagreement is treason
If you liked Sogya, Fine….In LA hes spoken at the
Directors Guild [?]..
Others didnt:
BRIEFING DOCUMENT ON SOGYAL RINPOCHE « Dialogue Ireland
dialogueireland.wordpress.com/…/briefing-document-on-sogyal-rinp…
Apr 7, 2009 – The Tibetan lama Sogyal Rimpoche is being sued for $10 million in the ….. Sexual predators like Sogyal Rinpoche are left unpunished and…ad nauseum
Up until this post, I’ve pretty much agreed with your assessments of the European situation. However, the head of the ECB, Jean Claude Trichet, has finally stepped down and taken his single-minded fixation on inflation with him. The new head, Mario Draghi, does seem to understand the ECB has some role to play in this crisis and has been buying the debt of distressed countries. Admittedly, this has been on a limited scale but seems to have been enough to keep Italy out of very hot water in the last debt auction. If the ECB steps into the Euro debt markets in a big way, they could easily stop the crisis. True, member nations would have to allow it to do so and then pass real reform once the crisis is contained. That’s not certain to happen, but France and Germany are at least no longer united in preaching austerity. Watching yields spike on French debt two weeks ago and realizing that they might be the next nation to go down the toilet put the fear of God in France. It’s at least possible that the ECB will crank up the printing presses to deal with the crisis.
Often these white incarnations are left in Tibet and beaten by the Tibetan Kids.
One is reminded of the blind Bohemian Moon Dog who became fascinated by American Indians. He left New York and went out to New Mexico to meet some. His fasciantion ended when some little Navajo kids lead him out onto an island on a busy street and left him there. He realized that the Indians were just a visible metaphor for the lost White Trbialism he was seeking.
Now you’re talking. The coming crisis may bring out the best in many of us – if it doesn’t come on too quickly and severely. If it does, then it’s every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. No giving up our places in the lifeboats for the ladies this time. They’re not ladies and they wouldn’t do the same for us.
They broke the social contract and now want to invoke it – to get without giving. As T.S Elliot said, the West is Christian. If we lose that, it will take centuries for something else to form – and not one of you would feel comfortable in it. The chivalry was a unique Western trait – it is probably to late to revive it (and not without everything else) and it will not come again.
MessianicDude said, “It will not be until after a while that we will recognize that, none of us are even capable of comprehending all that He is orchestrating to bring about a just resolution to our prediciment. ”
Okay. Received unjustified belief. Rejected. Next.
Asoka said “19-year old Jennifer Fox, who was beaten and sprayed last Thursday at the same OWS demonstration in which an 84-year old woman was sprayed, miscarried her three-month fetus on Sunday.”
I’m down with Occupy, but this chick has been disowned by her foster family as a compulsive liar. In addition, she failed to produce materials that she claimed to have that proved the pregnancy.
But you can’t fake being 82.
I said I’s Chicken George!
Wasn’t he conviced for plagairism? Also much of “The Diary of Anne Frank” was written in a ball point pen which didn’t exist at the time. A few years after the publication, the ghost writer sued Anne’s father to get more of the proceeds.
But you’re not alone. As Andrew Cohen once said, he never met even one Dharmadatu member who had emotionally dealt with any of this.
==============
Vlad, you seem to believe that Trungpa getting drunk somehow invalidates his teachings. Trungpa was brilliant and his dharma teachings stand on their own. They are not diminished at all by his personal behavior.
It’s the same with Jesus, who did violent, repugnant, and crazy things in his personal life. But his personal failings do not invalidate his teachings, like those in the Sermon on the Mount.
Your ad hominem attacks are thoroughly pedestrian. They do not in any way diminish the dharma message of beings like Trungpa, Osho, Gurdjieff, Jesus, Meher Baba, Krishna, Shankara, etc.
John Michael Greer (the Arch Druid) is going to be on the radio, tonight. “Coast to Coast.” 1-5am Eastern Time; 10pm – 2am Pacific Time. The “Coast to Coast” website has local stations and times.
Hey, Lewis!
Nice to see you back. Hope all went well in your transition and you are comfortable wherever you are now.
If the ECB steps into the Euro debt markets in a big way
==================
These guys can kick the can down the road for decades, stopgap measure after stopgap measure. It is not in the interest of TPTB to have a complete breakdown of the system they profit from.
But that won’t stop CFN from promoting the most pessimistic visions of the future imaginable.
So Asoka,
What if some of these countries join together and begin trading currency for oil other than the U.S. dollar?
What’s preventing them from doing so now?
The dead bodies of Saddam Hussein and Ghaddafi?
The US doesn’t tolerate such talk.
Was he? I don’t know nor care. I’m just saying I met the man once and he was a nice dude who seemed to take an interest in other people. Nice enough for me to remember him thirty years later distinctly.
My memory of him only amounts to a grain of sand on the infinite beach of history but it is my own true experience and what shapes my opinion of the gentle man.
Nothing is preventing them. Oil is quoted in dollars, but in practice other currencies have been used in trading such as the pound sterling, the Dutch guilder, and the Canadian dollar.
There is nothing sacred about the US dollar. Some OPEC members (such as Iran and Venezuela) have been pushing for a switch to the Euro.
After cheating on him and divorcing him, Hulk Hogan’s wife walks away with 70% of the Estate. And men have equal rights? In what other area of law is the contact breaker rewarded as women routinely are in divorce?
http://tv.yahoo.com/blogs/yahoo-tv/hulk-hogan-divorce-details-public-210908388.html
Is even noting this being “anti woman”?
Of course it doesn’t. That’s why Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” acutally works.
Just as you don’t care whether Ann Frank’s book is real either. Or rather, to put it more accurately – it IS real because everyone says it is. Just as you think that people who act nice are good.
A dog in China refuses to leave his master’s grave. That’s a good person. Google it, he’s famous.
Jesus did no such things. And Masters ARE supposed to be better than other people. The long time Roshi of L.A (blanking on the name) was a drunk and had an affair with one of his students. There is a tradition of drinking in Zen, I know. But you see, he handled it correctly. He gathered his students together and apologized for his failings, weeping as he did so. He was forgiven. Trungpa and his gang could never have humbled themselves like this.
I sat with Osel once when he came to Boston. His whole entourage were creepy – incredibly presumptious and cooler than thou even though wearing suits. Like somehow the worst aspects of art school bohemians meeting corporate asshole culture. He seemed a bit arrogant, but insightful and vibrant. No indication that he was a gay or a monster.
Helpful User Reviews on Amazon:
Defense Pepper Spray MK-9 Stream
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😉
AK
Yo Vlad, what are you talking about man? I only sent a link to the Doors song “This is the End”. I think ol’ JHK was referring to the same song when he titled this weeks rant “The Blue Bus is Calling Us”. “This is the EEEEEEEEEEEND” adagio
Hey CFN. I’ve been busy. Family and holiday stuff.
Wage – I saw your comment. I still think reducing LEGAL immigration to a more manageable level is the last hope of the US, and maybe of human life on Earth. Just keep thinking about it, all of you.
IX – I saw your comment. I’m off my game right now. Or, maybe, I’m slowly realizing that the National cake is already baked and the Federal game is rigged. If I can’t help my Country – I’ll have to concentrate on smaller projects. And, especially, concentrate on my own family and kin.
Been reading a lot of Fred – in my spare time this week. He’s got something to make everybody think. And he’s got something to make anybody mad. Vlad, you need to read him.
Asoka., you really need to read him.
He talks a lot about Mexico, where he lives with a Mexican wife.
Oh well, Happy Thanksgiving – to any of you who hail from countries where such a day is practiced.
And to the rest of you – happy Thursday.
“And—here I am on statistically shaky ground, as there are no statistics—the young too often seem to be assimilating to the black underclass rather than to the central white current. Mexican machismo and the ghetto strut of the black underclass have much in common. Rap is popular among low-class Mexican males. It is the music of defiant losers, of macho swagger and rejection of white America.
Black and Mexican won’t unite. They don’t like each other. Anger will come when the growing and better organized Mexicans take the southwestern cities from the blacks. One country, three nations, little compatibility, and no love lost.”
-fred reed-
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Mexicans.shtml
LLB, How ya been? nice to see ya back. How did ya make out with the store and relocation? RT
LOL. You guys are silly. =3
Man, I love my iPod. =)
Where would we be without computers? It’d be pretty damn shitty, just saying. You neo-luddites are pretty funny to watch. ^_^
The blue bus ain’t calling for us, but the short bus certainly is calling for you, Mr. Kunstler. Please board it immediately, and keep all appendages within the apparatus. Thank you, and have a wonderful day.
Hey JIM K.: is there a way to filter out the trolls from these posts? You need to add a troll filter. Maybe some bright person could invent one, if it does not already exist.
Lol, problem?
Well then, I am two legs up on the food pyramid! I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning! Sure beats tabasco sause on my MRE’s.
Wait! Madmax! I thought bright people didn’t invent anything to do with tech!! Troll filters…that just advances the cause, now don’t it?
Man…that sucks for you then.
Rippedthunder…I love Tabasco. How could you say that? =(
You guys make the baby Cthulu cry himself to sleep everynight. Please, think of the Cthulu. Stop your fuckery, please? Kthnx.
Jesus did no such things. … And Masters ARE supposed to be better than other people.
—————-
Look at what Jesus actually did. It is hard to see him as “better” than us. Jesus was an angry, violent, and hurtful person as demonstrated through his own words and actions.
“If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children
and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) Loki, loki.
“I come not to bring peace, but to bring a sword” (Gospel of Matthew 10:34) Loki, loki.
Jesus, in a burst of temper, actually cursed, i.e., used profanity, against an innocent and defenseless fig tree, condemning a beautiful fig tree to perpetual fruitlessness, i.e., death. Loki, loki.
Jesus entered the temple area and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables violently demonstrating his anger management problem. Loki, loki.
Jesus demonstrated his cruelty toward those who most loved him when he said “Tell that woman…” “That woman” not even “mother,” complete disrespect, intentional hurtfulness – “Tell that woman that nobody is my mother.” All she wanted to do was love him and Jesus demonstrates incredible egoism and insensitivity toward his own mother, disowning her. Hurtful and hateful behavior. Loki, loki.
I could go on, because Jesus was so obviously violent, angry, and neurotic, but you will probably come up with excuses to explain away his bizarre and hurtful behavior.
I will not excuse the behavior, I do not excuse Jesus’ personal failings, his cruelty. It is no wonder they crucified him. He earned his karma.
But Jesus’ fucked up personal life is separate from, and does not lessen the value of, the teachings on love that came through him, even though Jesus himself was unable to practice what he preached. Loki, loki.
You are a prophet with an attitude.
Attitude? As in “uppity”? OK. Jesus was Black. I am just calling a spade a spade.
Jesus’ mother was Afro-Asiatic and probably looked like a typical Yemenite, Trinidadian, or African American of today.
Consider a few inescapable factors that challenge the traditional perception of the Madonna and Child. In Matt.2:15 and Hos. 11:1 we find the words, “out of Egypt, I have called my son. “
Egypt has always been part of Africa, despite centuries of European scholarship which has diligently sought to portray Egypt as an extension of southern Europe.
Literally hundreds of Shrines of the Black Madonna have existed in many parts of North Africa, Europe, and Russia. These are not weather-beaten misrepresentations of some original white Madonna, but uncanny reminders of the original people who inhabited ancient Palestine at the time of Jesus of Nazareth and earlier. The “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” of the Negro spiritual was in fact quite black.
Fair enough.
It’s my understanding that other currencies must be valuated in U.S. dollars BEFORE that country CAN purchase oil. Please Google and correct me if wrong. So if the U.S. loses the people’s support to invade or sanction it’s way to continued dollar dominance, it all comes to a close much, much sooner than endless stop gap measures could allow. It’s more and more likely the case that the still groggy American populace will not continue to tolerate that sort of shit much longer, regardless of where one falls on the ideological spectrum. People now FEEL broke, and consumption isn’t the sedative it once was. Do you not notice the seed of revolution growing around you?
Anyway, your earlier Google search undoubtedly showed you that the British pound sterling preceded the American dollar in trumped up dominance, causing great calamity, socially and economically, as it collapsed virtually overnight. Brits probably didn’t expect it to happen, either, but it did. Point being, their government finagled and maneuvered, I’m sure, as wisely and corruptly as possible, until making the proper misstep sufficient to end the British Empire’s reign. A misstep like a flash grenade in the face of the people, I’ll guess. A second observation that came from reading the vacuity of yet another one of your stop gap measures could go on for probably another 10, 20, or 50 years replies.
Did you not recognize the contradiction in your own words? You’ve used specific timeline possibilities of 5, 10, 20… oh, you get the point, don’t you? Maybe not. You’re every bit as responsible for supporting your counterclaim while bleating, “ there’s no doom on the horizon, so cease with the pessimism.” STOP hand waiving, already. All things being equal, it should be obvious that the only reason your able to scrounge the “facts” for your everything’s hunky-dory song is because countries haven’t decided to dump the dollar, yet. That’s the only way the stop gap bulshit can continue to forestall the eventual.
In the first place, Kunstler isn’t making a scientific or even quantitative argument; he is making a qualitative one; he’s extrapolating as best as possible from a not entirely scientific accumulation of information available for all to scrutinize; that’s probably why he started a blog for shits like you and me, to bounce his ideas through the ether; what’s more, strong interpolation for his thoughts isn’t really possible, which for rhetorical purposes is entirely forgivable; wherefore, a lack of pinpoint accuracy doesn’t necessarily disqualify the trend he speaks to.
For the independent minded, JHK’s claims are not that of a religion either, wherein whichever ass-backward sermon you chose, the word of God is perceived to be unerring. So stop runnin’ your mouth, claiming everyone here is an acolyte.
If you don’t like the fact that people come here because they generally agree with JHK, then don’t join them.
If you don’t like the fact that people come here because they generally agree with JHK, then don’t join them.
—————-
Spoken like a true believer, an acolyte.
That was a bullshit dodge.
Boy, reading Fred Reed is like standing on a narrow ledge between freight trains heading in opposite directions – don’t let your agenda get too comfortable.
His thoughts on Mexico and the drug war were especially illuminating.
I love tabasco on my eggs, but I much prefer pepper spray up my nose and in my eyes. I say bypass the alimentary canal and go straight for the nerve center!
You are welcome, Absalom. It is all part of not being a true believer or an acolyte in the church of doomsterism.
What OWS Wants
1. Eradicate the Bush tax cuts for the rich and institute new taxes on the wealthiest Americans and on corporations, including a tax on all trading on Wall Street (where they currently pay 0%).
2. Assess a penalty tax on any corporation that moves American jobs to other countries when that company is already making profits in America. Our jobs are the most important national treasure and they cannot be removed from the country simply because someone wants to make more money.
3. Require that all Americans pay the same Social Security tax on all of their earnings (normally, the middle class pays about 6% of their income to Social Security; someone making $1 million a year pays about 0.6% (or 90% less than the average person). This law would simply make the rich pay what everyone else pays.
4. Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, placing serious regulations on how business is conducted by Wall Street and the banks.
Ah, Glasshopper, you speak the truth!
Sorry Rt – I inadvertantly used you to get to the bottom of the page. I try to use only Monday posters for that. But while I got you – that’s a pretty tame version of the song. Where’s
the “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to @$%&!!!! you.
It is a beautiful song though. The hobos call death “taking the Westbound”. All ka’s (souls) seek to follow Osiris as he goes into his paradise in the West.
I do read him sometimes – he’s cool. He is friendly with White Nationalists and has spoken at the Amren Conference before. He isn’t one obviously, but he knows Whites are getting seriously fucked over by the US Goverment. He knows all about low Black IQ and high Black criminality and in short, is on speaking terms with all the things you desperately try to pretend away.
Hey, Asoka. Thanks for taking the dissenting position here on this blog.
You are welcome, Absalom. It is all part of not being a true believer or an acolyte in the church of doomsterism.
=================================================
There you go again, cherry picker. Stupid one or two liners enabling you to weasel out of the corner you’ve walked yourself into won’t work on me. At all times I’ve retained my ability to correct my view when presented with good reason. I’ve considered better counterarguments than yours to people like JHK and found them all wanting. Still I remain open.
Don’t lie to yourself; you’re not the voice of dissent; you’re the voice of contrarianism. I do appreciate well justified dissent, but you only craft straw men, and then bet that no one will notice the trickery. Being new to this blog , I mistook your seemly skill to turn a phrase as an ability to think critically. Wrong was I. You’ve been discovered, fact collector.
When thought out, it becomes clear that you’ve chosen to hide underneath JHK’s blog bridge and bamboozle an audience you couldn’t muster on your own. If JHK is “wrong” because things don’t go down the drain quickly enough, you will argue that you were right because his timeline was off. You’re just betting the margin of error, like a petty gambler. If he is right, you will be kidnapped post apocalypse by a band of marauders and kept locked in a cellar as last resort meat.
Have at it, sneaky guy. I certainly won’t make the mistake of considering you original, anymore. Nor will I trouble you to respond to elements of my earlier post, which you’ve cleverly avoided. You, Vlad and a couple others can go back to the circle jerk internet cafe. I won’t dare interrupt.
LATERZ
You are a serious asshole. Is that what you want to hear, bloki?
The Shroud of Turin shows Jesus to be a White Man of noble proportions with sharp, beautiful, masculine White Features. No thick lips or flat nose here buster.
Although I’m heavily invested in stocks, I agree with your arguments as they apply to a large swath of the stock market.
Most of my net worth is invested in a portfolio of high-dividend yield oil and aerospace stocks. The overall yield from this portfolio is on the order of 3.5% using current share prices and 4.25% using the cost bases for my holdings. These are rough mental calculations, but the salient points from my personal perspective as an investor are, first, that this yield is much higher than I would be paid by a bank for the same principal and, second, that the dividends are a substantial source of cash flow and an effective insurance policy against share price losses.
From a social perspective, I consider dividend-paying stocks one of the most effectively and ethically managed capital markets currently in operation. Dividends reward the sort of long-term investment that is most beneficial to companies in need of capital, and they discourage flaky or manipulative short-term investing, much of which constitutes not capital investment but gambling. In my opinion, the dividend-paying portion of the stock market has shown much more prudence and probity in recent years than the banks, which have contorted themselves into high-stakes compulsive gambling operations and specious fee rackets that bear no relation to retail banks a generation or two ago.
One of my main grievances with today’s stock market is that, on the whole, it punishes virtue and rewards vice. To judge from recent news reports, most of the professional investor class is consumed by speculative bubble inflation, Nervous Nellie stampedes, pump-and-dump schemes and similar activities that are useless at best and fraudulent at worst. Amateur investors are routinely talked into buying investment products that they in no way understand. I was talked into buying a small stake in United Airlines in mid-2001; UAL of course proved to be a garbage stock, and due in part to my steadfast buy-and-hold strategy I was wiped out when the company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I was also talked into opening a Roth IRA whose utility I truly do not understand, in spite of all the carrying on about tax advantages; it has performed more poorly than my main portfolio and has practically no fungibility in the event of drastic losses. I’m glad that I contributed as little as I did, and I have no intent of making further contributions. I consider the entire mutual fund/IRA model inscrutably opaque and needlessly complex.
I don’t believe a word out of the mouths of stock analysts unless I have independently confirmed it from credible reports about the company in question. More than a few stock analysts are corrupt, and almost the whole lot of the remainder are out to lunch.
Jesus shmeezus.
how can any of you / us know wtf he did or said ?
it’s 2011, he’s long gone if he was ever here to begin with.
It’s a story conconcted to have control over the masses.
God….now that’s another subject.
Arguing over religion. Arguing over Republican or Democrat. Divide and Conquer.
just my thoughts on this tonite.
Under the Mexican Moonlight !
nice.
Watching that COP pepperspray all those PEOPLE on the ground, MADE ME MAD.
I told my friend and he said well yeah, but in other countries they just shoot and kill you.
2 wrongs don’t make a right.
pepper spray in your eyes is sickening,and throat, etc. it freaking burns like hell. That cop needs some in his eyes. for cryin’ out loud….. these are college kids.
Vlad, I demolished your claim that “Jesus did no such thing” by citing chapter a verse from the Christian Bible proving Jesus was an asshole. You also got the “Masters should be better than us” wrong. I also proved Jesus is Black. Loki, loki.
I find it very amusing that you, a white separatist, are following a Black god-figure. Loki, loki.
Regarding Hulk and his divorce. My point of view.
Sometimes the man treats HER so badly, but oh no he won’t leave, no SHE can do that. as in ‘just get the **** out’, ‘of MY house’. she probably heard that. well she may have. alot of us Do.
Just because she FILED does not mean that she is to blame for the pain and all. She might be, but
some guys provoke and provoke, but NO WAY they are going to take responsibility and leave. No they have to make sure she does that so that THEY can say ‘oh poor me, or She’s the one who left’.
A woman that is being treated well isn’t going to leave.
There are Mean Men and there are Mean women.
I don’t know why she got 70%. How come not half and half.
God….now that’s another subject.
=================
No, God was also concocted to control the masses. If you don’t believe in God, we were told, you can go to hell. So be good. God is watching.
Thanks for the link. going there now, then to sleepy I hope.
Happy Thanksgiving to you and (most) others !
how can any of you / us know wtf he did or said ?
===================
Damn, Jackieblue, you mean they never taught you what they taught me in Christian summer camp? Well, here it is: What Jesus said and did is indicated by the RED letters in the Christian Holy Bible.