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They’re kidding, right? Joe Biden? The former vice-president and US champeen influence grifter came back from the dead this Super Tuesday to save the Democratic Party from Bernie Sanders Venezuelizing what’s left of America (after you subtract our awesome debt loads). Things that come back from the dead, of course, are generally not high-functioning, for instance: zombies. Isn’t that exactly what the party has got now in the person of front-runner Zombie Joe?
They are kidding, for sure — kidding themselves — for which they’ve practiced tirelessly the past three-plus years with RussiaGate, MuellerGate, ImpeachmentGate, and sundry extra delusional hustles, including sanctuary cities, cancel culture, the Green New Deal, free everything, and the transsexual reading hour. So, now they’re pretending that Joe Biden is capable when his every utterance suggests that he is gone in the head. That will work for about a week, I reckon. You know something hilariously idiotic will come out every time he mounts a podium unless his handlers duct-tape his pie-hole. And now that the spotlight is off that distracting crowd of also-rans, the cameras and iPhone recorders will catch his every gaucherie — as, for instance, when he declared in New Hampshire recently to a rally audience of ordinary (non-millionaire) voters, “Guess what, if you elect me, your taxes are gonna be raised, not cut.” It’s on video. Smooth move, there, Joe.
And then, there is that giant anvil hanging over Joe B’s head in the form of an investigation into, and possible prosecution for, his shenanigans with son, Hunter, in Ukraine, including a money-laundering trail featuring millions of dollars from Ukraine routed through obscure banks in Estonia and Cyprus to Hunter’s own bank accounts. The Ukies have opened an inquiry, and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) is ready to subpoena Biden father-and-son. That is, if Sen. Mitt Romney doesn’t stand in the way of a vote for that, as he threatens to do — and he has an interesting motive to do that since his former foreign policy advisor, ex-CIA agent Joseph Cofer Black, was on the board of the same Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings, that employed Hunter Biden at $83,000-a-month for years.
Of course, if Zombie Joe is so obviously non compos mentis before he’s even been nominated, what are the chances that he’ll be able to serve in office a year from now? Somewhere between zilch and nada, I’d say. So, the latest scheme launched this week in chatter from Progressive Hopesterdom has Zombie Joe picking either Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama as his running mate, and then resigning soon after inauguration day, giving this Republic-of-Firsts its first woman president at long, long last.
This is what it’s come to in our new politics of hustles and scams. Though every person over seven-years-old would see through this dodge, what else have they got? Well, a brokered convention, anyway, if Zombie Joe flops spectacularly in the weeks ahead just by showing up and running his mouth, leaving Bernie the Last Man Standing — and the party appears dead set on thwarting Bernie by any means necessary. It’s not impossible that the Dems could rustle up some dark horse candidate in a back room of the Milwaukee Convention Center. I can’t think of anyone just now from, say, the governors’ mansions across the land. And just imagine if they tapped someone from Congress, such as that lying caitiff Adam Schiff (D-CA), what opportunity for sport he would present. More likely, they’d draft some Hollywood celebrity: George Clooney… Oprah… Morgan Freeman (hasn’t he already been president, or did he just play one on TV?).
There’s not a small chance, at this juncture in the Corona Virus story, that the convention may not even be held. And then what? Gawd knows…. But a disruption so severe implies that a lot of damage would be done to the Potemkin economy that is the centerpiece of President Trump’s reelection quest. That damage is being done in real time as I write, with the S & P futures index down another three percent at the open today, Friday. The trend is not Mr. Trump’s friend. And an awful lot of other things are breaking up in the financialized fiasco that enfronts what’s left of the US economy. The bond market is cracking up, especially at the junk-grade margins. And one can only guess at the havoc being wreaked in derivatives by repeated 1000-point swings in the Dow Jones and other symptoms of extreme disequilibrium in indexed things, from securitized car loans to currency swaps.
All of which leaves the Golden Golem of Greatness, Mr. Trump, in not such a bulletproof position for a second term, after all. There’s a possibility that Corona Virus might interfere with the election itself. Viral contagions are known to work in waves. If this is the first wave now, then a second wave would arrive just about in time for election day, November 3. Second wave viral diseases can be more virulent than the first wave, which was the case with the so-called Spanish flu of 1918. And what if a substantial portion of voters don’t dare venture into public places full of their possibly infectious fellow citizens? Would Mr. Trump be forced to postpone the election, fulfilling his enemies’ fantasy that he seeks to become the American Caesar? It’s not a pretty picture from here as things get interesting.
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“The trend is not Mr. Trump’s friend. And an awful lot of other things are breaking up in the financialized fiasco that enfronts what’s left of the US economy.”
I think you mean ‘confronts’.
And yes, by the time the November election rolls around, Mr. Trump is going to be in a lot deeper sh*t than he is now.
Live by the market,
Die by the market.
CancelMyCard– No, I meant “enfronts,” as in stands in front of.
9 am, Los Angeles. Insanity in front of Costco.
Why they didnt open early I dunno. The restless mob needing things.
Wait till the shelves are empty, for more than a day.
see youtube, especially the Honolulu Costco reports.
Honolulu’s kind of a special case. Resupply’s a rather tough nut to crack in the islands, as I recall.
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/industrial-steampunk-factory-machine-isolated-retro-vintage-rusty-vintage-technology-white-png-file-available-84630148.jpg
Exactly.
As much as I like Trump for his willingness open the eyes of many to the truth of our compromised system of controlled media/politics and industry, His lashing himself to the stock market ticker mast as “proof” of his accomplishments seems utterly stupid. If he knows the media is fake, how can he not know that the stock market is a rigged time bomb?
How can he not know he will go down with the stock market ship?
Is it all theater?
Has it always been theater?
Get ready! If he goes down, the economy goes down with him.
The Dems do not have a constructive clue what to do to improve the state of the union. Everything they want to do is going to crush the main part of the economy.
I don’t think it’s theater, I think Trump is hyper-focused on the markets in a savant kind of way, like an autistic (spectrum) type of character structure that has deep understanding and affinity with a few or one subject. And Trump is great with people when he can do the working class comedian thing, but when it comes to projecting “compassion” that’s going to be not his skill area. He should stay the hell away from that stuff.
If the Kung Flu explodes he should maybe ask Pence to retire and get a VP like Nikki Haley someone who can do the emo shit. People seem to like her style, she can be the Mom, while Dad keeps the eye on the checkbook.
And do I think the public really responds to leaders on that level? Yes I sure do. Anyone who has been near an ugly divorce knows this is the exact scenario we are all dragged into. The Dem side is the vindictive harpy female, obsessed with “proving” how wronged she is, not caring about the kids, willing to burn it all down to get that final validation that the man is the most vile thing alive.
The man has pretty much checked out and hasn’t the first idea how to respond. And the kids (all of us) are fucked.
But if we all get sick, Whoever is in the White House had better have someone up front who can handle that heart-wrenching mess on a national emotional level. Right now there is no such person.
Trump is simply conditioned like anyone born on third base to take credit for things that are really luck. And then when the shit hits the fan, he will find bodies throw in front of aforementioned shit. Take Pence. That was brilliant. He’s royally fucked.
I had to laugh at how that all played out. Pence with his usual deer in the headlights look. I’ll bet Donny goes out of his way to fuck with him regularly, just because. Probably takes him back to schoolyard days and picking out the weakling to fuck with.
sanspeur: By ‘it’, do you mean the Trump presidency? In that case yes, emphatically — the tawdry theatre of the confidence trickster.
I feel great pity for Trump’s marks, the ones who genuinely buy into the Apprentice image of Trump as a great businessman. The fact is that he was born into a great fortune, which he has largely squandered amid various bankruptcies and business failures. But all the while he fronted as shamelessly as the most vulgar pimp on the block, and look where it got him.
Time for me to admit that I made the same mistake as pretty much everyone else who considered themselves ‘serious’, and dismissed Trump as a reality-show clown. The one commentator I can think of who didn’t was the revolutionary socialist Chris Hedges, particularly the pro-wrestling chapter of his book Empire of Illusion back in 2009. More power to him.
Hedges was wrong about Trump, but in a way different than those sizing him up as a carnival barker.
Hedges is a smart guy, but has lost his way and is not good at pattern recognition. Much like Morris Berman, who, coincidentally, hates Hedges.
If you can’t baffle them with your brilliance it’s best to utilize bullshit instead. And that’s why Trump is in office post Lehman Moment.
Uncle Sam got drunk on the souls of the poor, and Trump is there to trump up irrational exuberance given Secular Stagnation. Instead we got Smoot-Hawley II & the circus ringleader from Hell.
Elect a clown expect a circus.
RW
TBH, I don’t think it is going down. Gut feeling, but it ain’t coming anytime soon.
I think we are witnessing history. Lots going on behind the scenes. Warring factions. I may be wrong, but we shall see.
“Has it always been theater?” Maybe. I was thinking about what may be the only truth to ever come from Dick Cheney’s mouth, that deficits don’t matter. It could all be smoke and mirrors. Money just being a method of control that works somewhat well. It’s an entirely man made concept. It doesn’t grow on trees, God didn’t create it. The Fed can print all they want. It all depends on a worldwide level of cooperation to keep up the gears turning. Seems mighty precarious these days.
Stick a fork in him.
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/us-primaries-special-why-joe-bidens-baggage-makes-him-a-no-hoper-for-the-white-house/
I dunno. Seems to me people talked the same way about Trump four years ago. I think Americans would gladly elect a chimp (no Obama pun intended, although you have to admit there’s a resemblance) if the marketing scheme was just right.
He’ll be squashed like a bug. The lyin’ turd.
And all on tape. Think Trump hasn’t seen this?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1235367190225879047
He should and I think he will, but as I have said before, I also think there will be massive voter fraud.
It is the only way they could win at this point, and I think they did the same in 2016, which, I suspect, is why they pulled out all the stops to overturn the election.
I suspect Trump simply had far too many votes. The polls were as absurd as 98% to 2% (or close enough) IIRC. No media outlet, no matter how full of shit, dares to puts up numbers like that unless they know something we don’t.
People are totally inured to charges of lying and corruption. That turd has been slung so many times by both sides now that it’s no longer effective. In fact, many people actually admire politicians who are openly, proudly, and defiantly corrupt.
Yes.
In fact, many people actually admire politicians who are openly, proudly, and defiantly corrupt.
No – decent, honest folk who believe in a fair America definitely do not. You might just be projecting – so you can justify to your grandkids why in god’s name you or anyone else were sucked in by the fat orange bastard.
No – I’ve never supported the fat orange bastard. But the fact that people actually worship corruption is irrefutable. Trump has openly bragged about that very fact. And how many “decent, honest folk” are actually left these days, if such a thing can even be defined anymore? Precious few. Most people view “getting mine by whatever means possible” to be the very definition of BAU. And yes, rest assured that every last one of them views themselves as “decent, honest folk” as well. The corruption is systemic, paradigmatic, and utterly pervasive. It’s the very air we breath.
Most people view “getting mine by whatever means possible” to be the very definition of BAU.
That’s a very dark view of things. Plenty of people (possibly a majority) have maturity, and emotional intelligence. They make life decisions based on things other than money – that’s how we get millions of teachers, nurses, firemen, carpenters, musicians, artists, farmers, chefs, police, army, and so on.
They either follow in their parents’ footprints (more or less), or they pursue careers and jobs that interest and engage them – they want purpose more than fame & fortune, and are usually grown-up enough to know that (a) fame & fortune are very hard to achieve, (b) people with a lot of money have to do awful things, and are often rapacious and unlovely, and (c) they can live happier lives doing things not for money.
I see you’re a genuine old-fashioned idealist, so I won’t try to pop your bubble. The world needs more of those types, so good on you!
Me, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool cynic – an idealist gone bad, if you will – who has learned the hard way more times than I can recount how fucking petty and spiteful people can be. Hell, it’s baked into our entire Christian/Capitalist “work ethic” and buttressed by our scientific survival of the fittest mindset. [Talk about your strange bedfellows, who’d have ever thunk back in the day of the Scopes Monkey Trial that the two would eventually share common moral ground!]
But back to my main point, the system itself forces us into these horrible moral conundrums, and had we more moral backbone, we as a people simply wouldn’t stand for it. We’d overthrow the whole fucking mess and be done with it forever. The fact that we don’t (and won’t) is revealing of our true moral character in a way that even our routine daily actions – altruistic as some of them are – is not. It reveals that in spite of all our flowery words and deeds, we lack the moral fiber to actually do something meaningful and lasting about our situation. Our sin is therefore one of all to convenient omission, rather than one of deliberate commission. The results, of course, are exactly the same, with sins of omission being arguably the far more corrosive of the two, since they’re almost always committed without conscious recognition. We’re sleep walking on our road to perdition, if you will.
ellipsis
“Hell, it’s baked into our entire Christian/Capitalist “work ethic” and buttressed by our scientific survival of the fittest mindset. [Talk about your strange bedfellows, who’d have ever thunk back in the day of the Scopes Monkey Trial that the two would eventually share common moral ground!]
Max Weber thunk it way before the Scopes monkey trial. 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool cynic – an idealist gone bad, if you will – who has learned the hard way more times than I can recount how fucking petty and spiteful people can be.
No argument here – I met my share when younger. And Australians divide into two broad stereotypes:
(1) the happy-go-lucky, laid-back, she’ll-be-right ones, who have won the lottery by being born in God’s Own Country, and feel very sorry for everyone else, and especially for having tiny little dicks, and
(2) the ones you seem to have met more often – greedy, rapacious, self-centred to a breathtaking level, thin-skinned, spiteful, vengeful, and always on the make – we have plenty of these too, and we call them “well-balanced”, since they have a chip on each shoulder.
Fortunately most of my family – and all my friends – are Type (1), so I can live a happy, chirpy life. Sun is good, Chardonnay is good, and in the long run we’re all dead.
Trump is simply conditioned like anyone born on third base to take credit for things that are really luck. And then when the shit hits the fan, he will find bodies throw in front of aforementioned shit. Take Pence. That was brilliant. He’s royally fucked.
Yep – and we’ll wait for Trump’s grades from Penn and his score verification for both “genius” and “stable”. This old video won’t sway anyone. Trump’s got a solid 33% who will support him no matter what, and about 40-45% that hate his fucking guts. November will only increase that number.
The corporate MSM is now reinventing the way we do math.
https://twitter.com/TheLastRefuge2/status/1235806822621048832
So was Mekita Rivas an affiirmative action hire?
Not just Mekita — imagine how many editors and other morons that talking point went through before the hosts were allowed to speak it on a live broadcast.
The stupidity runs deep.
… imagine how many editors and other morons that talking point went through before the hosts were allowed to speak it on a live broadcast.
The story, the point, and the graphic would have all been pre-produced – but the poor mathematical skills of the two on-screen space cadets might not have been. But there again, without the “$1 million for every American” the story has no point.
I guess it is possible the whole thing when straight from the Tweet and out the two mouths of the presenters, without any thinking or sub-editing being involved at all.
But to be a little fairer – it takes a LOT to producer 24 hours of live TV every day of the year … it’s actually remarkable who little they stuff up, in my view.
25% of the USA Democratic primary voters are black, and the popularity of Joe Biden amongst those voters is sky-high
The Biden gaffes, issues and scandals that lead to so much commentary in other quarters, seem to barely make a dent in Biden’s rock-solid support in the black community
The below was on the web the other day under a black community forum banner, and it is quite striking in voicing the perspective of a thoughtful black voter … notable for being different than what many would expect, having kind words for the white community and even for Trump, and quite sceptical of the ‘open borders’ mania of the Democratic Party pooh-bahs:
« Black Brothers n Sisters Be Ridin’ With Joe Biden
Americans, please support your black brothers n sisters, by supporting the man the black community knows is best for America’s future – Joltin’ Joe Biden. We Be Ridin’ wit Biden for good reason.
Too often, liberal whites and Jews presume to speak for ‘people of color’ and the black community, but they cannot do so with authenticity.
This is not the time for radical change in America – this is a time to evolve and grow slowly and take care of our problems we have long had.
Donald Trump is not a bad man. He has lifted more black people out of the hell of prison than Brother Barack ever did. Leading whites like Biden and Trump, understand that very often the black man in prison is a ‘rando’ [random unconnected person] like they say, not the black man who committed the crime.
In younger days Biden was friends with segregationists. They were not all evil people either, blacks know this. Biden understands, Biden is deep.
Blacks are not perfect and share responsibility for the problems and crime in black society. Blacks need uplift, they are America’s special, sometimes messed-up children. And this white-bashing all the time is not good ethnic ethics. And we do not need at this time unlimited tens of millions of new people in USA, till we solve the problems with people we have.
If you believe in justice for black brothers n sisters, support Joe Biden, he is a man for all, and give Donald John Trump honorable retirement for letting all so many black people out of jail for a fresh start. »
Charming related meme photo accompanying the above text –
https://i.ibb.co/tHyK2WR/We-Ridin-wit-Joe-Biden.jpg
When did you stop taking your meds?
That was written by a white person.
When creating dictionaries for non-White peoples, White scholars routinely created countless new words for concepts the primitives simply didn’t have.
No doubt they laud themselves and simultaneously defend the equality of their proteges if not their moral superiority to Whites. Double think.
the Tasaday, a primitive tribe in the jungle with no words for hate, war, fights.
—this was an article in LOOK or LIFE and it was fake…but Tony Robbins mentions them as real in his best seller.
and
Now, a 44-year-old man, his wife, and another 16-year-old boy are facing charges in the boy’s death.
Prosecutors have charged 44-year-old Taran Cortez Miller of Prior Lake and the 16-year-old boy with two counts second-degree murder in the case.
How is this “second-degree murder” when James Fields’ traffic accident that killed one member of a mob of violent communist rioters is first degree murder with all sorts of enhancements that add up to two life sentences plus 419 years? We all know why, but it’s good to bring up the question now and then.
Yeah. Wow. Not that a POC an’t jam their head up their own ass but wtf is that anyways.
“They are America’s children” says it all. Blacks don’t have a hope as long as they view themselves as children, incapable of solving their own problems without Big (White, educated, Democrat) Daddy to wipe their a**es for them.
Surely you don’t believe that they are equal? Prove it. It’s on you since all the evidence says that they aren’t.
So you want them to remain our children?
Please read my comment carefully.
I think some is up, too. Blacks are more group oriented than Whites and seem to have picked Biden. Or did someone pick him for them? As in their own Elite, guided by a higher Elite.
And then there’s this genuine“open letter to white liberals blaming ‘low information’ black voters for not cleaning up white folks’ mess“.
Seriously. Vote for Biden. Because whiteness.
“We’se Ridin’ with Biden”
I like it
There’s your campaign slogan, Joe.
with joe on his back and 3 10 year olds straddling him…boy n 2 girls.
“Chicks Are Hidin’ From Biden”
I think you mean “Kids are Hidin’ from Joe Biden”
The below was on the web the other day under a black community forum banner, and it is quite striking in voicing the perspective of a thoughtful black voter
Hmmm … are you sure it’s kosher? It might be, but there are lots of strange things in there that are pretty ahistorical, if not out-and-out racist.
It might be genuine in the same way as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The Biden gaffes, issues and scandals that lead to so much commentary in other quarters, seem to barely make a dent in Biden’s rock-solid support in the black community.
Why do you express surprise or amazement?
African-Americans can be quite conservative folk (just like white folk) – and their total disdain of Trump, and their (rightful) skepticism of Bernie, means that backing Uncle Joe might be the best path available, out of a pretty bad lot.
So I’m far from sure what point you’re actually trying to make here.
I doubt many commenters here have regular contact with low-income blacks. I do, at work, and am surprised at the support I’ve noticed for Trump.
I worked with Aboriginal People for more than twenty years – and while their history, culture, and circumstances are usually likened mostly to say Native Americans or Inuit, many Aboriginal people are urban, and not very dissimilar to African-Americans.
So while the would generally vote Labor, their politics ran the full field, just like white people, and some are very conservative. The progressive modernism of the social democratic parties they can view with suspicion.
You are going to make Cargill cry.
Lefties don’t cry … we plot and scheme, and skewer babies.
All the hallmarks of a gamma male.
Well, this is the worst case scenario, as usual. It could unfold exactly as stated here, but I doubt it. The election will be held and Biden will be propped up or somebody other than Sanders put in his place. The real problem, as stated, is the global financial situation which is now running its predictable course. This is what will concentrate our minds for the next few years and it’s havoc will be much worse than a virus.
I’m kind of leaning toward the idea that they put someone other than Sanders in Biden’s place, and keep Joe as that person’s running mate.
They seem to need Joe to be a candidate in order to claim any investigate into corruption is political.
It was okay for Democrats running for president to vote on removing a political rival from office, but it isn’t okay for this president’s attorney general to take any action against the whole Biden family.
but it isn’t okay for this president’s attorney general to take any action against the whole Biden family.
Because the DOJ knows full well there is nothing to investigate Despite Trump’s lies, Joe Biden was seeking the removal of a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who was not doing his job. Joe Biden’s actions were potentially more likely to lead to an investigation into Burisma . not less.
Trump lies, and the rubes buy it What a great country!
Amazing you can know everything without an investigation.
It has been checked and analysed and picked over. There is nothing left to investigate. It would be like indicting someone on suspicion of murder when there is no body, and no-one even missing..
Who investigated it? If it was anyone in the previous administration, please pardon my skepticism.
Thanks Jim
Also-enjoyed your new book, ‘Living in The Long Emergency’.
Almost got me with “caitff.” Left out the second i for caitiff:
/?k?d?f/
noun
archaic
noun: caitiff; plural noun: caitiffs
a contemptible or cowardly person.
Still a great word and a great post.
I guess the website didn’t recognize the phonetic spelling: no shwas here.
A recent visit to the local supermarket and Home Depot (Note: HD put my favorite hardware stores and folksy local lumberyards out of business a few years ago. Bastards.) revealed strangely quiet places considering the time of day. The peasants know what the deal is, that’s what I conclude.
Corona in Italy spreads to Hollywood,
The man who is ground zero for the disease in Italy – an illegal alien who delivers Chinese food.
Disease is all over Italy!
He was told to stay home by authorities [why would an illegal obey??]
but didnt..he has bills to pay..skiers take disease to Hollywood.
Great point: Why would an illegal obey? Disobeying our laws has gotten him everything he has.
And you would obey you say.
moot point
Great point: Why would an illegal obey? Disobeying our laws has gotten him everything he has.
The “illegal alien” is in Italy, so I expect they have not disobeyed any US laws at all. And breaking immigration laws have not gotten them anything – working hard probably has.
I expect anyone on here who could work somewhere illegally would do so immediately if you were as poor as this person. There is no moral high ground here … and checking of privilege would be welcome.
All domestic interstate travel,air ,car, bus, and train may be halted in the coming months, Medical Marshall Law coming before the 4th of July. When this happens, you no longer have any “rights”.
Martial Law, derived from military…
And it will be sought if this virus does not subside in late Spring. “We” will be looking for answers to a possibly unresolvable problem, always a disaster possibility.
America has become a “gimme” society, dependent on a government supplying everything to them and listening to media totally supporting the “gimme” State. Maybe a good dose of an unfixable situation will knock some independence Sense back into this country.
The Black Death did the same to the world in the Middle Ages, creating the Reformation and the Renaissance.
You are getting ahead of the game, but that is understandable. Bernie will give us free medical care, free education, free universal child care, free pre-school, freedom from student loans, etc.
Trump and Pence are adopting Bernie’s health care for all by saying all the testing will be free even to the uninsured with no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles. Government will provide free testing to all according to Pence/Bernie.
If the uninsured are not given free government paid medical care, (as Trump/Pence now want), we all suffer.
Socialism, my friends, is not socialism when Republicans do it.
Trump and Pence are adopting Bernie’s health care for all by saying all the testing will be free even to the uninsured with no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles.
It’s not an act of generosity, or even Bernie Socialism – it is self-preservation … no Repub wants (untested) contagious poor people emptying the ashtrays, cleaning the toilets, and washing the dishes of the rich.
America has become a “gimme” society, dependent on a government supplying everything to them and listening to media totally supporting the “gimme” State.
In the 1960s, a famous British documentary maker (Peter Watkins) make a docu-drama about the UK during a nuclear war (The War Game).
It was banned for a long time – not because it was too graphic and depressing – although it certainly was that – but it was censored because it showed how totally dependent (and naively faithful) the population was on “government”, and how totally that government let them down in a time of crisis.
Great viewing if you can find it.
There’s too much money at stake for the people in charge to shut things down. Hell, they make money off us when we’re sick. People will die, the survivors will blame the political party they are not affiliated with. Eventually it will run its course and we will move on, albeit minus 100 million people or so.
Treekeeper ….. That’s on the same order of magnitude as number of corpses from WWII.
What I’m curious about is when the magical “vaccine” is pulled out of someone’s ass. How much is that going to cost? And who is going to get it?
There is a buzz going around that the respiratory the Honey Badger Virus causes is permanent….. That’s why getting it a second time can be worse. My question is was this thing designed in a lab? Was it meant to curb world population and take out the elderly and infirm?
We’ve hit a point where conspiracy and stupidity are doing an odd sort of dance.
You mean worldwide?
Great post Jim! I dare say, even a few short months ago you couldn’t have written a salable novel based on the current situation. No one would have ever believed it. Here’s hoping Uncle Joe makes it through the convention, however. The resulting general election showdown will be a comedic epic for the ages!
Exciting times for sure, I’ve been waiting for the end of the American Empire since the patriarch of the Bush crime family freed Panama of a CIA stooge. You know what I am really enjoying is seeing the White “Liberals” who morphed into the AWFLs and their male accomplices thrash about in their pain they brought upon themselves.
I have a suggestion for the white left, act more like Mr. K and less like little sorority girls on their own for the first time. And for conservatives for God’s sake give up on the American Empire.
As a conservative, please advise “us” what our back up position is relative to the American Empire. Who do we look to for guidance in the future? China? Russia? Venezuela? Scandinavia?
If America goes, relative to world affairs, it will be a disaster.
Look at Syria right now.
The American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The gift that kept on giving if one was looking for unrest in the Middle East. For millions of people in that part of the world, life already is a disaster.
Right. As if they wouldn’t have invaded the West under any other pretext. Guess what? They tried countless times under the rubrid of the “Jihad”. They were beaten back, but stayed in Spain and the Balkans for centuries.
They deserve zero sympathy. We need all of our sympathy for ourselves at this point. We’re like a old, powerful guy who hasn’t take care of himself and is on the verge of breakdown – even though he could still kill you with one hand.
We need all of our sympathy for ourselves at this point.
I don’t understand the conservative mindset (to the extent that there is one). On on hand, they brag that the “American Empire” is the biggest, meanest, baddest, bestest nation in the whole world ever,
But on the other, there is a constant shit-stream of mournful cries – how the country is falling apart, how its leaders are failing everyone, how “vulnerable you are from poor brown people and much else.
I do wish you would make up your minds – you’re either invulnerable and will last a thousand years, or you’re in the toilet, and just one Bin Laden, or one nasty virus away from total disaster.
OK you get out there and keep saying that real loud.
Floating about twitter as of Friday afternoon is the usual conservative outrage about a pack of black boys beating a girl for her shoes, nice shoes I guess. Anyway it’s in the empire’s capitol NYC, Brooklyn I think home of the young AWFLs and their male accomplices.
Conservatives you are not going to save nice white liberal’s real estate holdings much less save the American empire when it cannot police its own capitol, as it is being de-policed by the even further Left.
As Conservatives your backup position is faith in God or rational science. Unfortunately, no Republican has followed rational scientific evidenced based thinking since asset inflation became the number one objective since Volcker.
Neoliberalism destroyed America because it could.
RW
If America goes, relative to world affairs, it will be a disaster.
No – the rest of us would be liberated, dancing in the streets and putting flowers in the gun barrels of the military-industrial complex. With the demise of the US the sun would rise again. True.
Leave the two party system out of this. The problems of the world today are dwarfing the leadership’s capability to handle them, around the world. JHK predicted that a pandemic could overwhelm the world, destroying global and national governments in TLE and World Made by Hand. We are observing the wisdom of that prediction.
Trump signed a bill authorizing 8 billion dollars to spend on Coronavirus stuff. To do what? Continue the bean counting as the disease expands
Develop a vaccine in “about a year” for this Coronavirus strain, that may be obsolete the moment it hits the street. I read that a second variety has already mutated from the original. We haven’t even totally found a solution to MERS or SARS. Is 19 just a variety of an original Coronavirus with the other two just intermediate stages? It is scary how really little we know.
As usual, the blame game is going to emerge from this. In a litigating world where everyone is constantly trying to blame someone, the finger pointing is going to be horrendous.
I try to imagine what a Dem President would do right now that would be different than DJT. With the ignorance of virus knowledge that is so obvious, my conclusion is:
Nothing. The Deep State is stymied right now in its ability to respond. Close the borders? Done to infected sources. Try to keep contamination isolated, Done. BTW, cruise ships are a infection explosion ready to happen. How to control expansion of the infection from ships is going to change the industry with huge impacts on parts of the world that depend on tourists. Two ships in total quarantine now. Just a start. Who is going to want to sail on future cruises on these two ships, especially when we find clean up procedures are not real effective. Airplanes are next.
What is going to happen? The good news is the public is going to have to just keep going on with business. Influenza haS been an annual bane to the human world. Flu shots come and go with some years blocking the current variety, other years not so much. We are used to losing folks to flu, it is not real newsworthy.
Which leads us to the real culprits. The MSM, that has ended sensationalizing this virus since the beginning. Their grubbing after headlines has blown this virus infection out of proportion. These “reporters” should be writing screenplays for disaster flicks.
People have been criticizing The current government group for under reacting to the pandemic. I know what they want, get the public all fired up reacting to the news, drop the markets, tear up the economy, whatever. All to get DJT’s claim to fame economy to tank. I hope people are smart enough to see through this debacle, control the spread as well as possible and await this strain’s fade away. I hope then that a lot more money is put into crushing the viruses in the future.
One of these days, the virus strain is not going to fade away. Humans better be able to kill these suckers by then.
Or just kill themselves. Nice to have options.
“Nine out of ten humans killed? And you’re not bothered.”
A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. “A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out,” he said.” Richard Preston, interviewing an Ebola researcher, from The Hot Zone.
Trump signed a bill authorizing 8 billion dollars to spend on Coronavirus stuff. To do what?
Silly John. To line the pockets of CEOs and investors in the pharmaceutical and related industries, of course. Very little was intended to ever trickle down to the grassroots level in the first place.
It’s the MSM’s job to sensationalize this disease. Like everything else, it can be politicized and blamed on Trump.
Besides, if they aren’t kept busy with this life and death drama, one of them might slip up and mention that the Democrats are running an obviously senile candidate.
one of them might slip up and mention that the Democrats are running an obviously senile candidate.
It’s only fair – since the Repubs sure are too.
Knowledge is hierarchical. How much do you want to know? And what kind of capacity do you have TO know? For the easily satisfied, it’s believing what Mike Pence says. The more intrepid will go the CDC website. The really interested will go to Natural News where RETIRED scientists and officials say it was engineered. This will never be admitted by anyone still in power.
Hierarchical, no. The relationships are much more complicated than that. AIDS some say was engineered by the South African government to kill Africans. That virus hopped on the Hersey hi-way and took a ride. An unexpected result.
Occam’s razor says no.
Natural News can be poo-pooed, yes it can. But Natural News will also show at times, content suppressed by the MSN. Viewers must decide what is real and what comes from never never land.
MSM – Main Stream Media. ( I did a Biden )
More complicated, but not less. It is hierarchical at the very least.
Gotcha – and with your own words no less.
You got nothing, Janos.
NEVER HAD
Never will.
Too bad your are so full of yourself.
The really interested will go to Natural News
Just to point out, you typed “interested” when you meant “ingenuous” or “gullible” – FIFY … no need to thank me.
Nothing. The Deep State is stymied right now in its ability to respond.
There is a no “Deep State” comrade, even though you would desperately like something to blame for decades of stuff-ups. No “Deep State” exists, just incompetent human beings in both the Repubs and Dems.
What is going to happen? The good news is the public is going to have to just keep going on with business.
From my experience here in sunny Melbourne Australia – the best advice is to go out and buy armfuls of toilet paper – it’s disappearing off the shelves as fast as they are re-stocked.
I would like to think that Australians are far smarter – and certainly more rational – than Yankees, but it is clear we are not. We’re just as dumb dumb as you lot.
Exactly my point. The grass roots will just keep on going, once the media STFU. All the money in the world is not going to fix this.
A definite conservative ideal.
“All the money in the world is not going to fix this.” –JohnAZ
Please tell the Pentagon… which is going to get $1.2 Trillion in “defense” and veteran spending in Trump’s 2021 budget.
We have been throwing TRILLIONS at the military for decades and where has it gotten us. Spend less on the military industrial complex, shrink that part of government. A definite conservative ideal.
We have been throwing TRILLIONS at the military for decades and where has it gotten us.
Absolutely nowhere comrade … well somewhere … just about every country in the world that isn’t despotic (North Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and a few more are). hates your fucking guts.
A brilliant decades-long policy.
Why not shut down every single Defence and CIA station in the entire world – every one – and just have 10-20 staff in modest embassies around the world everywhere. Sandwiches and gin & tonics.
Doing this will not impact on US safety 1% – but the money saved would be enough to give every Bernie supporter, every nut-fudge hippie, every wino in SF, and every poverty-stricken Native American – a huge condo in Aspen, Sun Valley, or Malibu.
What are you waiting for? Why have another six decades of the same old ridiculous shit?
I had a good laugh over a you tube commercial for a Subaru.
A soft voice, a pair with one child, exploring the wilds.
They are Black.
Not a caddy. Not a benz. A subaru and a lets go camping plot.
I had a good laugh..
==
N2O will cure you of that, and apparently that Mexican beer masquerading as a global viral epidemic.
You have a problem with African-Americans driving a Subaru and going camping? The racial stereotypes run deep and wide around here.
Tell Congress NO BAILOUTS: https://youtu.be/RQd9v23ICJA
I wouldn’t waste my time.
But then they’d have to come up with a whole new set of lies as to why the last ten yeas of lies didn’t work…..
Joe-Mentum….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WwFDktA3Cc
Isn’t Tulsi still running?
When I think of the two disasters that either Biden and Sanders would be, I don’t understand how she isn’t seeing more support.
Depends on what your definition of “running” is. Technically, she is. Practically, she’s neck and neck with Bloomy, although he of course at least has money. She’s been so effectively vilified that she’ll be lucky if they don’t revoke her citizenship and deport her to a third world Shitholistan.
She can’t be counted on to keep quiet about the criminal racket the Democrat side of the uniparty has become.
Bernie couldn’t be counted on either, plus he was talking about actively interfering with some of their more lucrative enterprises, back in 2016, so they rigged it against him.
Surprisingly, he didn’t get mad, and even threw his support to the Democrat’s pre-determined candidate.
This time around, they are rigging things again, and once again he is okay with it, or so he says.
If he were really and truly running against Joe Biden, wouldn’t he have mentioned that his opponent is suffering from dementia?
Good points. You have to seriously wonder whether Bernie’s not just a strawman candidate whose only purpose is to take the wind out of the sails of the extreme left.
James Howard Kunstler: “[W]hat if a substantial portion of voters don’t dare venture into public places full of their possibly infectious fellow citizens? Would Mr. Trump be forced to postpone the election, fulfilling his enemies’ fantasy that he seeks to become the American Caesar?”
More narrative shenanigans by JHK. Where are you getting this ‘forced’ shit, Jim? What earthly or unearthly influence is at work to produce this wildly tendentious and reckless portrayal of Donald Trump and his motives?
Trump’s actual motives are clear to see and easy to articulate:
1. He is a malignant narcissist with a raging, insatiable hunger for adulation, praise and the most superficial trappings of power and privilege.
2. He is intellectually vacuous and lacks the most modest understanding of, to say nothing of respect for, the principles and institutions of American governance.
3. As a result of (2), Trump will (and does) use the most transparent and cynical manipulations to satisfy (1).
4. He carries out (4) in a scale-free manner. That is, Trump commits his greatest and most significant violations just as carelessly as his pettiest. He is a living wrecking ball.
5. Trump is a lifelong career criminal, and is liable to criminal prosecution as soon as he leaves office.
6. Trump has always relied on his position to protect him from consequences, and never more so than now. If he were not POTUS, criminal proceedings would already be underway and he knows it.
Therefore:
7. Trump will inevitably try to remain in office indefinitely. Given Trump’s character, this is a clear matter of fact, not conjecture. Comparisons with Caesar, or any other actually effective individual, are a distraction. No principle, no political traditions, no august institutions, no respect for elections, and certainly not basic decency — none of these things bear on Trump’s calculations in the slightest. It will be all of a piece with the hair and the spray tan. The only question will be how much damage he does in the effort. The damage is all too likely to be considerable, and long-lasting.
Which is why it’s astonishing that Kunstler would pre-spin this forthcoming assault on American institutions as something that could be ‘forced’ on Trump. Trump is not being ‘forced’ to do anything; he is a malefactor, who will seize on any pretext or no pretext in pursuit of his aims. To fail to recognize this is to prepare the ground in Trump’s favour, using the coronavirus as narrative ammunition. I don’t care what mealy-mouthed things Kunstler says about how he personally doesn’t care for the Golden Golem. Trump has a positive duty to relinquish power exactly as and when required under law, full stop, and Kunstler is helping Trump undermine that duty. JHK needs to give his mind a good mucking out.
Elrond your opinion is JUST that an opinion please don’t pretend you have any understanding of what makes Donald J. Trump tick.
Elrond
You need to go to work for CNN, MSNBC or the liberal group at Fox, or any of the networks.
Your diatribe would fit you right in with their misinformation industry.
Why don’t you start thinking about the damage done to this country by 50 years of liberal governance, and what needs to happen to counter the decline.
It sure as heck is not to elect more extreme Leftists.
JohnAZ, any of those networks would yank me off the air after the first hour. Maybe the first few minutes, if I were feeling especially feisty that day.
In my well-considered opinion, you are correct to blame 50 years of liberal governance for doing serious damage to your country. But you are wrong in conflating liberalism with the Left. It was liberals who didn’t just stand by, but actively aided and abetted the Republican party to enable monied interests to strip and loot the economy. Real leftists always opposed them, and Bernie Sanders is one very honourable example.
Economic power is power. And if economic power is too concentrated, which it is, then it’s economic power that will need to be taken back. Anyone who tells you different is a fraud or a villain. At least I give it to you straight.
It’s called the Deep State, El. And yeah, both parties. Guess who created and funded Communism? The Bankers, the Elite of the Elite. Or do you believe that workers with hammers and farmers with pitchforks would ever get anywhere on their own?
It does tend to get out of hand as with Stalin, etc. They aren’t taking any more chances if they don’t have to. On the eve of the Black takeover, Mandela changed from Communism to Socialism. If he hadn’t, his big money backers would have downed him. Sanders has never renounced Communism. Why would they go with him if they didn’t have to? When complete and tractable idiots like Pete, Klob, or Joe are around?
It’s one thing to bring down Monarchies and the Fascist states and bring them into the System, but here at home where they live? Folly. South Africa is getting away from them now too, many of them have had to flee.
Bernie Sanders is a weak man. He would prove himself the poodle of Wall street if elected. And Trump is an unprincipled narcissist just as you say but he is also weak & will leave office on schedule. But continue in your fantasies, Elrod.
They would yank you off the air in the first hour, but it would be due to the fact that you’re overflowing with rage and in need of serious help for your Def-Con 1 level of TDS.
Unfortunately, even after Trump’s extremely successful, peaceful term as president, you still think you’re smarter than he is, but then you appear to be the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Crawl out of your parent’s basement and go look for a job and stop waiting for some elderly, dimwitted, useless socialist like Bernie to give you everything for free.
Bernie is a complete loser and has been his entire life. He’s done absolutely nothing but whine and scream for socialism for the last 50 years. Even Hillary can look down on him.
ROFLMAO! JackStraw, you so funny.
I wouldn’t call it an opinion; more like a crock.
Your servant, ma’am.
benr, I laid out what I had to say extremely plainly — in point form, even. If you want to change my mind, address what I said on its merits. If you want me to shut up, no thank you.
No one would presume to change your mind, Elrond. It’s hard to find a mind within that stream of consciousness mental diarrhea which you present as thoughtful commentary.
funny..thanks
You wrote an emotionally charged diatribe free of any concrete evidence to back your claims.
I did chuckle though, so thank you for that.
First point your mind is made up nothing but circumstance and life experience will change your mind.
I suspect you are so old and set in your ways it would take a serious dose of reality for that to happen.
Sorry to ruin your opinion hit piece by pointing out that it is nothing BUT your opinion.
Like wise I will tell you your opinion smells just like everyone elses.
elysianfield tries to sell that ‘life experience’ crap as well, benr. And he means the same thing by it, too: namely, prejudice and lack of principle.
“Prejudice and lack of principle”
Elrond.
Were that my prejudices and lack of principles were wrong, and the world a better place. You know, however, that the world is one large clusterfuck, and you know why.
Life experience, or “wisdom” coupled with a lifetime of learning should be worth something.
Elrond, did it ever occur to you that you do not know any police officers who are not, by your metric, racist? Why do you suppose that is? Your brother in law for instance?
In the 60’s, it was explained away by suggesting that the police departments recruited cops from the south…what a canard…however, it was accepted by the detractors as the only reason they could come up with that would sustain their worldview, their narrative.
W
EF, kindly go preach your gospel of despair to someone who cares. I’ve had quite enough of it.
“I’ve had quite enough of it.”
Elrond,
And yet you persist to ask for it.
Elrond, the only statement in your latest diatribe that I agree with is that Trump is a malignant narcissist. I believe the people that hate him the most are also suffering from narcissism. Maybe suffering is the wrong word, they seem to revel in their narcissism, as does Trump. Narcissists are clueless to their mental malady. They think they are always right, The fact remains that Trump somehow had his finger on the pulse of working class Americans and was, is the only one in DC that realizes wholesale immigration whether legal or illegal will be our downfall.
Maybe the Dia Tribe ought to be the new name for CFN readers, cbeard. It’s a very popular word around here, that’s for sure.
And I’m afraid you’ve missed something big if you seriously believe that Trump cares a fig about immigration. He trotted out all kinds of approaches in his 2016 campaign, kept notes on which ones got the biggest reaction, then play-acted the rest. These are old, road-tested techniques for skinning the rubes that have been familiar to every carnie barker and flim-flam artist since time immemorial, because they work.
TRUMP. HAS. NO. CONVICTIONS. None whatsoever. As long as he gets to play the big boss, he will give away the store because he just doesn’t give a shit. He has already done things like pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and continued racking up huge deficits with his bloated military budgets, because that’s what the rest of the Republicans wanted.
And did you watch the Fox town hall the other day? If Trump wins a second term, he is fixing to cut back Social Security and Medicare, exactly what he promised *not* to do. Because he seriously doesn’t give a flying fuck about you, your loved ones, or anyone or anything you care about. Sorry to be the one to keep telling this, but you are being scammed.
Why, getting the cipher on Trump is not rocket science. He is merely the next step of forty years of conservative oppression whogives the American self-image challenged something to live for. As ugly as that raison d’etre is.
benr
I just saw your utterly irrelevant reply to me at the end of the last thread, so I have replied to it. I see you have no more understanding of scientific protocol than your President, and imagine that solutions are about assertiveness or self-confidence or positive thinking or manifest destiny or strong nerve or … or … or…
Issue in haste, repent at leisure, to muck around with an old saw.
Or perhaps you just like the idea of a cohort of lawyers getting rich on the class action of all class actions.
Here’s how it actually works – I posted this before.
https://www.sciencealert.com/who-says-a-coronavirus-vaccine-is-18-months-away
There is no art of the deal with this one.
Elrond is bang on and I’m an expert in Personality Theory as I majored in it.
RW
Or your just full of shit.
That is your expertise 100% being a full blown blow hard and shit master.
benr – with every ranted reply here, you prove you’re utterly clueless and don’t have an argument against ANYTHING, other than to ‘ad hom’
Thanks for your support, RW. A propos, what do you think of this video?
https://youtu.be/2ITDa-rfQlw
I’ve recently become a Patreon supporter of hers. She has a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, and among other things, has been posting extremely well-informed chapter-by-chapter analyses of 12 Rules for Life. Doing the lord’s work — she reads Jordan Peterson so the rest of us don’t have to.
“Trump has a positive duty to relinquish power exactly as and when required under law, full stop, and Kunstler is helping Trump undermine that duty. JHK needs to give his mind a good mucking out.”
Are you worried about 2024 already, Elrond?
There’s quite enough going on this year to occupy my mind, thank you, Soloview.
Since no later than Trump’s election, the American social fabric has been visibly tearing under the relentless tensions of economic inequality. The Republicans are openly the party of the rich, while the Democrats have played good cop via identity politics and other frauds. I believe you’ve reached a point where no solution less radical than a Sanders victory, and a successful implementation of Medicare for All, will prevent the fabric from splitting altogether. 2024 will be too late. My opinion, for what it’s worth.
Wow that’s a lot to worry about, Hub bard. So much pressure on your shoulders. Have you tried medical tourism in Cuba or Venezuela or maybe Russia? My university educated comrades say it’s the best socialized medicine in the world. Plane tickets are cheap now. You should check it out and let us know.
Why on earth would I go to that much trouble, akmofo? I’m Canadian. We’ve had Medicare for All for decades. In important ways, I would have greater assurance stepping out into traffic than you have sitting in your easy chair.
You didn’t answer the question, Hub bard. Have you tried medical tourism? Seen any Americans visiting your Canadian hospitals? Because I’ve seen many Canadians visiting Americans hospitals and pay through the nose for the privilege. Why do you suppose these Canadians would do that?
” I would have greater assurance stepping out into traffic….”
Elrond,
Any more impudent suggestions out of you and I might invite you to test your theory….
The last thing I am is suicidal, elysianfield. But my finances are secure in any event, no matter what kind of interaction I have with the health care system where I live. How many Americans can say the same?
Elrond,
I am glad that your are financially secure. But for Medicare considering my wife’s condition, I would not be.
I am heartened by your claim that you are not currently suicidal. They take your guns away from you in this country with such an issue.
You’re right but then there is the “small” question of open borders. And even the establishment figures (on both sides, like Hillary and Trump) are promising open borders. How very small the portions of pie are going to be once we hit 400 billion, eh?
But to closer the border means a rejection of Marxism. Can you bear that? To care about one group and not everyone equally? To become National Socialist – even in the mildest context of multiculturalism?
Trump said it, “We want these people here. The economy is so good” – the most fatuous words ever and a betrayal of his base. Legalize the illegals and there is no more problem. Just like Bush wanted to do.
“Legalize the illegals and there is no more problem. Just like Bush wanted to do.” –Janos
Finally, we agree on something. Legalization/taxation is the best course for the nation.
You haven’t been paying attention, have you?
The Dems are now the party of the super wealthy and the Republicans are the party of the commoners.
Go look at the attendees of a Trump rally and compare them with the few attendees of any of the Dem candidates. It’s the little guy vs the elite.
I doubt you’ll get that, but it’s worth a try.
You haven’t been paying attention, have you? Trump signed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and let slip at last week’s Fox town hall that he’s planning cuts to Medicare and Social Security if he gets a second term.
Trump is a charlatan and those people at the rallies are marks.
Ding, ding, ding!
“Are you worried about 2024 already, Elrond?’
Worried about 20 Jan 2021, more like.
There was a lot of hysterical concern regarding Bush II in this regard as well, but he left quietly enough. Trump will leave as well, if he is defeated. He’s a made man, and isn’t any more likely than Hillary to be prosecuted. I’m sure he knows where the bodies are buried.
Trump will be pushed out if he needs to be, that much is still certain.
But unlike any POTUS before him, Trump will push back, hard, and his
dupesI mean sympathizers will support him, heedless of the damage. His legacy will be a precedent, which a cannier demagogue will sooner or later take advantage of.Or MAYbe…..it’s JHK’s fucking page, on his fucking website, paid for by him, which has readers as a result of his decades of work writing various observations, analyses, and speculations re: American Culture, and he can say what he wants, and YOU don’t even have to come here and read stuff you hate (why would you?) but can instead make better use of your time by pounding sand? Maybe?
Feel better? Some people just don’t like being disagreed with, I guess.
Or your post really made you look like a douche.
There you go again with the ad hominem. So far no one has responded to the content of Elrond’s factual presentation.
I did its a complete opinion piece and nothing more.
I know its tough but do try and keep up.
Yes!
Totally explains why he reacts equally to any affront to his precious ego, miniscule or earthshaking, it’s all the same to his small mind in service to his big ego. There is no clever hidden agenda. Even those using him don’t appear to be working on a clear agenda.
How much do the billionaires and political “leaders” understand the predicament facing industrial civ? Are they looking forward to a massive dieoff? Maybe want to help it along? The little people can be replaced with robots and computers that are far less troublesome and never smelly. Of course such people tend to be naively optimistic about machines. They don’t live in reality with us normal humans who have to deal with the general cussedness of things.
James Howard Kunstler: “[W]hat if a substantial portion of voters don’t dare venture into public places full of their possibly infectious fellow citizens? Would Mr. Trump be forced to postpone the election …
Good post elrond. And while I think JHK can be a clever and persuasive wordsmith, without beating the reader over the head, it might be possible to give him the benefit of the doubt, and see his use of “forced” as tongue-in-cheek or sarcastic.
But if that were the case, I think it was necessary for James to use scare-quotes around “forced”, but as you rightly detail in your post, to do so would switch the political and ideological impact of the paragraph in a direction James does not want.
And I agree on your other point: despite James repeating his mantra about not liking the Golden Golem, he still writes a post that is hyper-partisan against the Dems – which by definition means pro-Repubs.
But I disagree on your main point: I think there will be an election in November, and Trump can’t stop it, and there will also be an orderly transfer of power in January, if Trump loses.
However what will be really worrying will be the 2-3 months in between – a lame duck lunatic president facing huge legal problems the day he loses his protection of office, Look out!
Cargill, your last point feels pretty similar to my own worry, though stated with slightly different emphasis.
America is not yet so far gone that Trump could resist a clear election defeat. But sure as sunrise, Trump will spin any defeat as unfair and illegitimate, regardless of the facts. And if there’s one truly legendary talent he has, it’s for throwing sand in people’s eyes. If Jesus himself descended from on high and claimed the Dem nomination, then defeated Trump fair and square, Trump would still be left with 30-40% of the electorate believing Jesus stole the election.
That said, one only needs to look as far back as 2000 for an unclear election outcome. If something like that were to happen again, Trump really could turn defeat into stolen victory, especially given the Republicans’ established nihilism. Their grip on the Supreme Court has only grown in the past 20 years.
Interesting headline this AM
The EU is pouring millions of Euros into Greece to help it repel thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
Europe’s edition of the Wall. Finally, they are getting the idea that all the long term cultures of Europe are under attack and something needs to be done.
A lesson a few folks in the US better learn.
Not sure about that. Erdogan offended them and they’re sick of his threats. But they are ready to prosecute Salvini for trying to stop the Black African boat people. So they haven’t changed their position per se, at least not yet. But hopefully the practical issues are starting to impact their minds perhaps. And of course the challenge of the Far or Real Right.
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/olive-garden-customer-demanded-and-got-white-server-worker-says
It’s a pretty flimsy wall JAZ, just a fence really.
And Turkey has deployed a thousand police officers to keep the refugees — all 4.5 million of them — moving into Europe.
There may be some kind of confrontation between the Greek army and Turkish military police — with freezing destitute refugees caught in the middle. At any rate Turkey and Greece are ancient rivals, another flashpoint between east and west, between the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Brh
Migration is war
Property is theft.
Anybody else notice and think it strange that a sitting United States Senator publicly threatened two members of the Supreme Court?
Chuck is now trying to say he meant they would suffer political consequences, but everyone knows they aren’t elected.
Yes I saw that he should be bounced out of office and I do mean right now.
Little Chuck is unhinged.
“they would suffer political consequences, but everyone knows they aren’t elected.” –Beryl of Oyl
Political consequences for sitting supreme court judges could also be impeachment and removal. Non-elected judges are impeached and removed regularly.
Well YOU just showed how little you UNDERSTAND our American system of government.
Lol @ benr. Clueless as usual.
We saw this kind of hysteria from the MSM back in the Bush days. Remember the color-coded terror threat chart?
We were always told the media was liberal, but that is no so. They are globalists. There is a difference.
Also, as Rush Limbaugh noted, it isn’t the Democrats controlling the media, it is the other way around.
We were told we should seal off a room in our homes with plastic sheeting and duct tape. Sally Quinn of the Washington Post wrote that all Americans should carry a dust mask at all times. I am not making this up.
If you are over 60 you were told not to go to work yesterday by our governor (Jay Inslee).
Bad advice, the coffin still has to be paid for.
Jay is obviously dumb enough to qualify for the job. The problem with Joe Biden is only that Joe became overqualified and becomes more overqualified every day.
Hey Elrond, guess you won’t be too happy when Donald junior is elected in 2024
If and when, djk, that’s correct. I don’t like dynasties. I mean, we have one of our own right here with the Trudeaus, and I don’t care for them either.
And yet, people keep thinking they can get my goat by mentioning Justin Trudeau or Tim Horton’s. Pretty much all that demonstrates is those people couldn’t name a single other thing about Canada if their lives depended on it.
Hey, Elrond. We agree on something. Dynasties cheat on the rules against nobility and nepotism in the Constitution. All nations need the ebb and flow between conservatism and Liberalism to stay balanced.
It is the last thirty years of Liberalism in the US that has created the mess we are in now. That includes the insane belief by the Dems in 2016 that they deserved to have a female president and Trump is a bad guy because he whipped her butt. The good news is that the Dems spent so much time trying to toss Trump out that they did not develop any legitimate presidential candidates. They will now pay the price in 2020.
Bush II, the compassionate conservative, was a rep for liberalism?
He did nothing to stem the tide of liberalism since Clinton.
But, JohnAZ, true ‘liberalism’ has been in retreat since Reagan was elected.
Since then, it’s been all neo – and whether you label the neo ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’, makes no difference. They’re the same infection.
Clinton was the ‘liberal’ sort of ‘neo’ and gave us slashing of community-funding programmes (‘workfare’ is bullshit), the Crimes Act of 1994, the BPCPA which stripped YOU of the ability to apply for bankruptcy protection from predatory lenders and to cap it all off, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act let the banksters off the leash in 1999.
Then Bush II followed up with huge tax cuts, the Patriot Act, disastrous illegal wars in the middle east and generally being a twit and a tool of TPTB.
Elrond, Trudeau was courted by the Liberal elite to save them from Harper et al. Trudeau answered the call and rose to the task of making Liberals significant in federal politics after Harper almost destroyed them.
P.S. I’m a Trudeau Liberal.
RW
My sympathies, RW. Why not <a href="https://greenparty.ca/"vote Green instead? We have cookies!
You know The Plunge Protection Team is in your corner when they spend 8 Billion to fight the corona virus, (roughly enough to buy an aircraft carrier) and 120 billion a day for three days to keep a fake stock market propped up.
Geeze – What could go wrong?
Warren had a lot of… reservations… about dropping out.
She’s now going to run as an… Indianpendent.
I’ll be here all week… try the prime rib
Jim
How about Governor Coumo?
I know it’s a little late in the game, but here’s a hard-nosed, tough pol who knows how game is played. He could probably step right in.
Brh
_________
Everybody i know in the NY Capital District who knows or has worked with/for Andrew Cuomo considers him an awful human being. — JHK Admin
This commenting coterie is dumberer than I suspected.
How about a tough bastard who does not want to play the game.
“How about a tough bastard who does not want to play the game?”
Dog,
Then why bitch about Trump…two out of three ain’t bad.
Slow Joe’s grift is amateur hour compared to the co-champions Hill and Bill. No matter, even if he was the champeen con-man, Slow Joe is among friends in the Deep State.
And just as they let Comey and McCabe and Hillary off the hook, they’ll go through the motions with Joe and then announce that as a result of an extensive investigation there was no behavior that cleared the bar of illegality.
No idea what the Ukrainians will conclude. But on this side of the pond there’s pretty much no act that doesn’t have a legal escape hatch if you’re one of the anointed.
As far as a financial market crack-up goes, this would be the third opportunity inside of a generation to take the Wall Street bull by the horns. But, just like in 2000 and 2010, they’ll let it run rampant.
Obama had a god-given chance to gut it. Wall Street banks were in dire condition, the crooks that ran that show in no position to dictate terms. But, just like Obama, they’ll opt for papering over the problems with billions and trillions in Fed created funny-money. That and shot-gun marriages between the moribund and the less moribund.
The underlying problem is the intellectual vigor in those quarters. As in there is none. None. There’s no way imaginable in their minds but the way we’re on now.
The situation in Washington is the same as in the French military in the 1930s, run by old men, mired in old thinking, unable to cope with new conditions. The economy doesn’t work, the financial world in dire shape as evidenced by appallingly low monetary blood pressure (interest rates) and the shot-callers have no clue. None.
Obama had a god-given chance to gut it.
You’re assuming Obama wasn’t in the bag from the start, obviously. I think you need to rethink that.
The underlying problem is the intellectual vigor in those quarters. As in there is none. None.
You’re right in principle here, but wrong in the particulars. Of course there’s no intellectual vigor among the elite, since that’s not a trait they ever needed to develop anyway, but the underlying problem is that there’s simply no alternative to unwind the current mess that also preserves the current elite’s social standing and privilege. So BAU WILL continue until the inevitable crash, at which time they will implement whatever Plan B is on the drawing boards. I’m obviously not privileged enough to know what that plan is exactly, but I have a strong suspicion that it involves a new all-digital paperless money supply to be extended by invitation only to a select few based loosely on previous assets before the crash. This will be a closely monitored, very secure system for members only (and if you have to ask, you ain’t…), while everyone else will be politely invited to “go pound sand,” as the popular saying today goes. What happens after that is when the story gets really interesting! I wouldn’t even venture to guess what that might be, although it certainly won’t be good for most of us.
And don’t forget about Ice-Nine! Remember Laika Bank and Bank of Cyprus and the so called “bail-in”? Depositors weren’t bailed out, but their funds went to recapitalize failing banks instead.
The future stage was set in 2014 at the G20 summit in Brisbane, Australia, right after Cyprus, with the FSB(Financial Stability Board).
Shortly after, ATMs in Greece ran dry, as did cash and credit from the banks.
Ice-Nine then became the policy of major nations, no longer limited to the likes of small fry like Cyprus.
Also in 2014, the US SEC voted to allow money market funds to suspend redemptions, moving Ice-Nine capability from just the banking world into the investment world.
Great points! The precedents have already been established, so there really shouldn’t be any surprises when it all goes down.
Ellipsis, my intent was to state nothing more than there were two prior chances to take on Wall Street with a crystal clear justification, that justification being that the way things are currently set up are counterproductive (in general terms).
At a more granular level, one obvious misstep was the repeal of Glass Steagall during the Clinton administration. If there ever was a useful piece of legislation, that was it. A few dozen clear and concise pages replaced with a convoluted monstrosity thousands of pages long, an impenetrable thicket of law and regulation.
Another obvious problem; Wall Street institutions were too big to fail and too big to jail. You don’t fix this by making them bigger, which is what they did.
As for Obama, he has this gift of making his utterances sound like they come from the mouth of God. His deliberate manner, his cool demeanor, his pensive pose, his careful choice of words, fool people into thinking that he knows his brief. Maybe he knows some of it.
But I would argue he didn’t and doesn’t know Wall Street, he didn’t have a grasp of economics as an academic field, nor of what the profession is and isn’t, nor of the capabilities and weaknesses of its individual practitioners, and so he didn’t know who to take advise from and who to get rid of.
And, given the problems faced by the country, especially those in the economic realm, you need to bring more to the table than what he brought. I would argue this, that his training is in law, that he had limited experience as a legislator, and that’s it. For someone purporting to manage a gigantic organization like the US federal government, with its multitude of interlocking wheels, you need more. You need a deep well of knowledge of the country and its productive eco-system and what to do when you take the oath. But he didn’t have this.
In my view, Obama was in thrall to a few advisers that, to his mind, knew what was what, and could apply real-world solutions. And so, if you want to say he was in the bag from the start, then I would agree, Obama sure was “in the bag”.
But this is a long way of saying that I think Obama himself was clueless as to what to do, his mind-set and experience and training not remotely useful for what he faced. He was, in short, a puppet, a front-man for monied interests. He may have been fully aware of this, but given his lack of intellectual tools, probably figured his options were few.
As far as intellectual vigor goes in the elite, both in the oligarch and their managerial clerisy, I never saw them as the sharpest knives in the drawer, people of real capability going into mathematics and hard sciences and medicine. The elite are at best second rate, replacing analytical facility and most of all, knowledge of the world and its history and some ability at foresight with aggression and energy. They don’t have “wisdom” IOW. That’s my personal take. I don’t think they foresaw the mess they’d create, nor did they try, nor can they come up with practical solutions. They don’t seem to understand their own collective and personal peril in all this, for while they may concoct some gated solution as you surmised, I don’t think they’ll think through the implications. It will be a stop-gap, and, as you say, that’s when the story gets really interesting.
It may not end well for most of us, but if history is any guide, it will end worse for the elites.
Anyway, sorry for the long and winding answer. I know I prattle on.
You should not be surprised by the lack of vigor, AKA entrepenuerism.
A byproduct of the consolidation of power known as the Deep State.
These folks believe in the federal government separated from the people, its own power base. They believe the rest of us are peons, that they are the only ones smart enough to administer this country.
Coronavirus is going to destroy the Deep State faster than Trump or anyone else as the public is going to find out what a total waste of time and money the Feds really are. America is going to learn, AGAIN, that individual responsibility is the only thing that counts and the government is the problem, not the solution.
Thanks V. for the simple and astute comment. The leaders left the middle class pack mules on the Oregon trail to nowhere at least 30 years ago. Since 1987–just throw money on the wound until it clots.
Here’s one possible scenario: Trump continues spouting gibberish about us being in the greatest shape ever as hospitals overflow, the economy unravels, store shelves go bare, infrastructure bottlenecks, grids shut down, and chaos reigns in the streets.
General James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the Army, and a hand-picked platoon of his buddies from the 101st Airborne waltz past the Secret Service like they’re crushing so many roses in the garden, stroll into the Oval Office, and announce that the grownups are now in charge.
Costco Update: Noon, Today,3-6-20. West side of Richmond, VA.
Parking lot about 85% full. Shelve stock status; surprisingly well stocked, probably more of about every item than I can remember seeing in years. Seriously, pallets almost to the roof and this is a tall store. Interesting signage, five items that you cannot purchase more than two of; 1. Toilet paper cases, 2. hand wipes cases, 3. bottled water cases, 4. bags of sugar [25# or 50#], 5. same with rice.
I asked, both, the cashier and the guy checking people at the door “is work, here, getting ‘more tedious’?. Cashier says, ‘not as bad as last week’ (the annual Costco ‘bonus checks’ to members were mailed and received last week [ I wouldn’t have gone in once I saw the amount of cars in the parking lot, but I had a Costco check for $108 and bottled beer takes a long time to go stale]. Guy at the checkout door says ‘no problem, we’ve got this covered’. I am not certain about all that but today the shelves are stocked.
On the other hand, I had to check on a subcontractor working for me at an ‘assisted living center’. Their people tell me it is not a matter of if but a matter of when they will get hit. The have very little PPE, about 700 masks (a couple of days worth), can’t obtain tyvek coveralls, and are out of hand sanitizer. The sanitizer supplier says they “may” have some by the end of next week. This is one of four assisted living centers owned by the same outfit in this area (they have about 200 centers in the mid-Atlantic and the mid-West) and have about 800 ‘residents’ in this area. Also, they have less than 3 days of food in stock. I would say the operative term is ‘petri dish’….
General James C. McConville, Chief of Staff of the Army, and a hand-picked platoon of his buddies from the 101st Airborne waltz past the Secret Service like they’re crushing so many roses in the garden, stroll into the Oval Office, and announce that the grownups are now in charge.
Love to see it. I’ve long since concluded that a Pentagon coup is the only way out of our current mess. Not that that’s a particularly attractive option either.
stroll into the Oval Office, and announce that the grownups are now in charge.
And five minutes later there would be clusterf**k arguments everywhere about who was in charge of what, and where are the keys to the big black cars, and who’s getting coffee.
Military intelligence is an oxymoron … I submit the last seven wars the US has been in as evidence, Your Honour!
JUDGE: Guilty as charged! (Loud crack as gavel hits the bench.) Bailiff, lock them up!
COURT CLERK: Sorry, your honor, the defendants have thrown the bailiff into the brig.
JUDGE: Court’s adjourned. I’m outta here!
Military intelligence is an oxymoron … I submit the last seven wars the US has been in as evidence, Your Honour!
As opposed to Commander in Chief and Congressional intelligence? Remember, it’s the fucking civilians who gave the orders and cherry picked the intel.
Meanwhile in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a gang of about 25 ‘Youts’ surround, beat, punch, kick and stomp a slight 15 year old girl — it looked like a rugby scrum — to steal her ‘Air Jordan’ sneakers.
Video shows her in a heap on the sidewalk, with the ‘Youts’ running from the scene holding the sneakers and other stolen property triumphantly over their heads like war trophies.
It looks like Joe Biden’s core supporters, people who will be “Ridin’ with Biden”.
Brh
Get real Brh. The youth group you just described will not be voting for anybody. Care to bet they are registered? I have a fiver that says this ‘Youts’ team of and in your mind only, are not even registered to vote. Since it is all in your head you will have to lie to win this bet.
Today’s NYPost has the video. It is impressive.
K-Dog, reading you posts today, it seems like you are NOT “Ridin’ with Biden”. That’ going to leave you in a pickle when Bernie gets hosed in Milwaukee. What to do? What to do? You yourself may have to run again. Hey last time your message made it all the way across the country to Connecticut.
Brh
Damn, borough of my birth. But I’m still Brooklyn through and through, womb to tomb. Fuggedaboutit!
Amazing the people who think that they are capitalists continue to support this corporate communist state that we live in capitalism died 20 years ago, having a medical system that is actually in the business of not gauging people for basic medical necessities is not communism its basic human decency.
They are sheep who live to please and for good grass to eat.
Funny how they call the guy who is all about voting and fair elections socialist equating obvious democratic impulses with storm troopers showing up in the middle of the night to steal your shit.
The communist 1% already stole your shit and you slept through it. Thank you jackleon. It is nice to see someone who pays attention to the actual meaning of words.
Common ownership of the means of production in the absence of social class is what you get when a plutocracy has everything and the people have nothing. In such a situation there is only one communist class who’s members enjoy a communal tax break. Any other social class simply does not exist because they have no assets. Their existence is like the last natives in the Amazon rain forest who are being extirpated right now. An existence as easily ignored as any endangered species. When everything is pecuniary that is how it goes.
I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
Widely attributed to Jay Gould. Horrible human being, but smart man.
Thank you Kdog. The Libertarians are the dummest people of all. As if Capitalism doesn’t have winners, and the winners have no legal responsibility for the losers. As the Comedian said in The Watchman, The American Dream? This is it. You got it.
Other than your well deserved depression, what prevented you from “owning the means of production”? You couldn’t spare $100 on AAPL shares or AMZN shares or MSFT shares or GOOG shares NFLX or whatever? Anyone of those choices would have made you a multimillionaire today. What you are is a loser. A black cloud of non-ending depression envy and pessimism. Just cut your fscking veins and be done with it.
Excellent summation of the Zionist capitalist winner take all mindset. Wonder what you’ll do when the “losers” finally figure out that it’s not their veins that need to be cut?
Right Commie, because it’s the scrappy Zionists that are holding you commie loser back. That are preventing you from taking positive initiatives to better yourself. It’s the scrappy Zionists that are taking the taxes that your lazy ass don’t pay, and that go to the millions of dead wood Vatican parasites in the gov mafia bureaucracy and you pathetic welfare cases.
We know your game. Mass envy mass theft mass murder and mass destruction. That’s the only thing your rotten and diseased mind is capable of. That’s your only legacy. Your “innovation” of turning anything and everything you touch into shit.
Point us to your commie-jihadi paradise successes. Or better yet, go and live there, you whiny commie worm.
In the last thirty years the wealth of the American people has declined by 900 billion dollars while the 1% has seen their fortunes rise by 21 trillion dollars. Cuba has health care at a 10th the cost of the US and Europe does it for half the cost. The life expectancy in Cuba is 3 years longer than here. Three men in America have the same wealth as the bottom 92%. The American gas tank is running on empty.
Is this the best of all possible worlds?
We just need some more tax breaks for the rich and everything will be hunky dory again. And some negative interest rates too! After that we can start in gutting the social safety net altogether and expanding the greatest prison system the world has ever seen. MAGA til you drop BABY!
Irregardless, Bernie is done.
His revolution is stillborn. His campaign peaked in February and is now in serious decline. There’s no hope to revive it for 2020, and by 2024 Sanders will be 83 … too late, too late!
No such word as irregardless.
Regardless, everyone is falling for the “Bernie is done” scheme.
Just as they planned.
So you’re still holding out hope then?
California vote is 94% in.
Bernie … 186 delegates
Biden …. 148 delegates
It ain’t over yet. On to Milwaukee.
Technically, but then again the Bloomy funded anti-Bernie campaign is just getting warmed up as well. Gonna be a steep uphill for Sanders to even make it to the convention, at which time the fix will be formally unveiled.
Really a shame that there’s no debate until after Tuesday’s rather large delegate haul…especially with Michigan in there. Biden will come off looking like the dementia-riven old man that he is – though that may not matter s much to the ‘Anyone but Bernie’ cohort.
If the DNC puts Biden up as the General Election candidate, you KNOW it’s all true…that they’d rather have The Pumpkin Fuehrer for another term than see Bernie win.
And yet there the word is irregardless!
Won’t be long before they add it to the dictionary like a lot of other made up words and letters.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/g25712934/new-dictionary-words/?slide=1
Language changes.
In Candide the book Pangloss and Candide are saved from the inquisition by the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. It allows them to escape. It isn’t over till it is over. Bernie has to keep tending the garden; eventually we will get to market.
Hope springs eternal in the pack! Hope you’re not just howling at the moon.
So, Avatar, you’re not “Ridin’ with Biden” either?
Biden could be in trouble.
BRH,
Sadly, I was looking forward to “whorin’ with Warren”. Perhaps I will be ridin’ the gurney with Bernie, if your comments regarding the hot summer campaigning comes to pass….
Maybe ridin’ Dog’s rump with Trump?
But E.
In the torrid summer heat I will be under a shade tree along the Farmington River, sipping an iced Sam Adams, fishing for trout. Even on the hottest of says a cool refreshing breeze blows down from the Army Corp of Engineers dam.
I hope you are doing something similar.
Meanwhile, Biden or Bernie will be standing on some forlorn outdoor podium in Brownsville, TX, pandering to Mexicans to get out the Hispanic vote, humidity at 95%, temp at 110dF, not a breath of fresh air within 500 miles … not a problem when you’re 35, but at 80? And then there’s the Mexican food that the candidate is obliged to sample … it might be the tacos that does him in. Yes, a gurney might have to be kept available for Bernie, and the EMTs will be Ridin with Biden to the local ER.
You and Tusconspur are the best.
brh
If enough boneheads misuse a word it eventually becomes accepted.
Healthy use to refer to the state of a person (or living thing).
Healthful use to refer to something that made you healthy.
The great unwashed finally made it acceptable use to say “eating fruit is healthy for you.”
It really really pisses me off. I tried repeatedly to get my 5th grade report card changed because I got a lower score on a test for using “healthy” as the word to describe why I always ate all the peas on my plate. They claimed they could no longer find my transcript and that my teacher had retired and died by then but I’m pretty sure they were lying.
True story? Why did you care so much? Why did it matter? Would that changed grade make you into a real person? This is what’s called “giving you power away” in the deepest sense.
We’re all walking thru a blizzard here, Evie. Our tracks are soon covered up. Why are you clinging to an ego struggle of long ago?
Wasn’t healthful the right word (according to you) to have used? Are you calling yourself a bonehead? Too bad you vanquished clarity already!
Have you watched “Bone Tomahawk” yet? Please do!
Janos
You don’t have much ability to detect facetious humor do you? I post here with entertainment in mind primarily. Gawd you are mentally brittle!
Yeah, I don’t remember much about “Bone Tomahawk” except being disappointed after watching it.
Once again you expose that you don’t really understand the progression. Clarity of mind becomes an enemy because it makes one content with their progress. You don’t vanquish it you use it to push beyond. You are so far from achieving it it amuses me much the same as so called christians spewing hate amuses me.
How does it make you content with your progress? That doesn’t make any sense. Woolly or sloppy thinking goes along with self satisfaction, not clarity.
Nothing against your Traditional Teachings. I have no doubt you’re remembering them wrong.
If you had held onto Clarity, you would have never tried to get an old grade changed – not something from the fifth grade for Quetzlcoatl’s sake.
Janos, how in hell can you be so dense? Do you know what facetious means?
For goddamn sure you have no clarity. It was a made up story. What could be more ludicrous than trying to have a 5th grade test changed 30 or 40 year afterwards.
You must be pulling my leg pretending to be so uncomprehending.
Apparently the word ‘irregardless’ is not proper but has been in use since about 1900.
Like ‘flammable’ and ‘inflammable’ – same meaning but with the “in” prefix, the latter is, intuitively, the opposite of the former – but not so. Great language, English.
This is what happens when MK Ultra brainwashes the brainwashers. Remember Eric Berne [Games People Play], the MK Ultra clandestine operative when the CIA conducted mind control experiments at a Montreal mental institution. He professed people are divided into child, teen and adult. The shrink missed out on infants and seniors categories, tsk, tsk. An example of professors who don’t profess. The proof of which is displayed in the theatre of the political absurd, evidently bringing out the worst of the last aforementioned categories. Trump qualifies as the Grand Infant and Biden the demented, moribund senior. Bernie is the only sane one of the lot. Eric Berne [not Bernie] professed people ought to figure out which category others were; eg when talking, and then you analysed yourself to make a further determination. Moreover, anything said would then be repeated to the point of nausea to finalise the brainwashing. The shrink was subsequently suicided in Carmel. I mean, who in their right mind dies of a heart attack in Carmel at age sixty.
Michelle would make a great transsexual President according to Joan Rivers.
Agreed on Michelle. In this way she would finally come out. Rather proudly too, I’m guessing.
Bernie’s almost certainly sane, but his political instincts are either failing now or have never been so good. Probably a little bit of both.
Michelle could use unisex bathrooms. Every home in America has one.
Leaving aside the ridiculous Michelle Obama bullshit…
“Bernie’s almost certainly sane, but his political instincts are either failing now or have never been so good. Probably a little bit of both.”
You’re right. He’s STILL going easy on Biden, calling him ‘my friend’ and so on. No killer instinct (certainly not in the vein of Stalin or Mao who would be embarrassed to hear him accused of communism!)
Bernie remains a gentleman – yes, really – and wants to keep the argument above the ad hominem level. Considering just how sleazy & low-down the Bloomberg machine is about to get on him, he really should throw off the kid gloves and just start talking about the FACTS of Biden’s cruisy 30-year grift-fest in congress.
How Sleepy Joe voted for so many pieces of legislation that have crushed black folk, how he was caught plagiarising in law school, lying about his academic record when running for congress, and he’s STILL doing it – every day…and how the f*ck does an out-of-work ex-vice president earn $15.6 milllion in the FY 17/18?
Joan was silenced.
Anyone who wishes to redistribute wealth is a socialist, whether to the poor, the rich, the farmers, the rulers, the alliances, the banks, the corporations pool and etc.
You do not RE distribute your own wealth.
MD
You have got it right! I will say it differently. All these socialists want to redistribute the wealth all right, everybody’s else’s wealth. Their crocodile tears for the poor are exactly that.
Hold on to your wallets, the Dems are coming. All of you, not just the rich. Know why? Because there is not enough wealth in the wealthy folks to capitalize all their insane ideas, they are going to come after everybody, because they have to.
What do you call it when your wealth is used to compensate the banks for losing other people’s wealth they were supposed to protect?
Corporate Socialism, Evie. POor old JohnAZ has no clue just how one-eyed he’s become.
JohnAZ – what are you TALKING about? In a properly progressive taxation system, anyone earning under $100K would probably pay a lot less in taxes than now.( As well, with M4A, you’d pay half as much for your healthcare and get FULL coverage.). I’m guessing this includes you.
The legislators you’re so scared of will be well into that bracket, so no – it’s not about taxing everyone ELSE, it’s about taxing everyone FAIRLY, based on income.
Try this on for size – that after $105,000 p.a. on average, you don’t get any happier:
“https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/02/26/does-money-equal-happiness-does-until-you-earn-much/374119002/”
Imprimis newsletter, Feb 2020, volume 49, no.2:
The Roots of Our Partisan Divide
by Christopher Caldwell
(adapted from a talk delivered on 1/28/20 at Hillsdale College)
American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War [sic]. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.
I can end part of the suspense right now — Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s — they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.
One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War… [I]f you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or — heaven forbid — less brave, but because they were more decent.
Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood — the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave…
But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.
Because conventional wisdow today holds that the Civil Rights Act brought the country together, my book’s suggestion that it pulled the country apart has been met with outrage. The outrage has been especially pronounced among those who have not read the book. So for their benefit I should make crystal clear that my book is not a defense of Jim Crow, and that when I criticize the long-term effects of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, I do not criticize the principle of equality in general, or the movement for black equality in particular.
What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These gave Washington the authority to override what Americans had traditionally thought of as their ordinary democratic institutions. It was widely assumed that the emergency mechanisms would be temporary and narrowly focused. But they soon escaped democratic control altogether, and they have now become the most powerful part of our governing system.
How Civil Right Legislation Worked
There were two noteworthy things about the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.
The first was its unprecedented concentration of power. It gave Washington tools it had never before had in peacetime. It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked — or repealed — the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes — an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.
To put it bluntly, the effect of these civil rights laws was to take a lot of decisions that had been made in the democratic parts of American government and relocate them to the bureaucracy or the judiciary. Only with that kind of arsenal, Lyndon Johnson and the drafters thought, would it be possible to root out insidious racism [sic].
The second noteworthy thing about the civil rights legislation of the 1960s is that it was kind of a fudge. It sat uneasily not only with our First Amendment, but with the Constitution as a whole. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed largely to give teeth to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, did so by creating different levels of rights for citizens of southern states like Alabama and citizens of northern states like Michigan when it came to election laws.
The goal of civil rights laws was to bring the sham democracies [sic] of the American South into conformity with the Constitution. But nobody’s democracy is perfect, and it turned out to be much harder than anticipated to distinguish between democracy in the South and democracy elsewhere in the country. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots [sic], the letter of the law put the entire country — all its institutions — under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.
Still, no one was too worried about that. It is clear in retrospect that Americans outside the South understood segregation as a regional problem. As far as we can tell from polls, 70-90 percent of Americans outside the South thought that blacks in their part of the country were treated just fine, the same as anyone else. In practice, non-Southerners did not expect the new laws to be turned back on themselves.
The Broadening of Civil Rights
The problem is that when the work of the civil rights legislation was done — when de jure segregation was stopped — these new powers were not suspended or scaled back or reassessed. On the contrary, they intensified. The ability to set racial quotas for public schools was not in the original Civil Rights Act, but offices of civil rights started doing it, and there was no one strong enough to resist. Busing of schoolchildren had not been in the original plan, either, but once schools started to fall short of targets established by the bureaucracy, judges ordered it.
Affirmative action was a vague notion in the Civil Rights Act. But by the time of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, it was an outright system of racial preference for non-whites. In that case, the plaintiff, Alan Bakke, who had been a U.S. Marine captain in Vietnam, saw his application for medical school rejected, even though his test scores were in the 96th, 94th, 97th, and 72nd percentiles. Minority applicants, meanwhile, were admitted with, on average, scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th, and 18th percentiles. And although the Court decided that Bakke himself deserved admission, it did not do away with affirmative action programs that kept him out. In fact, it institutionalzied them, mandating “diversity” — a new concept at the time — as the law of the land.
Meanwhile other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism – ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it.
Finally, civil rights came to dominate — and even overrule — legislation that had nothing to do with it. The most traumatic example of this was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This legislation was supposed to be the grand compromise on which our modern immigration policy would be built. On the one hand, about three million illegal immigrants who had mostly come north from Mexico would be given citizenship. On the other hand, draconian laws would ensure that the amnesty would not be an incentive to future migrants, and that illegal immigration would never get out of control again. So there were harsh “employer sanctions” for anyone who hired a non-citizen. But once the law passed, what happened? Illegal immigrants got their amnesty. But the penalties on illegal hiring turned out to be fake — because, to simplify just a bit, asking an employee who “looks Mexican” where he was born or about his citizenship status was held to be a violation of his civil rights. Civil rights law had made it impossible for Americans to get what they’d voted for through their representatives, leading to decades of political strife over immigration policy that continues to this day.
A more recent manifestation of the broadening of civil rights laws is the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Obama Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in 2011, which sought to dictate sexual harassment policy to every college and university in the country. Another is the overturning by judges of a temporary ban on entry from certain countries linked to terrorism in the first months of the Trump administration in 2017.
These policies, qua policies, have their defenders and their detractors. The important thing for our purposes is how they were established and enforced. More and more areas of American life have been withdrawn from voters’ democratic control and delivered up to the bureaucratic and judicial emergency mechanisms of civil rights law. Civil rights law has become a second constitution, with powers that can be used to override the Constitution of 1787.
The New Constitution
In explaining the constitutional order that we see today, I’d like to focus on just two of its characteristics.
First, it has a moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics. As we’ve discussed, civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy. But the key question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe. Usually when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order. But in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. American can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.
A moral ground for invoking emergencies sounds more humane than a military one. It is not. That is because, in order to justify its special powers, the government must create a class officially designated malefactors. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the justification of this strong medicine was that there was a collection of Southern politicians who were so wily and devious, and a collection of Southern sheriffs so ruthless and depraved, that one could not, and was not morally obliged to fight fair with them.
That pattern has perpetuated itself, even as the focus of civils rights has moved to American institutions less obviously objectionable than segregation [sic]. Every intervention in the name of rights requires the identification of a malefactor. So very early on in the gay marriage debate, those who believed in traditional marriage were likened to segregationists or to those who had opposed interracial marriage.
Joe Biden recently said: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” Now, most Americans, probably including Joe Biden, know very little about transgenderism. But this is an assertion that Americans are not going to be permitted to advance their knowledge by discussing the issue in public or to work out their differences at the ballot box. As civil rights laws have been extended by analogy into other areas of American life, the imputation of moral non-personhood has been aimed at a growing number of people who have committed no sin more grievous than believing the same things they did two years ago, and therefore standing in the way of the progressive juggernaut.
The second characteristic of the new civil rights constitution is what we can call intersectionality. This is a sociological development. As long as civil rights law was limited to protecting the rights of Southern blacks, it was a stable system [sic]. It had the logic of history behind it [sic], which both justified and focused its application. But if other groups could be given the privilege of advancing their causes by bureaucratic fiat and judicial decree, there was the possibility of a gradual building up of vast new coalitions, maybe even electoral majorities. This was made possible because almost anyone who was not a white heterosexual male could benefit from civil rights law in some way.
Seventy years ago, India produced the first modern minority-rights based constitution with a long, enumerated list of so-called “scheduled tribes and castes.” Eventually, inter-group horse trading took up so much of the country’s attention that there emerged a grumbling group of “everyone else,” of “ordinary Indians.” These account for many of the people behind the present prime minister, Narendra Modi. Indians who like Modi say he’s the candidate of average citizens. Those who don’t like him, as most of the international media do not, call him a “Hindu nationalist.”
We have a version of the same thing happening in America. By the mid-1980s, the “intersectional” coalition of civil rights activists started using the term “people of color” to describe itself. Now, logically, if there really is such a thing as “people of color,” and if they are demanding a larger share of society’s rewards, they are ipso facto demanding that “non-people of color” get a smaller share. In the same way that the Indian constitution called forth the idea of a generic “Hindu,” the new civil rights constitution created a group of “non-people of color.” It made white people a political reality in the United States in a way they had never been.
Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787, that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefited by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.
A Party of Bigots and a Party of Totalitarians
Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage [sic], and your children [sic], can only have done so for terrible reasons. You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and they are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots.
But say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. In fact, although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen… “Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?” You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you and taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.
And that’s our current party system: the bigots versus the totalitarians.
If either of these constitutions were totally devoid of merit, we wouldn’t have a problem. We could be confident that the wiser of the two would win out in the end. But each of these two constitutions contains, for its adherents, a great deal worth defending to the bitter end. And unfortunately, each constitution must increasingly defend itself against the other.
When gay marriage [sic] was being advanced over the past 20 years, one of the common sayings of activists was: “The sky didn’t fall.” People would say: “Look, we’ve had gay marriage in Massachusetts for three weeks, and I’ve got news for you! The sky didn’t fall!” They were right in the short term. But I think they forgot how delicate a system a democratic constitutional republic is, how difficult it is to get the formula right, and how hard it is to see when a government begins — slowy, very slowly — to veer off course in a way that can take decades to become evident.
Then one day we discover that, although we still deny the sky is falling, we do so with [our eyes cast upward].
Excellent!
Jim’s books are so interesting, informative, and insightful, that I’ve bought every single one that he has published. Just ordered the new one, Jim!
But these criminals masquerading as public servants are people to whom I refuse to give the time of day. I don’t care what they say, do, think… I couldn’t finish this article, because frankly, these people are totally irrelevant to life on earth. They are grifters, intent on collecting cash through murder, theft, crimes against humanity… whatever it takes. There may be one or two exceptions, but even those one or two do not mention murder, theft, crimes against humanity, the need for justice for them, etc, so I cannot listen to even them (Tulsi, the elderly doctor).
I used to pray for the end of the US terrorist country, but that would end my SS. Thankfully, the US is being isolated by the nations of the world, and it appears that the US is becoming impotent, because nations are fighting back. This always defeats bullies. I’m encouraged. Go, World! Be strong!
The US apparently will continue to exist, but nobody gives a toot about it anymore. It’s a criminal enterprise with no redeeming qualities on the world stage.
I give up! Today marks 3 mos since I last posted a comment. I tried to kick my habit but it’s tougher than heroin (or so I imagine).
There’s so much going on I’m ready to burst. But first of all, before I get into the meat, I think CancelMyCard and Lawfish should be banned for playing schoolmarm. (Do a search on “enfront” and “caitff.”) When I do this (i.e. play schoolmarm) I get a personal warning email straight from the boss.
Apparently it is OK to correct one’s self (Green Alba does it frequently) but not others. And if you inform our host that he has made an error he will invariably go back and fix it as he did today with ‘caitiff’…and usually with a thank you as well.
Next up: Elrond’s diatribe.
Elrond, you made several excellent observations about Trump at 11:39 AM, specifically:
1. He is a malignant narcissist with a raging, insatiable hunger for adulation, praise and the most superficial trappings of power and privilege.
2. He is intellectually vacuous and lacks the most modest understanding of, to say nothing of respect for, the principles and institutions of American governance.
I could not have expressed it as well. I might have simply said he is an asshole and a jerkoff. But that does not mean I would favor any of the crowd of Democrats recently running. And THAT, I believe, is JHK’s position.
There is a certain cohort on this board who are driven wild by Jim’s essays which they perceive as pro-Trump when they are actually merely anti-Dem. I will go a step further. I can’t stand politicians as a class. I long ago stopped voting. And I detest breathless political punditry whether right-wing or left…good riddance Chris Mathews.
My skin figuratively crawls at the sight of insatiable political ambition.
More on intellectual vacuousness later.
Bring it on, I can’t wait!
Thank-Q, Q. Shtik.
I see very little pushback or criticism of JHK when he goes off the rails, which is distressingly often. I’ve been at pains to emphasize that the main issue is narrative. One narrative that JHK pushes is that the attempt to impeach Trump was not just ill-advised, not just poorly executed, but illegitimate in itself. He conflates the impeachment effort with the intelligence community’s extremely improper actions against the Trump campaign in 2016, as if they were one and the same thing. Both, after all, were attempts to ‘undo the results of the election’ — as if there were no distinction between rogue agencies intervening in the electoral process versus Congress executing its constitutional prerogative. There are others.
As for the Democrats, either they will change back to what they were before the Clintons helped to corporatize them, or they will dry up and blow away.
Trump’s anti-intellectualism is legend. I would not be far wrong to suggest that the last thing he has read is See Spot Run in the Dick and Jane first grade reader series. And so, it was just the other day that I cringed when Trump allowed his medical professionals to explain to the public how they should not expect a vaccine for the C-Virus for maybe a year-year and a half because of those persnickety requirements for clinical trials and whatnot.
Trump stood in the background, seething with barely contained contempt for these pinhead doctors and itching to put in his two cents as if he actually had something to contribute that the pros had not considered. And so he abruptly chimed in with (and I paraphrase) ‘do you think any of the previous flu vaccines would work against Corona?’ Trying with all their might not to allow their jaws to drop or have their eyes roll back in their heads and thereby embarrass the President and possibly get their asses fired, they responded that “no, it would probably be of no effect whatever.” The TV viewer could almost see a thought bubble over the doctors’ heads that read “Oh my God, this fuckin’ guy doesn’t have a clue how these things work.”
By happenstance I had just finished reading The Great Influenza by John M. Barry that spelled out the gruesome history of the pandemic of 1918 -1920. The Afterword of this book which was added in versions subsequent to the original speculated (based on population and mortality rate data) that as many as 100 million people died worldwide, if not more. After awhile places like India gave up even trying to keep mortality records. The book is tedious but I recommend it to anyone who would like to appreciate what a true pandemic is capable of.
Q. Shtik
Just happily discovered your return to the quagmire.
CancelMyCard below misstated how many would be happy if you left again.
That low intelligence types like him think they speak for everyone is galling.
At the very least the gibbering oaf should have written “…make us all minus one happy?”
But enough idle chit chat.
Trump’s question about using other vaccines doesn’t seem particularly beyond his norm. I’m a little more in wonderment that he didn’t ask if there was some way to use a nuclear bomb to MAGA by sterilization.
Uh, before you read the media’s panning of him, did you know the answer to the question he asked? I doubt it.
JohnAZ
Are you kidding me? Flu vaccines have to be continuously developed because of the evolution of ordinary flu.
You question reminds me of the mullet heads who think there will finally be a cure for cancer in the sense that just one silver bullet needs to be found. I’m pretty sure the cancer medicine that works for what I have wouldn’t do a goddamn thing for someone with a brain tumor or pancreatic cancer or colon cancer or breast cancer or other forms of blood cancer.
You think if fat bastard spent 10 seconds thinking about it the Chinese would have figured it out already and kept the factories going without all the hoopla? Especially since they are the ones who produce almost all the medicine that comes into the US?
Trump is a moron, from head to toe.
Evie – it’s simpler than just that – corona virii are NOT influenza virii. That alone rules out any existing ‘flu shot as helpful.
OK, on to the personal stuff (ultimately, virtually everything I write is personal):
The C-Virus situation is converging on the life of my family in several ways simultaneously:
Son Thom and his squeeze (they’ve been living together more than 10 years but not married…thus ‘squeeze,’ not wife) have an 8 day slot of time available for a vacation and what with a full time job and school courses it’s the last open time slot he expects to have for the next 2 years. And so they booked a trip to Paris from Mar 1st thru Mar 8th. With great concern I dropped them off at Newark Aprt for the trip over. I will pick them up Mon when they return assuming the flight doesn’t get canceled which looks unlikely as of now since France/Paris has only been slightly impacted by the virus.
They no sooner arrived in Paris than the Louvre was shut down…groan, one of their reasons for going. A day or two passed and the Louvre suddenly reopened. From the pictures texted to us it seemed Thom and his squeeze and only a few others got the word of the reopening. Thom is seen standing in gallery after gallery as the sole visitor.
And then there is my daughter, Maggie. She and her husband live in Manhattan. She works in retail and has to commute via subway which is always packed. Sometimes she can sit and other times she has to stand…all those seats and hand rails. All stocks of hand sanitizers, masks and rubber/surgical gloves are sold out. I checked for her in Jersey but, ditto. The shelves are empty. Her job is not one that can be worked from home. No work, no pay. Fortunately, her husband CAN work from home. He’s with a big Canadian bank.
Months ago Maggie laid out significant money for tickets to take my wife to see The Lion King. This happens this Sunday. The show is always sold out. My wife will take a train into the City and then they will sit for hours in a crowded theater. There is no way my wife would consider missing this show. She would rather get the virus. Maggie already has respiratory issues…had a deviated septum operated on several months ago.
Last Sept my wife and I booked a Viking river cruise that starts in Prague and ends in Berlin. The boat holds 190 paid passengers + crew. At least its not one of those ships that holds thousands. The trip runs from May 9 to May 19. No telling what may happen between now and then. Cancellation of the flights to/from Europe or the cruise itself are a distinct possibility unless this whole virus thing somehow blows over. At the time of booking I paid extra for cancellation insurance. I just read the insurance document. Odds are that we would get a voucher for a future cruise sometime in the next 2 years. To get a cash refund requires meeting one of a dozen or so criteria, none of which are likely to apply to me. I’m not interested in a future rebook. I’m old enough already that I could be dead by then. Hey, wait a minute. Maybe that’s the answer. If either my wife or I die before the trip the booking can be canceled with a cash refund. 😉
This CoronaVirus thing is the very definition of a Black Swan.
Hi Q,
2020 might be a great year for motorcycle trips!
Take care,
Jen in Salt Lake
Hi, Salt Lake Jen
I had actually been plotting out a big bike trip and then this virus thing hit and made me stop to reconsider. Here’s a question for anyone who may know something or have a rational opinion.
Would I be more likely to become infected with the C-Virus if I took a one month bike trip than if I took the identical trip in a Ram 1500 truck……….all other factors being held constant?
I’d like to be able to tell my grandsons that I once saw the USA by motorcycle in my 80th year. (I turned 79 last November so I am now 3+ months into my 80th year.)
Q
You do wear more protective clothing on a motorcycle.
The RAM has in cab air filtration and the motorcycle doesn’t.
What if a big fat bumble bee hits you in the kisser and just happens to be an nCoronavirus carrier?
Take up racing on the Bonneville Salt Flats instead.
RW
Evelyn, what I wear when on my bike depends on the temperature and the weather forecast.
Robt White, I can’t be hit in the face by a big fat bumble bee because the bike has a large windscreen and my helmet has two plastic face masks, one clear and one tinted.
My concern is being exposed to all that unfiltered air (when on the bike) vs the cool climate controlled environment inside the truck.
Welcome back, Q. You say: “unless this whole virus thing somehow blows over.” That is exactly what Trump says will happen. In a month the warm weather will stop the virus and you can go on your cruise. Enjoy!
Well, you are back to insult us all.
Can’t say I’m pleased with that.
But you are.
Why don’t you just f*ck off and blow away, and
make us all happy?
Hmmmm??
Naw a healthy board requires dissenting voices even ones who have a higher than normal opinion of their own opinion.
There it is in a nut shell everyone thinks they are right even when they are wrong.
How can an opinion be wrong?
When it defies logic, reason and most of all common sense.
“Naw a healthy board requires dissenting voices” –benr
I agree.
CancelMyCard
Hey! That’s unnecessary and boorish. That’s the sort of sh*tty behaviour the so-called ‘Bernie Bros’ exhibit and bring Sanders into disrepute. Grow up.
Q.Shtik brings a reasoned and experienced viewpoint that I enjoy – pleased to see you back, Q.
Welcome back, Q – glad you are well.
Since you pointed out my sin of self-correction (of which I am aware – I guess it’s an insecurity thang…) I will take the liberty of pointing out that ‘to correct one’s self’ is a rather more philosophical undertaking than merely ‘correcting oneself’ after hitting the ‘submit’ button too quickly. 🙂
We thought that you had passed, ‘the good lord took him away.’
Well, that would have been the best-case scenario!
CMC,
Clever….
If I left this sphere, no one here would note my departure.
Sure we would.
Malthuss,
Don’t depart!
I would Malthus.
You’re an interesting commenter, have that unique LA perspective.
Don’t die, Malthus!
Don’t leave. Your perspective is appreciated.
malthuss, your posts are appreciated. You are unique. Your departure would be noticed.
Given the Dems’ antics the past 3+ years, it’s doubtful any ticket the Dems manage to cobble together could beat Trump. Hillary/Biden would be especially fated to failure – criminals and losers both.
Ms. Obama I’ve heard has disqualifying citizen/residency issues, though I wouldn’t put it past the Dems to ignore the Constitution yet again, considering their mounting desperation.
Whatever they come up with may well siphon the Black, Women, Gay, Alzheimer Patient, etc. vote from Trump, but it won’t matter, as they’ve constructed an insurmountable schism between the Deep State and Bernie factions that will fatally dilute the Dem vote whatever the ticket.
Why don’t all you folks that very obviously hate this country just get the hell out of here?
Because there is no other place to go where they will let you bitch like you do, or have other liberties you enjoy here. Overall, the USA cares for its people more than any other country. So if you think somewhere else is a better place to spend your life,
GO!
You tell ’em, John!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIxBmyRQlwQ
Yea plenty of socialist utopias out there- go there enjoy.
Those who support the most incompetent, ignorant, narcissistic, buffoon who this country has ever had to depend on for wise leadership and failed so badly at would be those haters you are addressing.
They are as clueless about what is going on as the America bison who stood their ground in blissful cud chewing ignorance while their companions were falling all around in a savage slaughter.
The true hates of this country can be identified by their red hats.
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
Yet here you are spewing your own venom for all to see you only like the part of the country in lock step with you.
You hate the America that was and even I suspect espouse the idea that “America was never that great.”
Hence why some would suggest you hate the America THAT IS.
I despise the Progressive idea of new America as self destructive anything goes Antifa scum types.
There are still places people don’t lock their doors and can walk freely without fear of being assaulted for their pocket change.
The further down the progressive rat hole the worse the living conditions become.
Yeah, how to take from the upper 10% to give to another upper 10% in the name of giving to the poor.
How to try to make the bottom 10% wealthier and making everyone miserable.
The dogma of the Left.
benr
Is it conceivable to you that as the wealth of this country has been sponged up by the wealthy it’s virtually a mathematical certainty conditions are going to deteriorate at the bottom end of the spectrum?
To take the question further, the “bottom” of the spectrum has made its way a long distance into the so called middle class now.
You do understand that wealth is not finite?
If you do then you have to understand that what you said is utter bullshit.
The rot is not about the haves the rot is about the welfare state and bad government policy.
Everywhere progressive systems are taking over the rot is in full view.
Benr- you supported diversity of thinking, but when you actually GET some, you call it ‘spewing venom’. What’s with THAT? Are you not true to your word?
The red sticks are against the red hats. It’s that simple. She doesn’t identify as White or American.
The Leader of the Red Hats identifies with the Small Hats. Thus his Americanism is a joke. So she’s right but that just adds to her essential Wrongness.
In Nevada circa 1970 along came the California/Nevada Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, a prime example of Regional Government using illegitimate/unconstitutional cat’s paw State & Federal Judicial means to create and enforce strict and arbitrary restrictions on individual homeowner, farms and businesses.
Large Nevada Casinos and destination resorts in both states achieved ability to maintain profitable business models. This included busing operations to enable staff to reside outside the Tahoe Basin, rather than promote affordable decent housing in proximity. Additionally, and unfortunate for many hundreds mom & pop family properties, onerous rules and punishments for normal property rights expectations became the way of life, forcing abandonment of hundreds of retirement abodes. Tahoe is a beautiful place without vibrant middle class life. There are better and worse examples of “Regional Government” in the lower 48. Endangered (so called) species, not people, guide policy at these agencies.
Notable in recent decades have been the excesses of regulation and punishments involving encroachments real and imagined on “wetlands”. Homelessness owing to excessive residential building restrictions/costs is going to get more extreme. Objective look at the Regional Government phenomenon reveals a common thread: a totalitarian approach slanted to benefitting the wealthy. Paradoxically, Regional Agency mechanism has become inextricably bound up with Democratic Party politics.
Loss of small farms taken over by corporate operations is one glaring result of punitive Regional Government impacts on small operations.. Result of disappearing family farms opens possibility of famine in certain scenarios. Let others expand, please.
Biden.
Our esteemed host removed my comment about the groper.
Malthuss,
You pays your money,
and you takes your chances.
Think about your chances with Jim,
before you shoot off your mouth.
Hmmm?
The groper is legendary but understand posts like that open Jim up to liability which even though true he must remove.
oh
“And then, there is that giant anvil hanging over Joe B’s head in the form of an investigation into, and possible prosecution for, his shenanigans with son, Hunter, in Ukraine..”
It’s obvious what Biden’s kid gets from the Burisma deal, but what did Biden do to help out Burisma?
” America has become a “gimme” society, dependent on a government supplying everything to them and listening to media totally supporting the “gimme” State. ”
This is true .
But there are many variations of this , ” gimme ” .
And it sure looks to me like most of you don’t much complain about the biggest and most egregious of these gimmies.
The GI Bill is a gimme program.
Typically today in many parts of America the best house on the street , and the house with five vehicles in the driveway , belongs to a scion of the police.
Never the less , we must kiss their presumably cross – carrying asses.
So that’s a gimme program.
Gun control is a gimme program . For lack of a better term ( I think it is telling that there is not a term for it . )
We could call it the ; ” Gimme security” – program.
Likewise the war on drugs : Another gimme security program.
The war on terror ? I gotta admit , the 911 attacks were an impressive photo op.
Otherwise , more people die in auto accidents in the single state of Tennessee every year than died in the 911 attacks.
So the war on terror is another gimme security program , and I think , too , a Gimme – a – sop – to – my – vanity – program.
That is , I think the 911 terrorists were crazy or stupid to do what they did BECAUSE YOUR COUNTRY IS HARDLY SO IMPORTANT.
I couldn’t be bothered to blow up an American post office .
Why ?
Because you aren’t that fucking important. That’s why.
And so the thinking that informed your reaction to 911 was as stupid or crazy as the thinking that orchestrated it.
That’s why I call the war on terror a Gimme – a – sop – to – my – vanity – program.
Kunstler again referred to Transvestite story time .
It’s getting to the point that I might as well grin over the fake hand – wringing .
Transvestite story time originated with the LGBT crowd ?
The LGBT lobby is a fucking joke.
Maybe it originated with Nazis who have been dead 70 years ?
No , Transvestite story time originated with another one of YOUR Gimme programs.
Here again , we don’t have a term for this gimme program , so , again , I have to make one up ;
I – wanna – stick – my – nose – in – the -business – of – the – family – down – the – street , even – though – I – don’t – care – about – those – people , even – though – I – don’t – want – to – live – with – them , even – though – I – don’t – want – to – eat – out – of – the – same – pot – as – them , or – share – their – fate .
And – I’m – willing – to – buy – into – this – fantastically – superstitious idea – that – such – a – management – scheme – isn’t – going – to – be – a – fucking – disaster.
Even – though – head – hunting – cannibal – Animists – in – Borneo – would – immediately – detect – the – fabulous – nature – of – it.
You wound up with Transvestite story time when , in your control – freak conceit , you bought into the idea that bureaucrats and police could micro-manage the family you dislike down the street ,
and fancied that the bureaucrats and the police would not subsequently use that same power against your family.
How fucking stupid could YOU be ?
Anyway , that was another gimme program.
TL:DR
Can you resolve this down to a few bullet points?
Ok, I thought not.
Best wishes on trying to convice people.
You are not very good at this, so far, are you?
Says the guy who uses obscure acronyms invented , what , last month ?
” Can you resolve this down to a few bullet points?
Ok, I thought not. ”
Of course not. It isn’t a fucking Coca – Cola commercial.
China will have the last laugh. Tit for tat in 5he year of the Rat… when did it start ?
I agree. In the USA I don’t hear any mention of the 22nd century, but China plans for generations ahead. The 21st century belongs to China. The 22nd century belongs to Africa, so China is busy investing in Africa.
” Why don’t all you folks that very obviously hate this country just get the hell out of here? ”
Several possible answers to this.
First answer : Do you mean the country club set ?
The way I hear it , a Hilton Hotel in Paris , in Moscow , in Beijing , isn’t really much different than a Hilton Hotel in Iowa .
A gated community in New Zealand is pretty much like a gated community in Florida.
And so the country club set DO LEAVE ALL THE TIME.
They left with their factories , and now their office jobs too , PERMANENTLY though ……
Apparently they care more about their profit margins than they do about your American ass ?
Maybe you should talk to them ?
— IF you can get an appointment to see them ?
Second answer :
As I have explained before , my white fathers family died fighting for the land I’m standing on to the number of 300,000 .
As for my mothers black family , I think it’s pretty obvious that you did not , and do not today , give a fuck about them .
SO , I VERY MUCH WISH YOU AMERICANS WOULD GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY COUNTRY.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaQO7MFk0qw
Let me put that another way :
Fuck you too , you bloody hypocritical invader.
Third answer :
So , if I leave , you’re going to step up to the plate , and serve as unpaid maid and caregiver to my hard – to – live – with elderly American parents ?
You’re gonna pay their light bill , and feed their many dogs , and get ordered around like a ten – year – old for your trouble ,
because you’re so patriotic and love your fellow citizens so much ?
Right ?
Well, ladies and germs;
The UPI reports, this PM, that questions by medical professionals exist as to whether Kung Flu cured and released patients are “cured”.
Disturbing trend regarding a handful of patients being re-admitted to hospitals with recurring symptoms.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/03/06/Experts-unsure-if-cured-COVID-19-patients-are-reinfected-or-relapsed/8101583529793/?ds=2
No snarky comment….
Ever had two colds or two flus in a row? I have. Plus they are saying that the Co19 has already mutated to a more deadly strain, so two bugs are chasing us now, not one.
” Best wishes on trying to convice people. ”
Well , as I have said about 50 times before , I didn’t drag you to a blog entitled ” Clusterfuck Nation ” at gun point.
So I’m pretty sure I haven’t convinced you of anything , nor needed too.
The trying to un-convince yourself part , likewise , has little or nothing to do with me.
“Things get interesting” is such a nice way of say… well, for instance the title of this blog with “World” as the second word instead of “Nation”. Or FUBAR perhaps? LOL, gotta laugh, what else can one do? It’s all so strange these days.
” You are not very good at this, so far, are you? ”
You haven’t been on the internet long , have you ?
Or , in the time you have been here , you haven’t noticed a god damned thing ?
I have been on the internet since about 1985.
And , in that time , I have only seen it happen about 500 times ;
Some guy from Kazakhstan , for whom English is a third language , writes a post , and someone , or several someones , replies with bullshit like yours.
Funny thing is , I understood what the guy was writing , and he was a hell of a lot more convincing than those assholes with their fake-y criticism.
Here’s a real pro – tip for you ;
Tactics like that make you look stupid , or lazy , or dishonest ,
and the only popularity it will ever win you is the fair weather kind.
Good for you Kesa Anna. I like the way you don’t take any sh#t.
Rock on with your bad self you moonstruck Dostoevskian Rebel.
brh
BRH/Kesa,
I have heard it said;
“…Don’t let him shit on you like that…open your mouth!”
‘I have been on the internet since about 1985.’
Sure about that cowboy?
There was no internet in 1985. Some interconnection between some collegiate intranets but mostly us nerds modem dialing into BBS services whose numbers we traded like currency back in the day. Nothing truly like the internet per se…
you can allow for a little hyperbole. fugeguy.
Fair enough 😉
Anyone who wishes to redistribute wealth is a socialist, whether to the poor, the rich, the farmers, the rulers, the alliances, the banks, the corporations and etc.
You do not RE distribute your own wealth.
Here’s a short one ;
“If you want government to intervene domestically, you’re a liberal.
If you want government to intervene overseas, you’re a conservative.
If you want government to intervene everywhere, you’re a moderate.
If you don’t want government to intervene anywhere, you’re an extremist.”
— Joseph Sobran
( And there’s your clue as to where Transvestite story time originated . )
So I guess I’m an extremist, then. I never woulda thunk it.
Have you heard about Somalia, Kesa? No Government – best country in the World! Afghanistan too, almost as good – lots of little boy prostitutes. So? So you’re wrong again.
Culture is upstream of Government. That’s Conservatism 101. Guess you missed class that day….
What a fascinating place. There are some bright minds here, and yet also some reeeeally angry souls. Many thanks to the former and for the later, might I recommend some Tums to absorb some of that bitter acid in the gut and a little more humor in your life?
Axis? As in Axis Sally?
No, no Sally. Axis as in “Axis: Bold as Love.”
Scotch is better 😉
“…that does not mean I would favor any of the crowd of Democrats recently running” –Qshtik
There are still THREE Democrats still actively running. One is an active duty combat veteran, the first combat veteran to run for president, who won a delegate to the convention in the March 3 primary. In a brokered convention she could still win the presidency.
Qshtik, what is your take on recent market volatility? Stay in? Get out?
Dear **cough** Asoka, it’s not like I actually know anything special but let me tell you what’s been going on with my portfolio. I had my money divided up amongst 3 money managers, Vanguard, Fidelity and Wells Fargo. The need for this division resulted from my financial life becoming complicated when my brother died in Sept 2014. He was a never-married recluse whose hobby was saving money and never spending a cent unnecessarily. I was his sole heir (his home, his car, his investment accts and a modest amount of silver coin). By the end of 2014 I had sold his home, towed his car back to NJ and sold it to my next door neighbor and sorted out and made sense of his various investment accounts. I then paid off all the outstanding debts of my 3 kids and their significant others giving them a clean slate going forward. Fortunately my brother kept meticulous financial records and an Excel spreadsheet right down to the very penny.
For his generosity upon a totally unexpected sudden death I remember him and his extraordinarily odd life every day and by returning his ashes back to NJ and placing them in a pyramid I had built and completed the very day I got a call from a detective in Mirimar FL informing me of his death. He had died 5 days prior to his body being found. I power wash the pyramid and coat it with a water repellent deck stain every year or two. I remove the top section of the pyramid each year on the anniversary of his death to visit his ashes. Also enclosed is a typed-up story I wrote of his life and passing to be found by somebody 50 or 100 years down the road. This is the only afterlife. Life in memory.
But I digress……….. I recently shut down my Fidelity accts and transferred the funds to Wells Fargo where I had developed a relationship with a particular money manager. His office is right in my local WF bank a half mile away so there is a convenience factor as well.
I have 4 accts containing investments and one small inactive checking account. The 4 accts contain a mixture of fixed income and equity (i.e. stocks) investments. It leans more heaviliy toward the fixed side which is considered appropriate at my age. Gains on the fixed side (bonds in particular) tend to go up when stocks fall and vice versa. These investments tend to mitigate to some degree the losses one has been incurring on the equities side in the past two weeks but STILL gains in fixed investments is only offsetting 10% to 50% of the losses being suffered in equities. The largest of the 4 accts dollarwise may be thought of as the offspring of the 401k I contributed to during my working career which ended 14 years ago. I would always forgo, to the greatest extent possible, the enjoyment of current consumption to an extent that would minimize havoc with my wife who would much rather consume now and save later. When I retired, my 401k was converted into an IRA. I forget the rationale for the conversion but tax wise at least they are treated the same.
Since one has not paid income taxes on money socked away in 401ks and IRAs the govt is anxious to finally start extracting their pound of flesh and that, until a month or two ago, began at age 70 and a half. They just recently extended that date to age 72 when you have to start taking RMDs (Required minimum distributions) and paying the appropriate tax.
The money in this IRA is now invested in two 5-year fixed annuities making 3.4% and 3.3% annually, compounding daily, and incurring zero advisory fees. I was fortunate to lock in these rates before bond rates declined precipitously this past week.
In another WF account is an “inherited IRA” (from my brother) which has different rules than a standard IRA. RMDs must be taken at a faster clip. All the money now must be withdrawn over a ten year period and the appropriate taxes paid.
The inherited IRA money is invested in some weird “vehicle,” a 5 year fixed annuity, that will yield between 0% and 4% of the change in the S&P 500 index over a certain one year period. The worst you can do is have a zero gain (if the S&P, say, were to go down for the year) or to gain as much as, but no more than, 4% if the S&P went to the moon.
A third acct containing money that has already been taxed is invested in a vehicle identical to the inherited IRA above except that the rate range at 0% to 5% is even more favorable.
Finally, in the 4th account (containing already taxed money) is where I run wild. The money is invested in 10 nicely diversified Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) half of which are bond funds and half stock funds. On big market down days this acct will get hammered but the losses will be mitigated somewhat by gains in bonds. Conversely, on monster up days the acct will soar but the gain will be reduced by losses on the bond side. If the 50/50 stks vs bonds gets too far out of whack, say 60/40, adjustment of holdings will be made. My advisor gets 1% per year, billed on a quarterly basis, of funds under management for his troubles.
The money at Vanguard, all of it already taxed, is in a single acct invested 50/50 stocks vs bonds with investment choices, I believe, largely driven by algorithms. Because Vanguard doesn’t have “bricks and mortar” locations they can get away with only charging a .3% advisory fee.
Now that I have got this all set up it should pretty much run on auto-pilot and free me from anxieties associated with my own daily management and stupid emotion-driven mistakes, like bailing out at the bottom and buying in at the top.
That’s about it.
Oh, wait a minute. You probably would like to know where the markets are headed over the next year and the answer is I have no idea but I’m in for the long haul. I would point out, however, that when the market crashed in 1929 the DOW took 25 years (til 1954) before it reached its old 1929 high.
Not my concern, I will be pushing daisies.
Thank you. Who is Asoka?
I’m not riding with anyone
I don’t play the game
It’s rigged
Seems to be that a few good algorithms
can run this shit heap of a government
Why can people not see that Hillary is getting ready to enter the race!!!!!!!
They crave the drama of the last second surprise.
I think some do. Here is an invite a friend of mine received.
She donated to the bitch in the last election. I wonder why only donors got the email. She’s testing the waters is what I fear. Biden is stupid enough to select her I fear. One more reason to vote for Bernie.
Onward Together!
????? —
We’re just one day away from the premiere of the new documentary covering Hillary’s life from her early years through the 2016 election, and we want to know: Will you be watching “Hillary”?
The four-part documentary will be available to stream on Hulu beginning this Friday, March 6th. With behind-the-scenes footage from the 2016 campaign and brand-new interviews from Hillary and her friends and family, you won’t want to miss out.
Let us know that you’re planning a watch party — no matter how big or small! — and Hillary could call in to say hello and answer a few questions:
Hey for the first time Liz Warren’s husband appeared, Mr. Warren. He is an old guy with a cane, Professor of English Lit. type. He’s probably glad the whole goddam thing is over, at least now his wife will be home to cook him a good Sunday dinner for a change.
Biden/Abrams 2020
‘We’se Ridin’ with Biden’
brh
He has likely been missing out on more than dinner.
Beer?
She’s got the fire and he looks like he’s about to expire. Who knows about desire. Someone said that Warren often acts like Jerry Lewis, running about, with waving hands and flailing arms.
I wonder if she walks him or ties him up, and who knows what?
Wouldn’t she look good in a long, black skirt with a white apron and a pair of wooden shoes? Maybe a Dutch girl hat.
She strikes me as a Nazi dominatrix in the bedroom. A total Jekyll and Hyde type.
Yes, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.
Yah, you just said it but doubtful anyone else did.
“Some said” – that’s the most mealy mouth two words in the language.
Oh yikes, someone said you probably had a tiny dick and even a smaller brain.
“Someone said”
It was Joe Piscopo. You can’t touch this.
“Oh yikes, someone said you probably had a tiny dick and even a smaller brain.”
Ev,
That “someone” might have been my wife…don’t believe everything she says….
yuck you guys are gross! lol
ha
I’ll bet ol’ Liz can’t boil water.
It’s Pulsin’ For Tulsi
For the times they are a-changin’.
http://www.got-truth.com/docs/For%20the%20times%20they%20are%20a%20changin%27.pdf
Surfline video streams are now showing cargo shops sitting.
https://www.surfline.com/surf-report/1st-st-jetty-to-pier/5842041f4e65fad6a7708864
Had a couple of streams fo new York where a bunch of ships were lined up anchored.
The surf in New York is pumping right now!
https://www.surfline.com/surf-report/lincoln-blvd-overview/5d7145cd5081e30001244572
This one goes out to the corona virus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=gCaRT7vfsCQ
NY? Bit of a commute!
What anti-viral protocols are being adopted by the Food Service Executives at the local “Captain D’s”?
“What anti-viral protocols…”
Puck,
Uhh, the honor system, I believe.
I recall reading somewhere that one of those basic laws of military strategy is to never divide your forces and to never exhaust your Reserves. Hitler exhausted his reserves in the push to Moscow in November/ December 1941. Hitler was reckless. (I think that Hitler also divided his forces in the push South? ) This allowed Stalin and Zhukov to pull 400,000 troops from the Eastern Theater guarding against the Japanese who were preparing for Pearl Harbor. Who was that Bolshevik Fucker who performed the incredible logistical feat of moving 400,000 troops and 1,000 tanks from Siberia to Moscow in just a few days? Bulkolin? I have a hard time with Russian names. Stalin used to hold big boisterous banquets replete with lots of food, caviar and vodka, but Stalin would often drink out of his personal flask which contained just water. I guess that Stalin would act pissed? You always gotta keep the People Believing. Reverend Jim Jones would perform fake Faith Healings to keep ‘em Believing.
Unfortunately, Humor and telling jokes does not instill Belief and, therefore, is of dubious value. In contrast, the Russian people seem to Believe in Mass Murder, torture and War, wife beating, etc. In other words. the Russian people need a Tsar?
Doesn’t say much for the current US state of affairs, does it? Forces “leaner and more efficient” than ever before and spread out all over the globe. All dependent on questionable technologies developed by civilian contractors whose overwhelming motivation is to maximize profits at all costs and ordered up by politicians whose sole motivation is the pithy sound byte and the next election, always perilously close ahead. Can’t wait to read the historical analysis of why the US empire finally gave up the ghost, assuming its ever actually written in the aftermath. As far as belief goes, even the troops mostly view their mission as just a paycheck these days, what with the Global War of Terror they’re charged with imposing now known to be a perpetual war without end, and in a civilian landscape on the home front that’s even more bleak for those who aren’t connected.
Never should use the word Never.
Napoleon had some great successes violating that rule as did Robert E. Lee.
What they both deemed as desperate necessary measures at the time.
There was a sad story of a woman in Wuhan who quarantined herself for 40 days at home and then contracted the virus when she went out to buy food. I suspect that the vegetable seller at the food distribution point had the virus. She probably got it from exchanging money? I don’t think that the Americans know what they’re dealing with?
3% mortality rate?
Are there herbal or mega vitamin cures?
Colloidal silver I am told is a huge factor as is zinc.
https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Path-Silver-Wings-Satisfaction/dp/B0049Z034K
I am told – benr
============
You can pretty much count the value of an opinion as zero when the support for it is “I am told.”
I am told by a man I work with that he has been using it for years and he never gets sick soo….there you go I expanded on it.
Happy you old stickler you.
Depends on who did the telling and who did the remembering, does it not? A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and of course the value depends on what the chain is hauling.
William Burroughs felt that his opiate addiction kept him healthy. After he got clean, he became prone to sickness like most.
I almost never get sick and I don’t take either silver or opium. Perhaps my condition keeps me healthy? Or is it my constitution?
Burroughs never got clean. Read Barry Miles Bio. He was an addict to the day he died one day out in Lawrence Kansas.
He got clean now and then for awhile and then would fall back. Why wouldn’t he if it preserved his healthfullness?
Another version of “I heard” and “someone said”. Favorite sourcing used by SSL.
I think that the mortality rate of the Covid 19 virus is a function of many variables, such as the strain of the virus, prevalence in the environment, age of the victim, pre-existing conditions, how overburdened the hospitals are, etc.?
Americans tend to sequester old people in nursing “Homes” and “Assisted Living Facilities”. Nursing Homes will become death camps?
I heard that Trump is a bit of a hypochondriac? A hypochondriac gets to deal with the virus?
Huge germaphobe legendary in fact.
We will all be by the time the virus subsides.
Some infected people may spit on money and then pass it on?
Do you remember the one-holer toilet in the Men’s bathroom in the Guangzhou train station? I wonder why the Comm…nist planning authorities willfully designed a one-holer to accommodate thousands of travelers? Was it designed to make People suffer? Like the disgruntled food service executive who wipes a booger on the underside of the complaining customer’s breakfast ham steak?
“ Stalin and Molotov were infinitely snobbish about the superiority of Russian grandeur: after all, they lived and worked in Catherine the Great’s palaces. However, Molotov had an eye for bathrooms: he remembered the lavatories long after he had forgotten the negotiations. “There was a bathroom,” he complained, “but no shower.”
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Revillaging: Looking to Our Roots as We Redesign Towns and Cities
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/03/revillaging-looking-to-our-roots-as-we-redesign-towns-and-cities.html
“Our current ways of living are life-threatening and unsustainable. Our increasingly individualized society is contributing to epidemic levels of loneliness and isolation, depression, anxiety and other mental health crises. There is a serious need for people to reconnect with community—and also with the planet as there is perhaps an inextricable link between our anxiety and depression epidemics, and the existential threat of climate change (which has very real physical, mental and emotional impacts). Faced with this dire need for something to change, there is a growing movement of communities and individuals looking to new ways of living—and old ones.
“The potential solution to all of the above issues could be as simple as looking back in time at the structures and cultural dynamics of our villager ancestors, explains Mark Lakeman, an urban architect, permaculture pioneer and national leader in the development of sustainable communities and public spaces.
“‘For the majority of our history, or herstory, people have been living at a human scale, and it’s been multigenerational,’ says Lakeman. ‘It was always a cooperative or collaborative structure.’
“Since the ’90s, Lakeman has been at the forefront of what is often referred to as the revillaging movement. Revillaging seeks to rehash the way people live and interact in our society from the ground up, by reconstructing urban spaces and the way we relate within them. One key piece of revillaging means making sure all of the needs of a given resident can be met within a walkable distance, by redesigning the grid to operate at a ‘human scale.'”
—
For what it’s worth.
“For what it’s worth.”
About 75% of real American Ideas considering the current exchange rate.
Or even less, considering the “realpolitik” of the proposal.
“Herstory”
There’s a clue on the real agenda here, E.
I could see somebody trying to put together a town based on those principals. First he’d have to gather investors and raise a ton of cash. How do you get anything of any size built in 2020? First you need to get an ‘Environmental Impact’ study done, which takes about 10 years and costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then you need to add all kinds of rules and easements to insure that this new utopia is ‘Inclusive’, that is, not just for rich white lefties with an interest in urban planning, which would make it just another gated community. No, there needs to be a plan in place to clear out public housing projects in the nearby city and move those distinguished residents into their new digs for free. All that will take about 20 years, by which time the world will have moved on, interest in the project which was so enthusiastic at the outset will be lost, and the whole thing will be dropped, a huge embarrassment best not talked about.
That’s the way things work now.
Brh
Then you need to add all kinds of rules and easements to insure that this new utopia is ‘Inclusive’, that is, not just for rich white lefties with an interest in urban planning, which would make it just another gated community.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting these projects start from scratch – you have to build on what is already there – keeping the best parts, and either re-building or re-purposing the parts that are awful.
I don’t think it’s necessary to denigrate these efforts – our “modern” cities are both our greatest engines for economic progress, but also the sites of many a crisis. The trick is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And I agree at one level – the new urbanism can make nice spaces, but the most desirable and successful cities around the world (SF, New York, London, Paris, Stockholm, etc) have priced whole tiers of people out of the market – all the service people, retail, cleaning, etc, but also the college-educated who are not in the money careers – artists, musicians, designers, freelancers, cafe-owners, food-makers, etc – they struggle too.
Cities can become wealthy beyond imagining – but also really boring places to be in. I give you Dubai, for instance.
That’s pretty much what we had when I was a youngster. Everybody walked to work in the plant c1826 that made axes and machetes. We walked to the grocery store on Main Street, to school, to church,to the post office, to the hardware store, to the bank, to the shoe store. It was all right there; we didn’t have a car most of the time because we didn’t need a car. NHRR ran a train into town 3 days per week. Then around 1970 the plant closed, and the RR tracks were ripped up. An indoor shopping mall was built in what had been a gravel pit on the edge of town. That’s when everything changed. Even tho I was pretty young the thing that bothered me most is when they began cutiing down the apple orchards.
brh
An indoor shopping mall was built in what had been a gravel pit on the edge of town. That’s when everything changed.
I still live in an old part of Melbourne with three local shopping precincts – dating from about the 1880s and onwards, and all on their local “Main Streets”. They’re very walkable, and very pleasant, and still retain a selection of shops that meet most people’s needs (especially coffee!).
But realistically I choose to drive to all of them if I’m going shopping – but I can walk, or use bus, train, or tram (streetcar). However most of Australia is not like that – and most of it is much younger than 1880 – JHK describes these car-based suburban wilderness areas very eloquently in much of his writing.
Meanwhile all these shopping strips struggle – with turnover in owners and function – and all have to compete with the humongous shopping mall a mile or so away, with every shop there has ever been – from Gucci to McDonald’s, and acre upon acre of car-parking.
Elrond
Everything you wrote may be true but it all runs a distant second to the social impact of everyone substituting life with an addiction for a digital instrument that causes the vapors to be without.
Ever see people at a dinner table together all looking at their phones?
How about kids streaming away from the end of a school day all focused on something in their hands?
What would you estimate is the number of time coitus interruptus has taken place because of the chime from one of those devices?
Put a fork in the human race.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…all women…by…you know…The Thing!!!!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i6JJtUNK-M0&t=655s
Well, we know one thing for sure. If this POTUS thing doesn’t work out for Uncle Joe he’ll have a fortune in residuals from all his campaign trail standup comedy engagements. If his staff is smart they’ve already negotiated those. He’s going to be pure gold for the late night crowd.
LOL! That was good. Bless his heart. The more he talks he embarrasses himself more and more and makes it really awkward for people making an effort to support him. Did you see that recent clip of him sniffing that baby and making a weird satisfied face and grunt? He’s so weird and icky, why anyone would let their baby close to him is beyond me and I truly do question their competence.
Jeff Sessions slapped his hand once when he was trying to fondle his (Session’s) granddaughter. Maybe it’s part of his dementia. We shouldn’t make fun of those suffering from senile dementia. I am looking forward however to Biden challenging Trump to a fistfight on national TV debate.
That will be hilarious and it probably will happen.
The pasty white complexion of those who have been recently resurrected is not too appealing on the campaign trail. Hopefully those in charge of the Zombie will use some of the Golden Golem’s makeup. Don’t worry too much about the Zombie’s mental state, considering the population who will be voting. Joe has his base in the comfortable nowhere Zombie zone. Reality explodes with a fury in interesting times, make sure you have enough ass wipe.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/aipac-conference-coronavirus-123158
Two conference attendees confirmed to be infected. About two thirds of Congress attends this foreign lobby extravaganza to beg, bow, pander, and sell America out. Time to reread the Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”.
I heard about this. It sounds really harsh but it’s true. You can quarantine and contain to some measure economic pain and suffering and they are so good at that. But the virus, or the Red Death, is proving that it doesn’t care how much money you have. It wants to be everywhere and one day will be, like the Grim Reaper itself. At least some doctors believe it could be that type of pandemic.
Yes, Joe Biden, the esteemed senator from Delaware before being the esteemed Vice President, will most likely be the candidate. I think the DNC would campaign for Putin before Bernie Sanders. But we’re at the end of the road for identify politics and the Democrats will need every vote they can get to beat Trump. The African-American constituency pulled the rabbit out of the hat for Joe and he owes them big time for his reprieve and he knows it too. My guess for VP? Cory Booker or Stacey Abrams and the smart money will be on Stacey.
Identity politics are really just beginning. The global collapse and shrinking resources will only accelerate it. Actually its really funny to me that you say the end of identity politics is coming while mentioning Stacey Abrams. She is rabidly racist, and a major race hustling identity politician.
… mentioning Stacey Abrams. She is rabidly racist, and a major race hustling identity politician.
I don’t wish to pedantic over semantic stuff, but it isn’t possible for a black person to be “racist” – because race is all about power and privilege, and the oppressed person (historically – I don’t mean individuals) cannot be racist towards the oppressor, because they (the oppressed) are the powerless.
Now I know that conservatives and right-wing nutters in particular get themselves in a total twist when they perceive cases of “reverse racism” taking place without anyone being “punished”, but nevertheless they need to understand what “race” is about, and just suck it up.
So if a Black mugs a old White person, who had the power? Or in prison when Blacks have numerical superiority? Or in Black districts, where only Blacks get elected? Or in Black countries after Whites have been thrown out? Or when Obama was president, was he completely powerless?
Rethink it. It’s an old and tired idea. It’s wrong and it’s always been wrong. Or remain the Fool that you are.
I was talking about the use of the word “racist” – it isn’t transitive – it can only describe the oppressor. The same case can be made for women – they can’t be “sexist” – because it is a term of power too.
I’m not talking about the behaviour or position of individual African-Americans – Condoleezza Rice was a conservative BAP, and Colin Powell was top brass – and both not incidentally a lot smarter than the white guy in the white house.
Collectives are made up of individual members – forest/trees. See set theory. Thus if you are view the White Race as oppressors, you are naturally viewing every individual White as one too – unless they can prove to Commissars like you or to their Black Overlords that they are one of the few good ones. Thank you for allowing me to describe the dynamic so well.
And as you said earlier, even good ones are going to have to “suck it up”, sins of the fathers and what not. Love the one you can just from individual to collective so well – even as you deny so doing. Classic double think made possible by the engrams being very well buffered or insulated from each other.
@cargill
Anyone can be racist not just old whitey!
I see plenty of sexist women now as well as soon as they get in a position of power they stack the deck against men.
Your views are utter rubbish.
LOL ok Boomer. How long have you been outta touch with the real world? Oh! Thats right. You’ve never been in touch with the real world. Too bad its encircling you. You can play ideological olympics and perform intense virtue signaling rituals but Nature will get the last laugh. As the Prophet Muhammad said, if people really understood the nature of things in this world they would weep and mourn. Maybe you need to come out of your safe bubble, interloper. Or we can burst it for you. That would be so fun lol!
Wear your hair in a bun so you can always have a hatpin with you. Or wear a hat with the pin. You never know when Cargill or some other “Rover” will come bouncing along.
Rovers. 🙂
I didn’t mean that identity politics were over — what I meant to say was this is where the road leads. I don’t think they’re just beginning though and will only escalate from here. It’s a bad situation we’ve gotten ourselves into with politicians pandering to every self serving interest group imaginable.
But the reality is that Blacks and Latinos and others have reaped real world benefits from identity politics so I am not sure there are incentives to suddenly stop. I think it only gets more intense as the US fragments ethnically. I agree its a very bad place to be but its a self inflicted wound. Why we ever believed a country is a melting pot is something I will never be able to understand.
Racist. That she is. Still harping about voter suppression, which is a complete falsehood. Due to minorities, immigrants, and maybe some others migrating to the South, our next gubernatorial election will probably result in a leftist in office. Sad state of affairs in the 13th colony.
Yes, absolutely.
Editorial in WSJ today gives total credit for Bidens resurrection to Jim Clyburne, Representative from SCarolina. They called him the new saviour of the Democratic Party.
Biden/Abrams 2020
“We’se Ridin’ with Biden”
Rest assured Stacy will be more than ‘ridin’, she’ll be driving the bus.
Brh
She will sit on him and he will expire. All our currency must be faced by Angry Black Women. Make them solar holograms that bitch at you as soon as you take them out of your wallet.
Omigod, what an image! Is the Tubman still on deck to replace the Jackson? With his daughter & son-in-law whispering in his ear how much ‘inward’ support it will attract at the ballot box, expect it to happen before the election if at all. Us ‘outwards’ who gave him our vote last time might just forget to vote. It’s equivalent to tearing down our heroes statues. True, just a symbol but it stands in for more substantive issues that seem to have been forgotten by our president. He even says now that MAGA stands for ‘Microsoft, Amazon, Google, & Apple.
Don’t know. We were all psyched to start making such bills into objects of art or billboards for our message. As Sheik what’s his name said, My men are waiting for you at the Litani River. The Litani was a Rubicon and the Israelis wisely decided not to cross it. If they choose to cross this Rubicon, we will make it our Delaware.
I’ve left 90+ percent of the readers behind, but I know you are with me still. Truly you are a Hanuman, a Lion among Monkeys.
Did you say cross the Delaware? That means a night visit. “Mama, put away the silver!” The cheese popes would really like to get their hands on that Litani, as if they’d stop there.
“I think the DNC would campaign for Putin before Bernie Sanders”
Almost killed me with that one because when I read this it made think of the DNC running Putin and then Trump winning. The DNC would then demand an investigation of Putin Trump collusion to trick the DNC into running Putin so he could throw the election to Trump.
Far fetched? Yes. But not much crazier than what we’ve seen;)
900 people waiting to get into LA Costco.
‘3 paper towel containers per card, not per person’ the young woman shouted outside…..and I saw them grabbing their 3 [45 rolls total, 3 x 15 or so].
I may return this coming week and see how many wait to get in.
Imagine when the supply chain gets disrupted. OMFG.
Have you tried to go shopping at like 2 in the morning? That may be your safest option right now. And make sure to wear a mask, glasses at least or some kind of eye protection, and gloves. Try to get what you need soon. Stores around here are already starting to limit the number of certain items you can buy like paper towels, hand sanitizer, and canned food.
costco is not 24 7
no stores are, that I know of.
some WALMARTS are.
Yep you’ll have to go to Walmart. And believe it or not they are beginning to limit how much you can buy of certain things.
So this is total bullshit! I have a mask, you want a mask, I can’t sell you a mask, I can’t even send you one for .99 cents. even though you want one. Ebay shut down the sale of masks. I thought we had a free market??? Below my email from ebay at 16:43 3/07?20 where I have been selling for 22 years Can you say LOCK-DOWN! PANIC NOW!
eBay is currently not allowing listings for certain masks and sanitizing products due to concerns that inflated prices for these products may violate applicable laws or regulations. Do not relist this item. You are also required to immediately review and update all your other listings for sale that do not comply with these rules..If you do not follow this policy in the future, this may result in the removal of your listings and the suspension of your account.
If you have any concerns or questions, click “Help & Contact” at the top of most eBay pages.
Man, I just did a search after my post. This morning there were thousands of auctions listed. Now, this last minute, 32, and they will be bumped. I’m sorry if I have a ton of masks and you want one. NO-CAN-DO !!
Yeah, sorry – no free market during a Crisis. People want to market in human misery. We just can’t have it.
EMTs will be exposed to this virus more than your average citizen, Rip.
You have to answer calls and who knows who’s infected or not. Its gonna be a dicey situation for them.
Posted on March 7, 2020I Used to Support Bernie Sanders — Now I’m a Race Realist
Ann Eilbeck, American Renaissance, March 7, 2020
I am one of the few who has managed to slip away from the mainstream view of race. More than anything else, what led me to go “right” when everyone around me went “left” was my experience in liberalism’s epicenter: the university system. Superficially, college is where you go to get a formal education — and where you learn how to live with complete strangers for the first time. But for me, it was more than that. It was where I became disabused of the utopian ideas I had always believed.
When I arrived on campus, I discovered that all three of my roommates were Chinese exchange students who barely spoke English. They hung together and I felt like an outsider in my own dorm room. They put calendars on our communal fridge written in Mandarin and stared at me whenever I walked into the common area, pausing their conversation just because of the presence of a white girl. I felt like a horrible person for being upset about it. I had just campaigned for Bernie Sanders the summer before enrolling. I was liberal. I grew up in a conservative area and had imagined that college would be a wonderful place, complete with plenty of likeminded liberals and that famous strength: diversity. I didn’t want my parents to fight my battles, so I decided to ask the school myself about getting assigned a new room. They said I was being discriminatory and took no action. I felt ashamed — like a good white liberal should. My parents wanted to push the matter, but I didn’t let them. Instead I lied and said the situation had gotten better.
The rest of my college experience was filled with similar frustrations: group projects where I couldn’t effectively communicate with my partners, LGBTQ people being nasty if I asked what a “fury” was, students getting angry with me because I accidentally said “Columbus Day.” It was on campus that, for the first time ever, I was physically harassed. A black man who felt that I gave him a rude, or “bratty” look, pushed me into a street — apparently I wasn’t allowed to share a sidewalk with him. Two Asian men saw what happened but just looked away. The person who called the cops was a white guy who, thankfully, saw it happen from where he was seated in a nearby café. That was the first, but not the last, time “diversity” placed me in physical danger.
The price of multiculturalism kept rearing its head in other ways, too. If I didn’t smile at non-whites, they immediately didn’t like me. I worked in retail and was routinely berated by Hispanic women telling me to learn Spanish. To boot, they would often trash the fitting rooms and make comments about me being “too pale” or “not curvy.” Things like that kept happening. Still, I tried hard to excuse it all, always telling myself, “It’s just the individual.” I wanted to be above it all, but for the first time in my life, I couldn’t ignore race like I had always done before. I felt constantly intimidated, and there was a clear pattern as to why.
I was a typical young woman: I went to college like we’re all told to do, talked to people politely, and spent my free time shopping for cute clothes and old books. But after four years in higher education, I came to realize how important race truly is. The experiences I had didn’t make me hate any race — I really don’t think I’m a “racist.” They were just the start of my journey into understanding how much I love my people and how I feel robbed of the America we’re supposed to have, the America that my ancestors fought for in the Revolutionary War. I don’t think I will ever understand why I’m hateful for wanting my country to remain the same, but the people eagerly awaiting the end of America’s white majority are not.
JS: Good girl, Ann. Welcome Home. Remember, “Racist” is their word and it means whatever they want or need it to mean in a given situation. We’re a long way from the Webster or Oxford dictionary on this one.
When I arrived on campus, I discovered that all three of my roommates were Chinese exchange students who barely spoke English. They hung together and I felt like an outsider in my own dorm room.
JHK has talked in detail about the money racket that higher education has become. It is widespread here in Australia too – with most of the major universities “selling” university places to international students.
I returned to my old faculty buildings at the University of Sydney last year. In 1970-74 it was mostly white – but diverse in its internal dynamics: privileged kids from some of the city’s richest, middle-class sons and daughters from the professional classes, and a big bunch of us working-class kids who got there with brains and scholarships.
It was a wonderful mix – and the learning environment was excellent. Now it appeared to be about 95% Chinese – and the place felt like a dull machine, or a busy terminal at a Shanghai airport.
I wonder where all the working-class and middle-class “Australians” are, who are not getting those university places? It’s a funny world.
Funny world indeed where we let you people like you dictate policies that result in abominations like this.
Thank you for admitting you are wrong.
That video you linked to, upstream, from Sweden … pretty much says it all.
Remember last year there was a similar video from Chicago, I say similar but it was nearly identical except nobody was urinated on. What made it particularly reprensible was the white kid was handicapped … on the autism spectrum, and was looking for people to be friends with.
A few years back I mentioned an event that happened in Hartford in the 90s, might be the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. By then most white families had fled the Blue Hills area, but some couldn’t or wouldn’t get out. Some had lived in the area their entire lives so for them it was home. One elderly French Canadian couple had their handicapped grandson living with him. The nature of his handicap again, was autism. He was 12. He went to a special school and was supposed to be picked up and dropped off at his house. One day a new driver dropped him off on the wrong street, which is when a group of about a dozen young ‘community members’ ran him down and literally beat him to death. Beat him beyond recognition. Here’s the kicker: the local paper, community leaders etc tried to pass it off as simply a gangland incident and you had to read deep to get to the fact that a handicapped white 12 yo boy was murdered by a gang of blacks for no other reason than that he was white and on the wrong street. Arrests were made but the story quickly disappeared and the whole thing was swept under the rug.
I was trying to remember the kids name, it escapes me. I’m sure the grandparents are gone now too. There’s not even a sign anywhere that it ever happened.
Sometimes when I’m working down here I’ll see an occassional little one with a blond head of hair — its rare — and I’m afraid for the kid.
brh
brh
Blame Baba Ram Das and his ilk…his dad was president of the New England railroad.
[you ask, whats that have to do with it?–dig a little deeper].
What you posted– One day a new driver dropped him off on the wrong street, —INDEED…What was the race of the inept driver?
maybe it was not an accident but pre planned..huh.
Anglin’s new cyber obsession, Neeko. What great taste. What a great Man. What a great Girl. The Universe was created so she could frolic herein. Is she White. Kind of! Will she ever grow up? Not if we can help it. Not sure what kind of woman she would become, an open question.
It might work if she had a child. One woman I was enamoured of changed into a Madonna once she gave birth. She was so different I didn’t even recognize her. But she was still beautiful, but in a completely different way.
https://www.instagram.com/neekolul/
Well, The BBC reports that Italy will quarantine up to 16…million people. Restaurants will remain open, but customers must maintain a 1 meter distance from one another. Football cancelled. Skiing Cancelled. Italian Hockey emporiums closed. No swimming pools to remain open. Pope’s gonna send his blessings via Video.
Oh, yeah…people must remain in their homes …any person on the street with a trivial reason…90 Days, Motherfucker! (this sounds much better in Italian, I suppose….)
And…the link;
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51787238
“90 giorni, figlio di puttana!”
For a complete, meaningful translation, gesticulations must be included….
Skiing, SKIING! No Dolomites for you, “You’re a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”!! Sumbitch!!
The BBC reports that Italy will quarantine up to 16…million people.
A friend of ours lives in Bergamo Lombardy – has all her life. She teaches young children and loves skiing. She says all the young people are going stir-crazy in their isolation … including her own teenage daughters, who love their skiing, their friends, and indeed school.
So the psychological impact seems real – based on these reports from the front line as it were. She says the shops are still okay, and there is no panic-buying – but the economy overall is taking a dreadful hit, and the Italian tourist season starts in a month – or would normally.
Neeko does Okie Boomie. For Cargill. May it bring his tired, sick Leftist heart some joy.
https://twitter.com/neekolul?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1234964801844998144&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdailystormer.su%2Fboomer-reacts-to-neekolul-with-standard-levels-of-entitlement%2F
That is very weird stuff indeed … thank goodness I have avoided facebook, twitter, instagram, and all similar childish nonsense. Petri dishes for young minds, it seems.
No doubt your favorite poet is Whitman. He too is always talking of “comrades” and such.
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the
earth,
And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the
learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it
may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d
universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed
before a million universes.
COME, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over
the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s
necks;
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme! 10
For you! for you, I am trilling these songs,
In the love of comrades,
In the high-towering love of comrades.
Thank you Dog. He is among my favorites as well. I was just giving Cargillian a dig for not digging Neeko.
And keep turning those leaves, preferably while high on grass. You’ll find the ones where he talks about the swarthies being behind us or lower on the tree.
Janos, do you think Neeko is old enough for you to avoid scrutiny for having pedophilia impulses? How did such a website become a hangout for you.
Ridiculous. Better find that clarity of mind you buried somewhere. Her magnificent breasts and hips say that she is old enough. She will never be more attractive than she is right now. And yeah, she’s probably going to squander it doing stunts like this. I don’t begrudge her the power and its delight of enjoying her gifts, so do we. But she needs to pass them on as Shakespeare says in the Sonnets.
Even if she’s 14 eh? Your defense lawyer better not use that as his argument to keep you out of trouble.
Now even I am frightened.
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/?fbclid=IwAR39pkEjxVIXAfCqV1GVVY5IJkdToXAC-TsmRMxOOFy5XEAv4HEl8HulFpU
Is there such a thing as reverse engineering here? In other words, if whoever developed it released their notes on how they did it, could that help with the undoing of it, as in a vaccine?
“may effectively become a death sentence for our species” –edpell
Do not be afraid of dying, edpell. It’s just Gaia engaged in self-defense, a reaction to our careless habits of environmental degradation. Karma.
So, Gov. Cuomo declares a state of emergency in NY. What the fuck does that mean? I’m about 45 miles from the NY border. Should I get in my spidy-hole with the AR and MRE’s? Or should I just keep-on-keepin’ on?
PANIC NOW !! CLUSTERFUCKERS!! and if needed I have masks at Leaveittothebeavereater.com only $49.95 per mask for a mask that was 50 cents last week
Will a Halloween mask work?
Only in combination with carnival beads.
I have beads also, please only pull one at a time. Thank you.
Those aren’t Okinawa Love Beads are they?
Nobody worried about things like Coronavirus in my day. Things were simpler then. There wasn’t all this concern about hygiene
There is value in eating dirt/ dirt exposure.
I guess life in a germ free bubble is great? But sooner or later the bubble goes away.
“I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done this instead of running for President.” –Donald Trump, March 6, 2020
We have nothing to fear, even though things are getting interesting. We have a president who has told us he knows more than the generals, more than the experts, more than the intellectuals, scientists, and doctors.
We have a stable genius in the White House. There is no reason to fear for our future. Trump has assured us: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
So sleep well, clusterfuckers. Magical thinking is strongly supported by this president and you know you want to believe him. He told us: “I alone can fix it.” The virus is on the run and we have it on presidential authority the virus will disappear, like a miracle.
We have a stable genius in the White House. There is no reason to fear for our future.
I’m not sure wpa whether our right wingnuts are fully on top of irony and sarcasm … I guess we’ll see.
I’ll check back after John, Janos, and BackRow get back to us. The ultra right-wing seems pretty humour free to me … they’re angry, god-fearing, and righteous … always a very terrible combination!
Give me leftie hippies any day – at least we invite you in to share a bong.
🙂
The presidential quotes are real. I am just repeating what POTUS said. Trump said he is a stable genius. Trump said he alone could fix it. Trump said he knows more than the doctors. Trump said the virus will disappear “like a miracle.”
I don’t believe any of his claims. I can critically examine his claims and compare them with empirical evidence. I have not been brainwashed into Trump’s cult of personality.
We have concrete evidence of 3,400 deaths from the first 100,000 cases of infection of coronavirus. That is a 3.4% mortality rate. Compare that to a 0.1% (zero point one percent) mortality rate for influenza. Coronavirus is 34 times more deadly than the common flu. So when Trump says Coronavirus is no worse than influenza, I call BULLSHIT on Trump’s claim. Not my opinion. It is a FACT from the last two months deaths compared to the number of infections.
We still don’t have diagnostic kits in my part of rural America, so the virus has been spreading undetected for the last six weeks. And Pence lied about having a million kits ready by yesterday. He was only off by 925,000 diagnostic kits… and we didn’t get any.
Things are indeed getting interesting.
According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins, there have been more than 101,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. More than 57,000 people have recovered, and at least 3,400 people have died.
3400 divided by 101000 equals 3.366% mortality rate.
Not being adversarial but keep in mind, the lack of testing means cases could far exceed 101,000 so the numerator in your calculation could be much much larger whereas the denominator is not going to enlarge correspondingly so the actual mortality rate would consequently be lower.
Evelyn
Right on! The world does not have enough resources to handle the situation now. By the time we do, it may burn itself out.
Not being adversarial but keep in mind, the lack of testing means cases could far exceed 101,000 so the numerator in your calculation could be much much larger whereas the denominator is not going to enlarge correspondingly so the actual mortality rate would consequently be lower.
Your numerator is 3400, and the denominator is the 101,000, and the denominator could increase a lot if more testing were done.
Cargill
I believe you are incorrect. Do you not recall that to solve the problem of combining fractions one needs to solve for the lowest common denominator?
e.g.
1/8 + 5/16 = ?
2/16 + 5/16 = 7/16
Don’t be such a stiff neck. Besides your correction being evidence of your forgotten school lessons you avoided admitting to the essence of the point I made.
Cargill,
Yowza!!! If ever there was a post I wish I could delete.
My apologies. Your correction was correct. So ignore everthing but the stiff neck part on down.
We still don’t have diagnostic kits in my part of rural America, so the virus has been spreading undetected for the last six weeks. And Pence lied about having a million kits ready by yesterday. He was only off by 925,000 diagnostic kits… and we didn’t get any.
It’s a devilish plot by Trump & Pence … to keep the numbers way down, we just won’t do any tests! Brilliant … that’s why they’re in the white house!
Hey Cargill
How are things in Australia, Corona wise? Any better without Trump?
Question for the Trump haters.
How do you address a problem with no real solution in front of the public?
Containment did not work in China, the most authoritarian nation on earth. Containment procedures have worked somewhat to slow the growth but we are still on the uphill side. Italy has just put in very severe travel and crowd restrictions to notch up to the next level of attempted control.
Just watched Chuck Todd and Fauci on Meet the Press. Fauci is being honest and for once Todd did not act like an idiot. They presented a good picture of what the situation is.
Containment will slow growth but not stop it. We better hope that the virus “burns itself out”, their words, this year. He said vaccines may be ready by next year, but will probably only be used to counter a second or continuing emergence.
Individual isolation is the only effective control, to protect yourself. Fauci and other reports this morning have stated that people over 60 need to be very cautious of public exposure, wash their hands, etc. over seventy, even more so.
Trump haters, you are showing your stupidification by politicizing this situation. Fauci, the only guy I have heard tell the truth about this outbreak, works for Trump.
Again, I ask, if you were in Trumps shoes right now, how would you handle this situation. Remember Star Trek’s Kubiachi Mark scenario? The No Win scenario.
The plague continues to spread, and it will not stop until conditions no longer favor its spread. Individual action only will start the “burn out” process. Government action is worthless. Testing will just ID the extent and will not help to stop anything.
Listen and heed the expert’s words. Your Trump hating is useless!
How do you address a problem with no real solution in front of the public?
For a start, it’s better not to elect a corrupt incompetence imbecile to a position of authority. What were you thinking?
Being anti-Trump and wishing him gone is the only rational position for grown-ups. And you can use the term “Trump haters” if it makes you feel better – but it’s kinda childish.
His pronouncements about coronavirus have been ridiculously self-aggrandisement, in most cases totally inaccurate, in some cases dangerously optimistic, and in all cases, geared towards propping up the stock market and his re-election.
Need I say more?
Just watched Chuck Todd and Fauci on Meet the Press. Fauci is being honest and for once Todd did not act like an idiot. They presented a good picture of what the situation is.
Reality is finally catching up with Trump & Pence … the virus spreads faster than their BS can possibly cover it. The change of tone – via Dr Fauci – is described here:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/08/health-officials-coronavirus-elderly-sick-risk-123889
Pretty sobering.
Cargill
Your diatribes are actually humorous to me. No president, no human being is as bad as you and the rest of your Trump hater crowd make them out to be. With my viewpoint on life,I could have been an Obama hater during his time. I wasn’t. You show yourself to be a lesser person with your obvious extreme bias against one person. So I laugh.
And I have a pretty good chuckle myself – at all the Trump Cultists sipping the Kool Aid, and those who jump at every shadow …. little nervous nellies scared of Big Bad Socialism, and the Bigger, Badder Deep State! It’s hugely entertaining.
JohnAZ
You still on the ‘hater’ binge, are you?
How would I suggest Himself should handle it?
Two options –
First: let the experts give us the facts and support those experts, rather than blathering on about ‘how well I understand this stuff’ and ‘beautiful testing kits’ and giving DISINFORMATION over the goggle-box for the ears of his base, who only believe what HE says, about how well he’s handling it. Poppycock.
Second: again, let the experts give us the facts and then just SHUT THE HELL UP.
If anyone is politicizing the situation, it’s Himself – blaming a shortage of testing protocol (not sure WHAT he was actually on about, to tell the truth, because he rarely finishes a thought) on Obama! WTF???? Who has gutted the funding of the CDC over the last 3 years? Not Obama.
Janos on acid would be interesting.
Janos never struck me as particularly angry, and he is the opposite of religious. Sometimes he is pretty funny — it looks like its 3 strikes and you’re out, Cargill, (that’s a baseball reference for you furriners)
Brh
it looks like its 3 strikes and you’re out, Cargill, (that’s a baseball reference for you furriners)
I actually played baseball, and softball too (both slowpitch and fastpitch). I can explain ya the infield fly rule if you want.
The homeless people in San Francisco probably have weakened immune systems and live in confined camps and homeless shelters, so they will be wiped out by the Covid 19 virus. The healthcare workers in US hospitals will quickly run out of protective gear so they will become transmitters of the virus. Nursing homes will become death camps. Wall Street deliberately downplayed the virus threat to keep the stock market juiced. The insurance companies won’t want to pay for it.
Yep. It is all still about money to them. It’s a heartless and callous system and its disgusting.
Listen here you mask hoardin’ sumbitchs. Give ’em up now! Weze comin’ to gitch ya”!
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-france/france-reports-fourth-coronavirus-death-requisitions-masks-idUKKBN20Q2L3
Why do you suppose that Stalin didn’t kill the middle aged, married Russian, Jewish bloke who popped his daughter’s (Svetlana’s) cherry?
Stalin killed everyone else….
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Stalin was from Georgia. I don’t know what this means? I think that for a few hundred years Georgia was a satrap of the Persian empire?
Well forget about trains.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/amtrak-cancels-acela-train-service-between-nyc-washington-due-to-coronavirus-2020-03-07?link=TD_mansionglobal_new_mansion_global.11147f181987fd93
Get a Horse!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkLE5X03zx8
Don’t know how to explain it.
http://www.got-truth.com/docs/Dont%20know%20how%20to%20explain%20it.pdf
I’m shocked by the naked Neekophobia on display here. Where is Buck? I miss his wisdom and abject stupidity. He would side with Evie. His suggested alternative? Susan Sarandon.
Thus does the dried up corpse of Liberalism spasm and jerk as it dies a slow death – the death of the undead.
Maru, not Mark, John. Kobayashi Maru
Yeah, spell check!
Gentle reader (With particular attention to our guests from Great Britain), The BBC. this Am, reports that a major supermarket chain, Tesco, has begun limiting “essential” items to a 5 per limit. The limit includes pasta and some canned vegetables. This may be but a harbinger to subsequent events in the US.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51790375
Oh, I almost forgot…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy2vBE6AdkU
EL, What ever happened to the free market? I have lots of food in my storeroom. My SIL laughs when she is here and goes down there. She says it is like going to the market. I figure these people in a panic are way behind the curve. Why not be set up with goods. I buy on sale and stock up. Seems like common sense to me. But what do I know. Keep it on the downlow!
Thanks for the Stovepipe link. Cool.
I pity Green Alba
No need to, Patriot. Alba lives in Alba, not England, and doesn’t shop in Tesco.
Alba had a delivery brought to her door from Sainsbury’s yesterday (no plastic bags, natch…), complete with loo roll she thought might not be there after reading panic notices on here. But it didn’t matter anyway, because Alba can walk five minutes from her home in at least three directions and buy loo roll or anything else from the local shops.
Because Alba lives among sane people.
She doesn’t pity you, though – you’re too much of a berk.
GA
You have no car, how do you get around?
Do you just stay holed up in your ‘flat’ 24/7?
Flat haha. I mean apartment.
You need to get out more.
Brh
Yesterday, since I was meeting my daughter for a birthday treat (for me), by bus.
If I’m walking to the local shops (between a minute and ten minutes away depending on the direction), or even undertaking the 25 minutes needed to get me to the town centre, then clearly I’ll be using those weird things on the end of my legs that Americans seem to have forgotten how to use. Did my phrase ‘Alba can walk five minutes in any direction…the local shops’ just not, you know, compute?
I thought you had more sense than to ask such an utterly dumb question.
I’m also a member of a city car club, with a car at the end of my road, should I wish to use it, which is very rarely.
And I’m 15 minutes’ walk from a railway station.
It’s difficult to stay holed up in your flat 24 hours a day when you have a dog, even if you’d want to. BTW, there’s a modest-sized Tesco within 10 minutes’ walk from me, as it happens, but I haven’t seen any hordes queuing up for anything. That tends to be the sort of mentality you acquire when you live in the kind of bubble car ownership brings with it.
Happy birthday dear,
I hope you don’t take what I say to you seriously.
Having said that, my recommendation is to go out and buy yourself Dodge Ram Power Wagon, 5.7 liter engine, 410 bhp, 17 inch wheels, lifted, 4 wheel drive, with a built in winch. Think of how you’ll freak everybody out hauling ass thru the bogs, into the highlands, around castles, scattering the MacDonald clan as they tend their sheep, sucking up gas at 7 miles per gallon, burning rubber on Edinburghs narrow cobblestone streets … your neighbors stand aghast as you blow by them as you give them the finger, shouting ” What the hell are you looking at? You think you knew Green Alba? Think again, Suckers!”
Brh
Thank you, brh.
And yeah, that ‘car’ might have problems finding a parking space outside my house!
When we go away with the dog my husband rents a Toyota Hillux (covered) from a local rental place, because it’s cheaper than renting a normal car for some reason – it’s already embarrassingly big. We’re off to the English Lake District in a fortnight, if the The Bug hasn’t hit us in the meantime. March isn’t the best time to appreciate Wordsworth country but annual leave needs to be used, so what can you do? Glad we’re not booked for a holiday in Tuscany.
GA “Loo roll”, haha! Good one. A “Berk”, is that on par with a “Fukin’ numpty?” Over here I prefer “Bumwad”. I just picked up 80 tubes. Not as any emergency supply but that is just the way I buy it. I use one square at a time, yea right, the better half uses an arms length per swipe!
Well I’d certainly have difficulty carrying 80 loo rolls home (or indeed accommodating it when it got there), StE, and I didn’t experiment to see how many Sainsbury’s would drop off. I only ordered a modest three packs of nine (there’s half that much already in the house), plus a dozen kitchen rolls, since the anxiety bug hasn’t got me shitting myself yet, despite my almost certainty of catching the thing when Him Indoors gets back to work. 🙂
you’re too much of a berk. – GA
============
One has to be a berk to wear a black burka when it’s hot out.
Nice new piece of Brit slang there, GA. Thanks.
Nice new piece of Brit slang there, GA. Thanks.
Cockney rhyming slang is great – we use it a great deal in Australia – being a classy people.
Berk = Berkshire Hunt.
Cargill – Lost to most hereabouts, I’m guessing.
Cargill
I think ‘merchant banker’ is currently the most frequently used Cockney slang among those not born within the sound of Bow Bells.
Cockney slang was originally used as a means of communicating without the ‘peelers’ eavesdropping, which might explain why it migrated to Australia in particular. 🙂
Went to the supermarket yesterday. Empty shelves on toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. Already happening.
Got an Amazon delivery the other day. Made in China. Wiped it down.
Everything we touch becomes more of a threat the wider the spread. Folks are saying now that signs of the outbreak were around back in October, no one recognized it.
Everybody should watch the movie, Contagion. The mechanisms being used are all shown very well in the flick. Also, the futility of the containment scenario, just another governmental fiasco. Trump downplayed the startup of this breakout, a major error. He obviously had not watched Contagion. The man is a germaphobe with a distorted picture of the world of “bugs” as a consequence. Today though, his germaphobe techniques are the rules of the road. His downplaying reflected what China did, what all governments do. Why?
To protect from the potential panic by the public. The government’s downplaying is always a mistake which I had hoped Trump would have put the real story out. He and his did not and now are paying the PR price for it.
Bottom line though, like the movie, it would not have made any difference.
I am looking forward to the Democratic review of what they would have done different. Good fodder for SNL.
Funny sidelight on the movie. Jude Law played a rogue journalist that bedeviled the CDC calling them liars and broadcasting that a cure called forthysia existed and the CDC was hiding it so the pharma companies could make money.
Sound familiar?
Funny until I heard that Jim Bakker, remember him, was hawking the same line with silver solution and marketing it.
In the flick, the virus destroyed the brain in a few days and was very contagious. It’s mortality rate was 25 -30%.
Co19 is not as virulent as the movie’s virus. What about next year with a virus that attacks nerve tissue instead of lung tissue? Like chicken pox and polio!
“Went to the supermarket yesterday. Empty shelves on toilet paper and disinfectant wipes. Already happening.”
I went to the chemist across the road yesterday to pick up a prescription and there was hand sanitiser and surgical wash on the counter. I didn’t buy any – soap and hot water will do fine, as it generally does.
Trump downplayed the startup of this breakout, a major error. – JohnAZ
============
I agree.
In fact, if I may focus on the crass money angle to this story, as the virus relates to the stock market decline, I believe Trump made a big error in trying to hold the market aloft (the DOW was at its all-time high as recently as Feb 12) by playing down the likely severity of the virus outbreak. He should have played UP the Black Swan nature of the event and thereby shed himself of any personal blame for stock market losses. In my view, even if there had been no C-Virus, the market was unlikely to make it all the way through 2020 to election day without a significant correction (-10%) or bear market (-20%). So this pandemic (putting aside the death and illness aspect) was a Godsend to Trump, politically speaking.
Excellent points. Let’s see if he’s smart enough to latch onto that. Of course that cuts both ways, though. The market correction can and also will be blamed on his reaction to the outbreak, so not sure which contention would win out there. The silver lining will be if this thing catches on in DC and wipes out a large part of the government bureaucracy. Could we possibly be so lucky?
Update : Joe Biden’s campaign slogan
Previously, “We’se Ridin’ with Biden’
New, “We’ze Ridin’ with Biden, Stacy Abrams is Drivin’ ”
That ought to hook in Deplorables and Bitter Clingers in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, a sure fire vote getter
Biden/Abrams 2020
‘We’ze Ridin with Biden,
Stacy Abrams is Drivin’ “
BRH
In the lexicon of the street;
We’s ridin’ with Biden,
Stacy Abrams be drivin
Word! We lookin fly,
Hope the old cracker don’t die!
I can always count on you and TS Spur to come thru.
That was good E.
I notice folks on the blog downplaying this virus. Not a good idea! Isolation will become mandatory in the future. Watch the movie!
Our minister in church put out his first warning this AM about shaking hands touting elbow bumps.
Cargill
Watching a report on people in Australia fighting in a supermarket over buying toilet paper. Glad to see your Trumpless society is doing so well.
Our minister in church put out his first warning this AM about shaking hands touting elbow bumps. – JohnAZ
=============
How’s this for utter stupidity: Last night my wife and I had dinner with a couple at their house. Upon arrival I made fanfare of bumping elbows with our hosts rather than shaking hands or giving hugs. Before dinner, as an appetite enhancer, we loaded up a pot pipe and blithely all sucked smoke into our lungs from the same pipe. And then we coughed like crazy, saying through our cough spasms and squinting eyes, “Good Shit!”
Watching a report on people in Australia fighting in a supermarket over buying toilet paper. Glad to see your Trumpless society is doing so well.
Yes – I was very proud of my fellow country-persons. But at least our prime minister didn’t come out and say “They are good people – there are always loose cannons on both sides”.
I’m not downplaying it, JohnAZ. I’m expecting to get it, since I live with a doctor. And I have a dog, so I can’t hole myself up anywhere. Pavement has to be walked.
And since I had a birthday just yesterday I’m even further into the death zone than I was last week. 🙂
The info coming out of the CDC says that the mortality rate starts to increase at age sixty and really kicks up at seventy. Immune system reliability being the main issue. Any compromised issues, lungs, heart, kidneys, liver just adds on.
The main body of the public gets a cold to a bad case of the flu.
A change this AM though with Fauci. He is saying 60 year olds and older should not go on long plane rides and stay away from cruise ships. This could put a stake in the heart of the tourist trade for a while.
Scott, senator from Florida, was commenting on the first cases in Florida. He looked scared talking about what the tourist trade getting hit was going to do to Florida,
Like you, GA, I am well into the death zone.
I certainly wouldn’t go on a plane, JohnAZ, and I have to say those giant cruise ships strike me as being like the seventh circle of hell at the best of times.
My husband and I are both on the wrong side of 65, so yeah… He’s got diabetes too, so immune system issues to be added on. And the small detail of seeing patients. What he gets I’ll get.
There are 18 confirmed cases in Scotland, with three of them in Lothian (Edinburgh is in Midlothian) so it’s just a matter of time.
Yes the tourist industry everywhere will take a kicking. The UK’s main ‘local’ airline (FlyBe) has just collapsed. It was already struggling but Covid19 finished it off. I doubt it will be the last.
Scott, senator from Florida, was commenting on the first cases in Florida. He looked scared talking about what the tourist trade getting hit was going to do to Florida,
Two of the largest cruise ports in the world are in Florida – Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Cruise bookings are cratering, and people are seeking deferment and credits for trips in the future. The major cruise companies are very varied in their cancellation / deferment policies. So are insurance companies.
But this could be an existential threat to cruise lines – they need huge cashflow to operate, with massive fixed costs.
Alba,
Birthday congratulations! I wish you nothing but health and happiness…may your lentils be everlasting!
Thank you, Elysianfield – that’s kind of you. 🙂
I haven’t thrown out the Best By 2010 ones – they look fine to me, but I don’t have a microscope. Some unknowns are better left unknown.
Happy Birthday Mrs. GreenAlba!
🙂
Thank you, PeteA. I’m entusiastically hoping for some more of them, not that it’s ever a big thing. 🙂
I seem to have acquired an Irish accent in one word there!
Phoenix has its fifth virus case confirmed by state folks.
Just like everywhere, this blog needs to become constructive with its discussions on the issues, especially the virus.
I wonder who the blame folks are going to hit after a while on the virus. Initial tries are of course aimed at Trump, like everything else. When that runs out, I guess Mother Nature will be next.
Maybe we need to dust off the mirror and take a good look!
Or maybe you should blame the Chinese and global free trade and open borders for the spread of the virus.
People are bunnyhopping around the planet for their own amusement without any help from global free trade.
And it’s hardly new, is it? The plague got to Europe along the Silk Road – before 20th century globalisation was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye.
Hah! You proved my points without even realizing it. As if globalism was a 20th or 21st century thing. Globalism was one of the first things humans tried. Or again, I have to ask, did you already forget those Sunday School lessons you taught? You’re exactly right. The Black Death originated from densely populated, bat eating, rat infested China and spread along the GLOBAL trade route, the Silk Road to the rest of the known world. So since we agree that Globalism sucks let’s do something about the bunnyhopping. I don’t like that either.
People got slap-happy with the advent of penicillin and antibiotics and vaccination. My barber told me that when he was a young feller plying his barber trade that he had to be regularly tested for TB because of his close contact with the public. But no more.
Now that polio doesn’t regularly do its thing every swimming season because of widespread vaccination, hipsters figure they can do their anti-vax superiority dance and look down on us country folk. Well, call me delusional but I remember kids hobbled by polio, rotting in iron-lung machines and wheel-chairs, stiff-legged from steel braces. And when the polio vaccine came out, people didn’t walk, they ran to the clinic to get their shots.
The point is we’ve gotten careless. The SARS outbreak should have been the alarm-bell, and then the ebola outbreak, but nope.
We knew full well that the Chinese dismiss this newfangled germ-theory of disease as demonstrated by their daily disregard for any notion of elementary sanitation in their meat markets, and their lack of an inspection regime. How many disease outbreaks have they had among their pig and poultry populations? Why do these things typically start in China? It ain’t rocket science and it ain’t supernatural.
Experts. Fuckin’ experts. These outbreaks get played down by the expert class because lord knows we have to guard against – cough – panic. No, we can’t have panic. But let’s be real, what this really means is that we can’t have corporate bottom lines suffering. But corporate bottom lines get whacked anyway so here’s a different approach. Next time this happens and as sure as we sit here it will, jump on the damned thing with both feet. And it will probably come from China if history is any guide and it usually is.
Now, I know this is sigh-inducing for the cognitive elite, but you hit the nail on the head, this is the point of international borders, if it isn’t too simple a concept for their greatly sophisticated minds to ponder, because it really is a simple thing.
Borders may not entirely stop the spread of these contagions but they may limit their spread. Can you stop international airline travel? Of course you can. Can you shut down international ports of entry?Absolutely. Can you stop people from just walking across hill and dale? No question. If you have the personnel to go fucking about accomplishing absolutely nothing in piss-holes like Afghanistan, they can surely be redeployed to perform that most essential function for which armed organizations exist: protecting national boundaries.
Bottom lines may suffer, goods may go into short supply, but then again, if there was ever an argument in favor of domestic production over these present-day arrangements, this is it.
You know I agree with you about the border and globalism. However, Chinese behaviors do seem to initiate these virus mutations, but no one seems to know why. The spread, thanks to our continuously moving around, is unavoidable and because we know so little about viruses, we are unable to counter them.
We need to work toward destroying viruses both inside and outside the body. Vaccines take too damn long, the viruses change too fast.
Border control is needed to stop the deflating effects on our wages from too many illegals and to stop the evils of the border, drugs, trafficking, child trade, and who knows maybe biological warfare.
The Dems by opposing the Wall and other methods of border control are compromising our national security and now especially the safety of all Americans. Latest word is that lots of Chinese are illegally crossing the border. Hmmm. For a few votes.
Agree with you both. Scanning people for fever at the airports is proven to be an ineffective method of stopping the spread We should be testing everyone we possibly can coming in if we’re insisting on keepin everything open. And if we hadn’t moved all the manufacturing and expertise overseas we would likely be much further along in testing capabilities and all and we wouldn’t be in trouble when it comes to potential shortages of everyday medicines. Another fail for the Elites, but once again ordinary people are the ones who will pay the price. And V I agree, I mean, what better time could there be to deploy the military to the borders to curtail the invaders who may now be infected too?
“Hah! You proved my points without even realizing it.”
Then you have a very simplistic interpretation of globalism. It’s not international trade. Nothing that came out of China or India was needed for everyday life by ordinary people – spices and silks were luxuries. What people ate at home and used for work was made locally. International trade but no globalism.
And plague was nothing to do with bats, however revolting they may be as a menu item.
As for Sunday School lessons, whaaat??
“Let’s doing something about the bunnyhopping. I don’t like that either.”
Right, so if I’d suggested bringing an end to recreational flights because of AGW or energy penury, you’d have just said, yeah, go for it… Nothing about people’s freedom to take a vacation wherever they like.
Funny.
And for those who dismiss *cough* experts indiscriminately (not a sign of great intelligence, although they’d love it to be), you could do worse than listen to England’s (I have no partisanship in these matters) Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty.
No false assurances, no hysteria, no promises it will just fade away in the spring. Just a real, proper expert who knows what he’s talking about. And leaves Boris and Donald looking like the morons they are when they open their mouth about things they know nothing about.
An acknowledgement that it could hit as much as 80% of the UK population (because it isn’t the CMO’s job to bolster the markets), that several hundred thousand people could die, and that there will likely be a period, before too long, of about 3 weeks where the NHS will struggle (i.e. be on its knees, as doctors and nurses fall sick while a rush of patients arrives needing care). We are almost past the ‘containment’ period and about to move into the ‘delay’ period, which won’t be that long either but will give scientists (those fucking ignorant *cough* experts who know so much less than the *coughers*) time to acquaint themselves even better with the virus), and healthcare systems to prepare themselves. Then it’s the next stage…
Bottom lines may suffer, goods may go into short supply, but then again, if there was ever an argument in favor of domestic production over these present-day arrangements, this is it.
It’s not a sentiment that I necessarily disagree with, but we are all at fault – it’s not a product of globalism, or elites, or corporate greed, or neoliberal internationalist government policies.
We – all of us – over the past generation have eagerly lapped up the fruits of globalism – a colour TV or a pocket calculator used to cost many weeks’ wages – now they practically give them away at gas stations. Same with clothes, shoes, cars, and a million other consumer products. We are the cause.
“and we wouldn’t be in trouble when it comes to potential shortages of everyday medicines. ”
Indeed. Many of the UK’s medicines are manufactured in India, but the key active ingredients for those also originate in China. Seems most of the errors and regulatory non-compliance complaints also concern China and India… (according to a pharma journal I happened upon).
JohnAZ:
“Latest word is that lots of Chinese are illegally crossing the border. ”
“word is”…that’s as reliable as ‘people are saying’. Where’d you get that little factoid anyway, John?
The plague got to Europe along the Silk Road – before 20th century – GA
==============
And there were several plagues during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) in Greece, Italy, and environs.
Wars don’t help, do they Q? As in 1918…
Without a war, it might not have got beyond Kansas!
And nobody has proof the virus wasn’t made in a lab so it could be a manmade disaster.
. It really doesn’t make any difference whether Man or Mother Nature makes the “bug”.
For arguments sake, a good bio agent is fast acting and deadly with a large mortality rate. And controllable in spread with a short lifetime.
You are trying to destroy another army or populace then move in to take over.
Coronavirus is none of these.
Maybe the objective was larger this time (taking the economy down by other means?) and/or maybe it wasn’t ready to be deployed just yet.
But you’re right. At this point it likely doesn’t matter, although if this was bio-engineered it just highlights the foolishness of such efforts, as if that needed to be pointed out in the first place.
You are right about the economies. It sure backfired if that was the case as China has been decimated.
I hope it teaches the US Elite they cannot put all their eggs in one basket, especially an enemy’s basket.
Or what if it was a leak from a lab but it was a genuine accident? Anything is certainly possible. But I do see what you mean that at this point the cat is out of the bag so what difference does it make where it came from. It’s coming so prepare for impact.
God has taught Man many lessons about disease control and hygiene. Mosaic law is largely about cleanliness while living
In tents in the desert.
Another disease prevention lesson may have been the Tower of Babel where God dispersed early man who was starting to live close to each other in cities. Biblical overpopulation!
This year’s election is going to be interesting without conventions and rallies. My estimation of Trump’s recognition of how serious it is is when he cancels all rallies until the plague burns out.
God said you’re not supposed to eat bats and rodents. They eat both in China. God knew before we did that all mammals are susceptible to cororna viruses and when you eat certain mammals like those you can be exposed to new deadly ones.
So how are you with bacon butties, which ‘God’ said you shouldn’t eat either. Or prawns?
“God knew before we did that all mammals are susceptible to cororna viruses ”
O.M.G. Did he let two of every bacterium on the ark too?
Lol I just noticed I spelled it cororna and not corona. I’m shocked you didn’t notice. Oh ok, so now suddenly Biblical laws and their correct application matter to you? You’re not very scientific Alba. Bacteria can live in water so they didn’t have to get in the ark. And bacteria and viruses are different things btw.
Akmofo
You are right. But the rules given to Moses about Kosher and personal hygiene put the Hebrews giant steps ahead of a very filthy world. Even then the rules of Kosher recognized the disease carrying capability of blood.
JAZ
It isn’t until you lose it, that you understand what you have. Be it freedom or health or family or love or joy or wisdom or life.
Speaking of the wisdom of life, what is the most prized food of the Torah?
“Lol I just noticed I spelled it cororna and not corona. I’m shocked you didn’t notice.”
I did notice. I noticed it was a typo and didn’t feel it necessary to point out something you didn’t do deliberately. Although occasionally I do if it results in something funny, because funny is good for you.
” Oh ok, so now suddenly Biblical laws and their correct application matter to you? You’re not very scientific Alba.”
Suddenly? LOL, as you like to say. And you’re not very good at irony, SSL, but I have to forgive you that because you’re both American and religious. Consider yourself forgiven.
Biblical laws were written by people. People who noticed that some things worked and some things didn’t. They obviously didn’t get everything right, which is one of the many reasons we know they were just human.
If they’d been written by an all-knowing God, living in eternity (i.e. not time) that God would have added some provisos, like ‘don’t eat pork just now, but once animal husbandry and science have advanced to a state where pigs can be reared parasite free, you won’t need to deprive yourselves of those delicious bacon butties (until those clever scientists you don’t know about yet find out that bacon’s carcinogenic, of course – then you can take your chances).
Are you still covering your head every time you go out in public too? What a shame, given those lovely blond tresses. 🙂
I recall reading in passing, JohnAZ, many years ago, a theory that the Essene possibly died out because of their attempts at hygiene.
The suggestion was that previously the locals had just pooped right there on the ground and the hot sun baked and sterilised their secretions.
Then they started to bury it and it infected their water supplies and their food. Who knows?
And you seem to be forgetting that, according to your theology, he didn’t ‘know’ about corona viruses, he made them for your delectation, along with smallpox, plague and all the rest.
That’s just wrong. You refuse to believe in God at all but if you consider God could be real then you want to say that He creates diseases for His own amusement. I’m sorry you are so angry but perhaps you’re seeing things in a way that you wish to see them?
The universe is composed of a basic duality in essence to its existence. Positive and negative. The Hebrew Torah is a guide to the positive path, the path of light, the path of life, the path of joy, the path of fulfillment, should you of-course choose it.
Learn Hebrew, Mrs Green!
You’re funny, SSL. You need everyone to be angry because you can’t conceive of people just thinking for themselves and drawing logical conclusions.
I don’t believe ‘he’ exists, but if he did he’d need to take responsibility for all biological realities that ‘he’ set in motion.
akmofo
You’re welcome to follow what works for you, on the basis of your entirely local religious traditions. I don’t really see a god of all the world demanding that everyone in it should learn one particular local language to achieve enlightenment.
Maybe you guys just have loads of extra time while the rest of the world toils. Lucky you. Like those everyday Hebrew *cough* scholars we have in some cities in the UK who spend their days reading their scriptures while they and their wives and kids are kept by UK welfare, i.e. me.
Nice ‘work’ if you can get it.
And they like to have lots of kids, to get their money’s worth out of the UK taxpayer. God be praised.
Mrs Green
I only wish you well. There are no demands, ever. You have complete free will to acquire your wisdom at your own pace in your own way, or not. I was where you are at, not that long ago. Just as stubborn as you, and probably a 1000x more. My ignorance broke when I lived abroad. It was also the time I started to take interest in the “news”. And I saw the constant malicious staged lies about Israel. I then understood that they are recreating Plato’s cave. That they are not to be trusted regards ANYTHING. That they are in the vast vast majority all lying and ignorant hacks.
Mr Mofo
My criticism of ultra-orthodox low-level Hebrew ‘scholars’ sucking at the teat of the British taxpayer (and presumably taxpayers in other over-generous countries) has no connection with any views I might have on Israel and certainly not with any other ordinary Jewish people. If they think money falls off trees, rather than being earned by the great unenlightened who toil around them, that does not taint your country unless it explicitly approves their mooching off other people’s taxes in their own supposed pursuit of their own enlightenment (would that it would bring them some actual insight).
There are other kinds of welfare sponges – they are not alone.
I’m slightly amused, though, since they should easily find a place in that enormous category of ‘commies’ which you hold so dear. Are they not the very definition?
From each according to his means to each according to his sense of religious entitlement? 🙂
Given that welfare money is so open to abuse, I’ve always advocated that it should be eliminated. Period.
The “ultra-orthodox” are NOT ultra-orthodox or orthodox in the least. They are a Roman/Vatican spawned ugly caricature, divorced from ancient classical Judaism and Hebrew culture. I have zero sympathy for them and their Roman nonsense. Nonetheless, I’m fair and honest and I know enough of their communities abroad to know that your description of them is false. I’ve been to and seen their communities in the US Canada Europe Australia, and know that they live in very wealthy communities which would disqualify them from the gov mafia money to say they receive as welfare.
In Israel the situation is different. Indeed some of them do suck on the government tit, but it pales in comparison to the fraud of the Muslim and other foreign communities in Israel.
There’s a somewhat successful effort to incorporate the less radical “orthodox” community to the high-tech sector. Another is to incorporate them into the national service, but this has been less successful so far. The radical “black hats” community is very small even by Israeli standards, maybe 50,000 strong, so it’s not a big deal. Still, this privileged precedence should be eliminated.
Yup.
God has taught Man many lessons about disease control and hygiene. Mosaic law is largely about cleanliness while living
We got to know an Israeli couple on a cruise once – they were very kosher, especially him. They would scour the markets on shore excursions, looking for fish without scales, and other items that met the obscure rules of kosherdom. You could only drink wine made from grapes grown in the place where you were drinking it – which is obviously a problem on a cruise.
When I commented it that all these rules derived from ancient hygiene, he became very adamant – even angry – that that was all anti-Jewish myth-making, even a slur. He said it was God’s word, or something …
Anyway on the last night, we had a party, and to our surprise he had many Scotches – so that was obviously kosher enough.
Legalism only goes so far. In the end its all about the intent of the heart. Following all the rules perfectly outwardly means nothing if inwardly you are lawless.
Remember that when God gave the Mosaic laws, there were no instructions on packages of meat, especially pork, saying heat this until a thermometer reads 165 degrees.
“Why can people not see that Hillary is getting ready to enter the race!!!!!!!” –xxzzy999
She won the popular vote last time. I don’t see any signs she is interested in the stress and headaches of wielding presidential power. She learned her lesson. Even winning the popular vote you can lose. Why win again only to have the presidency stolen from her again?
You never give up do you. Stolen, my foot. Hillary ignored the mid west in her campaign and it cost her. This country is not four states, it is fifty. Trump out campaigned HRC and won. Protection of the minority from the majority, read the Bill of Rights.
Protection of the minority from the majority, read the Bill of Rights.
The awful compromise of the Electoral College is not mandated in the Bill of Rights – it was in the Constitution in order to try and settle interstate jealousies, rivalries, and suspicion.
The colonies didn’t like each other very much, and to a high degree they distrusted a strong central government altogether. The Electoral College isn’t a fair device – it gives far too much power to small states, and to rural areas.
It is tyranny by a privileged (white) minority over the much bigger majority … unless you hanker after the Three-Fifths Compromise – and believe a Black or Latino vote in Harlem isn’t equal to a good old-boy farmer out there in Iowa or Montana.
I’m not a farmer in Iowa or Montana, nor am I privileged, though I am white. As for the Electoral College, it was and is a perfect example of the genius of the founding fathers. Small states and rural areas having power makes perfect sense to me.
As for the Electoral College, it was and is a perfect example of the genius of the founding fathers. Small states and rural areas having power makes perfect sense to me.
It’ really is a travesty.
Same argument was used by Mediaeval knights against the yeomen and peasants getting a vote. Same argument was used in the Three-Fifths Compromise of the Constitution. Same argument was used to force through hundreds of Jim Crow laws. Same argument was used to prevent women getting a vote for a century.
The privileged always have spurious arguments about why expanding the vote will lead to TEOTWAWKI – and really – you do wind up on the wrong side of history.
Enjoy your Iowa hogs (I’m sure you do) – but please don’t insult the intelligence of others by claiming that the US is a democracy – it’s a rigged plutocracy, and of course it always have been, since Washington and Jefferson ponced around in perfumed wigs.
Cargill
The whites are still the majority in the US. The minorities are protected from the white majority over the two centuries by the Bill of Rights. The small states are protected from the big states by the same philosophy. The little guy makes a difference in this country, unlike most everywhere else in the world.
The small states are protected from the big states by the same philosophy. The little guy makes a difference in this country, unlike most everywhere else in the world.
No – in all other democracies there is a belief in the rule of law, and a commitment to majority rule. Small states are small for a very good reason – hardly anyone lives there.
The only people who champion this sacred “minority rule” are Republicans and all the wingnut right-wing nutters – on here and elsewhere – you can’t stand the thought that a majority of people might not agree with you.
Shock horror! LOL. And why does every Republican held state try to suppress the vote and stop the majority having a say? Because the Republicans know they cannot EVER win a fair election where everyone gets a vote. True fact.
You are SO undemocratic it makes a genuine freedom-loving person spit.
La,La,La, Coronavirus my ass. What is it a flu? I had the real flu and it kicked my ass at 35 years old. I think if it was worse I would have had pneumonia and died.i was a young buck and was exposed to most every bug around at the time. Who knows, stories of the 1918-20 pandemic scare the shit out of me.
No. It’s basically like another type of SARS. This virus causes pneumonia. Its not anything like flu.
You are right. I just read a good article on the virus. It is identified as SARS Co ** 19 Type 2. It kills in two fashions, one direct invasion by the virus more deeply into the lungs, a consequent immune response which inflames the lungs and if the pneumonia overwhelms the ability of the lungs to expel the fluids in the lungs, the inflammation response attacks other organs and kills the patient from multiple organ failure- sepsis. During the big SARS epidemic, I remember the hospital put a intensive sepsis watch of folks that tested positive for SARS or even the flu.
The second mechanism is in investigation now. Bacterial superinfection, especially in re-infections, is being identified as a cause of intensification and death. This was the primary cause of the deaths from the Spanish Flu.
We need to learn how to kill viruses in vitro. Even our body’s own attack mechanism, the T cells, attack with poisons that kill the viruses. It is the running away of this T cell response that causes the multi organ destruction.
BTW, the coordinating cells that keep things under control with the immune response are called CD4 cells. These are the white blood cells that were attacked by the HIV/AIDS virus. That is why AIDS was such an effective killer.
The running away of the TCell response is because its toxic response also attacks host body cells. Inflammation!
Is this related to the cytokine storm I keep hearing about? I’m also eager to get more info on reinfection with this one too. Previous studies lead to some troubling conclusions but are admittedly preliminary. Some say the cytokine storm gets going once you get it a second time. And yes, severe inflammatory response is part of that as the immune system becomes imbalanced.
” I think if it was worse I would have had pneumonia and died”
You might have got pneumonia, but you most likely wouldn’t have died. You’d have been given antibiotics, as I was, and my 2-year-old daughter and elderly mother. Well, I say elderly, but she was younger than I am now and I’m obviously not ‘elderly’. Just getting on a bit… 🙂
Want to get POed at the government and pharma industry,
Google Peter Hotez and read his story about Coronavirus.
Closer to home, we have worse problems than some Asian virus which has killed a few hundred people so far (110 people die in the US each day in car wrecks). Last night in Hartford somebody torched a 5 story apartment house, driving 75 families out onto the cold streets at 1:00 am … it happened in the Charter Oak section of the city … where will these people go? The squalid hotels running along US15 running north and south of city limits are already packed full of illegals from all 4 corners of the earth in this 3rd world sanctuary. Like in medieval times it’s the blade (machetes) and fire (the arson variety) which reign supreme in our capitol. I’ll admit they’re pretty good pursuaders. Anglo American civilization as we had known it until about 1960 is pretty much extinguished here. Well, it had a decent run, about 3 centuries. No amount of ‘Urban Planning’ is going to fix this. The main concern of state govt seems to be how do we raise enough cash to fund the exhorbitant pensions we’ve promised the public sector unions who keep the Dems in power. Oh, there’s a new phrase in the news coming out of Hartford the past 2 weeks “shot in the face”. Three esteemed citizens at various times have been “shot in the face”, and promptly expired.
Brh
You mean killed several thousand people so far? Hey, many problems start off small and then one day they’re insurmountable. The virus could be like that. Illegals are invaders and thus viruses. And the crimes they commit and the destruction they wreak must be considered mortal attacks to the body. They clearly aren’t afraid of consequences. If an immune response doesn’t kick in soon then your right. The virus killed its host.
The Australian Stock Market (ASX) is down 6.2% near the close on Monday – 18% in ten days. Not sure we’re going to BTD quite yet either.
Closed 7..4% down … we’re back to January 2019. Shoulda left our money in cash at 1..9%.
550 … COVID-19 CASES IN USA
21 … DEATHS FROM COVID-19
21 divided by 550 = 3.82% mortality rate
Influenza is 0.1% so Covid-19 is 38 times more deadly than flu virus.
Influenza is 0.1% so Covid-19 is 38 times more deadly than flu virus.
However you need to be cautious about small numbers – the US mortality figures are skewed (currently) by the impact of the virus on a Seattle nursing home.
While it’s clear that coronavirus is more lethal than flu, it will vary wildly while the sample is small. But I don’t think there’s much doubt that it is pretty dangerous for those over 70 or so.
And the US State Department has warned older people not to go onto cruise ships .. that’s a bit like cancelling Christmas.
Yep it’s a big deal. And just think back. Remember how not that long ago you said you just didn’t see what all the fuss with this virus was all about. Well now you do. Are you saying Christmas is important too?! Wow! I mean, you do definitely need Jesus. But slow steps are ok. Really, you are doing so good.
“Really, you are doing so good.”
Why do Americans eschew adverbs? One of life’s mysteries…
Christmas is important. People need a bit of midwinter cheer to brighten those dark December days. Such celebrations were engaged in before the Pagan festivals of the time were co-opted by Christianity (even though it is considered unlikely that Jesus was born in December anyway). At least the Pagans didn’t use it as an excuse for buying endless crap to give to people who didn’t need anything, though.
Yep it’s a big deal. And just think back. Remember how not that long ago you said you just didn’t see what all the fuss with this virus was all about.
I feel verballed – I don’t recall having a speculative view one or the other – positive or negative. I just go with the science and real facts via CNN.
Wow! I mean, you do definitely need Jesus. But slow steps are ok. Really, you are doing so good.
Yep – I agree – I bringing all you guys and gals along just nicely.
May.be
~toktomi~
Things are getting interesting. Oil prices crashed to $28. One expert says they could fall below $20. Asian markets tanking. Monday could be another 1,000 down day for DJIA.
Things are breaking – no… they’ve been broken for a while, but we’re seeing it erupting – like a pustule cracking open…
“However you need to be cautious about small numbers” –Cargill
The numbers are consistently around the 3.5% mortality rate whether the number of cases is 550 or 101,000. Why do you think it would be any different when the numbers are 55 million cases?
Do you arithmeticians really think there are only 550 cases vs. the number of deaths you rely on for your calculation?
With all the hell raising about lack of testing capability wouldn’t it be safe to assume there could be ten times as many people with the virus as there are confirmed cases?
* * *
In response to JohnAZ reasonable call for this forum to make more reasonable and helpful input I have this.
It is sad to read about the made scrambles going on to buy toilet paper. Corona virus or not a more sensible way to insure you have a kissable bung hole would be in to install one of these devices on your toilet. Trust me they are the greatest thing you will ever invest in for so little money. You might think cold water would make them distasteful to use, but it is NOT. You will love it and life will never be quite the same for you again if your are force to use TP.
Wow, what a long link – hope this works
https://www.amazon.com/Veken-Handheld-Pressure-Attachment-Stainless/dp/B07RL2RN1D/ref=sxin_3_ac_d_pm?ac_md=2-0-VW5kZXIgJDUw-ac_d_pm&crid=SZ8PRSGAS6CO&cv_ct_cx=bidet+sprayer+for+toilet&keywords=bidet+sprayer+for+toilet&pd_rd_i=B07RL2RN1D&pd_rd_r=5439c3cc-7f30-4809-b11a-223b8063655a&pd_rd_w=jt1ly&pd_rd_wg=9tuP4&pf_rd_p=516e6e17-ed95-417b-b7a4-ad2c7b9cbae3&pf_rd_r=A1JMJ24BEBDXEZ8H3BXW&psc=1&qid=1583736854&sprefix=bidet%2Caps%2C196
they are the greatest thing you will ever invest in for so little money. – Evelyn
=============
When my wife and I go away on vacation we can’t wait to get back home to give our asses a good squirting. She says there are 2 things she misses, the cats and the hand held bidet.
Why do you think it would be any different when the numbers are 55 million cases?
Don’t go feral on me please … all I am saying is the current mortality rate in the US is quite likely skewed because of the impact on a aged-care facility in Seattle, where a lot of deaths occurred.
What on earth do you have difficulty with, in understanding that simple statement of the obvious?
Shout out to K-Dog : how do you think Sanders will do in Washington on Tuesday?
With all the hell raising about lack of testing capability wouldn’t it be safe to assume there could be ten times as many people with the virus as there are confirmed cases?
It seems to me the number of undiscovered cases is not the slightest bit relevant. What is relevant is the obvious: of the people who catch it and we know about, how many die? That is the only stat that is comparable to the regular flu, or whatever.
On the oil price, James Howard has talked for years about two sides of the oil crisis:
(1) with peak oil occurring, oil will become too hard to get and too expensive to deliver, and the Western car-driven world we currently have will be no more, or
(2) when oil gets too cheap, all those marginal producers around the world (including the shale oil cowboys in the US, and the very deep-sea cowboys all over the place), suddenly confront $30.00 oil, and they go broke.
In other words, there is no Goldilocks sweet-spot.
Oil really plunged today – but I don’t understand why the stock market goes with it. I would have thought that cheaper oil would have made a lot of other stuff very attractive. But not to be.
Yeah oil is too cheap
Oil is too expensive
We no longer need oil we’re transitioning to windmills
There’s a glut
Shortages are on the horizon
It’s one goddam thing or another. Who knows what to believe?
Brh
It just seems like someone or someones are doing their damn best to make everyone afraid and I suspect it has to do with doing anything to get orange man bad out of office at any cost.
“Yeah oil is too cheap
Oil is too expensive”
That we would toggle between those two conditions at this juncture was predicted in TLE.
So, you think you have seen all the Biden controversies? Think again.
Jimmy Dore presents: Joe Biden Pathological Liar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSUPfnYdXFU
Again, I cannot wait for the debates.
Joe Biden is not the same class as the fat orange bastard – pathological lying wise – so why do you bring this up? It only makes the comparison with the Dumpster look very ordinary indeed.
There really is a glass-houses caution required here. And that pathological idiot (House of Reps minority leader – Mac something) came out today and said – unbelievably – that Hunter Biden only got his gig because of the family name.
The entire Internet laughed hysterically – pointing out that the whole Trump clan (plus that Jared Kushner creepo) only have their jobs, their fortunes, and their freedom, because of daddy. Great moment.
So many emotions.
LOL.
The entire internet?
You mean you and a few of your friends in Twitter?
What, me worry? Will Trump be viewed as another Nero, a hero, or something close to a zero?
https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/donald-trump-nero-meme-021905209.html
You can just picture the scene in China, filthy Chinks pulling the cow and pig guts to make heparin. Never realized how Much of our medicine is made overseas, particularly in China. And who knows what the hell is in it?
This is a giant, staggering example of corporate greed and irresponsibility, placing the health of our nation in the hands of a foreign, often antagonistic power. Cutthroat capitalism, with the compliance of Chinese collaborators and coolies.
Negligent homicide comes to mind.
All of this is now coming into view because of Corona and people like Rosemary Gibson with her great book, “China Rx…..”
Screw soap and water to wash, I believe oil at 30 balloons a barrel is cheaper. I’m filling my swimming pool as we speak.
So this AM my oil company has a sale on $1.95 a gallon for No. 2 heating. I figure they are dumping stock so as not to take a bath. Don’t buy, prices are tanking, get it tanking, as in oil tanks. Fill yer tanks, gird yer loins, stock up! PANIC NOW!!!! Summer’s here and times are fine!
It was sunny when I awoke this AM. All of a sudden it is overcast. I believe there is a large Black Swan hovering over my abode.
Careful it doesn’t fall in your swimming pool, StE – you’ll never be able to find it.
Circuit breakers on! I feel that is dirty pool. Let the cards fall. You win some you lose some. I have been losing for the past ten years due to manipulation.
Turns out Hand Sanitizer might be flammable after all. Like everything else of practical value in the modern world, it is petroleum based. Read an article, in Seattle, hand sanitizer is being distributed to people living on the streets of that city; instead of being used to wash hands it is being burned like sterno to heat their tents. So there it is. Hand sanitizer has at least two uses, maybe more.
Brh