Clusterfuck Nation
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How to account for Americans being the most anxious, fearful, and stressed-out people among the supposedly advanced nations? Do we not live in the world’s greatest democratic utopia where dreams come true?
What if the dreaming part is actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is nearly impossible. What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens?
You end up in a virtual world of advertising and agit-prop where manipulation is the primary driver of human activity. That is, a world where the idea of personal liberty (including any act of free thought) becomes a philosophical sick joke, whether you believe in the possibility of free will or not. You get a land full of college kids trained to think that coercion of others is the highest-and-best use of their time on earth — and that it represents “inclusion.” You get a news industry that makes its own reality, churning out narratives (i.e. constructed psychodramas) to excite numbed minds. You get politics that play out like a Deputy Dawg cartoon. You get a corporate tyranny of racketeering that herds spellbound citizens like so many sheep into chutes for shearing, not only of their money, but their autonomy, dignity, and finally their will to live.
Can a people recover from such an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, including the burdens of empire, onerous global debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change — things that hurt to think about.
The sense of gathering crisis persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is so hard for the public to process that a dismaying number of citizens opt for suicide. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they dominate the scene on every side.
A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that make up the crumbling armature of “normal” life in the USA. The political Right seeks to Make America Great Again, as though we might return to a 1962 heyday of industrial mass production by wishing hard enough. The Left seeks the equivalent of an extended childhood for all, lived out in a universal safe space, where all goods and services come magically free from a kindly parent-like government, and the sunny days are spent training unicorns to find rainbows.
The decade-long “recovery” from the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 amounted to ten years of fake-it-til-you-make-it — with the prospect nil of actually making it to something like economic and cultural soundness. Are we too far gone now? Some kind of shock therapy is surely in the offing, and probably in the form of a violent financial readjustment that will alter the terms of getting and spending so drastically as to topple the matrix of rackets that masquerades as the nation’s business.
That financial shock has been coiling and coiling in the fantasyland that banking has become in the new zero interest rate regime where notions that pretend to be money get levered into new ways of destroying life on earth and the human project with it. At some cognitive level the people of this land sense what is coming and the wait for it is driving them crazy. Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part, and a hard way to learn that a virtual life is not an adequate substitute for an authentic one.
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That was an impressive list of avoidances of reality, but it failed to include the actual fantasies on screens, particularly the big silver ones. The superhero fantasy “Avengers: Endgame” had the best opening weekend box office ever with more than $350 million in North America and $1 billion worldwide. While Marvel’s superheroes were saving the world, 6,000 stores have already announced they are closing in 2019, more than all of 2018. Welcome to the Retail Apocalypse, where Thanos doesn’t have to snap his fingers to make things disappear.
This is rather scary. Millions upon millions the world over convinced that the umpteenth super heroes movie in a canon of tens of dozens of silly, childish, and absurd is a must-see.
If this does not reveal the power of media and social media programming, of group-think, in today’s culture… I’m not sure what does?
A coup against a president?
This isn’t melodrama, but reality: a country of imbeciles.
As if people would be attending lectures about Proust if it weren’t for those dastardly Hollywood profiteers? I rather doubt it. There are worse things than lots of people having time and money to spend on a few hours’ entertainment, especially when they have little power and few options when it comes to their own lives.
It’s not that Proust would replace Avengers, it’s that a Madeleine would replace Madonna.
TraffickingInDivinity.com
At most points in history, and in most cultures, public torture and execution were the amusements of the day.
We should be happy millions now prefer a movie. It’s a sign humanity is progressing.
Kuntsler spews whatever nonsense comes to his jaded mind. He is one of many perpetual doom and gloomers that make a living painting horror scenes. He speaks as though Americans haven’t been losing themselves in Hollywood fare to escape reality till only recently. He should remember a little girl named Shirley Temple. She diverted the attention of America away from one of the worst times in our history.
Kunstler defends Trump because he feels a kinship to his style of fraud. He sells a conjured narrative that for some sad and sick reason has following. Very little of what he offers has bases in fact. It’s merely personal opinion. He asserts that those on the left roundly support free everything. Medicare for all is not free, as Bernie Sanders has mentioned on many occasions. Bernie has admitted taxes will go up. But there will be offsets in that there are no more continuous and relentless insurance premium increases. Increases that largely benefit Health insurance CEOs. Profit above all else. Above humanity and above morality.
But Kunstler has proven time and again in his blathering that he is not a particularly moral man. His views on free higher education are short sighted as well. As he rails often that higher education and health care have become rackets benefiting CEOs and administrators, but gives the middle finger to proposals that would benefit the majority. Free higher ed means a more competitive workforce and logically fewer requiring the welfare state he so detests.
Well I think Mr. K has simply pointed out how the proposed solutions for free healthcare and free education are nearly an impossible feat for a society that is nearly bankrupt and immersed totally in pervasive accounting fraud, as well as general fraud across the board. Such costly proposals as you admit yourself may very well be effective but would be impossible to implement within a fragmented society where there is a complete lack of honesty and integrity. Also the sole focus on profits does not help. Great social welfare systems require honesty, transparency, and a system that creates new capital. Plus everyone must contribute which means everyone must put into the system to get out benefit. In today’s society a lot of people want to take but don’t want to give. How do you fix all of that pray tell?
Seadolt has gone to hell
Freud thought that civilization was at advance if people burned his books instead of him. He thought that civilization was also advanced if people hurled epithets instead of spears. JHK is an extremely well versed writer that I follow for his tactical ability and knowledge of historiography & writing. You, on the other hand, are just flatulence in an elevator.
RW
To Robert White;
So being the connoisseur of flatulence, that I’m sure you are, you prefer to sniff JHK’s emissions. All you require is some flowery phraseology to cover up the stink you long to inhale.
JHK is fully entitled to hold the political stance that he holds whilst lending thoughtful perspective on the current state of affairs to readership that extends to other website domains like ZH. When I first started reading JHK’s stuff I realized he was a gifted writer that could easily push my buttons to make me react in opposition to his well thought out arguments. After reading his articles a few times I quickly realized that his politics were nothing like my politics as the Grumpy Marxist that I am would never abide someone like The Duck. What I realized was that while JHK was in fact a polar opposite politically, he was well versed & highly articulate.
At that juncture I was pretty well convinced that even though I would likely never agree with his politics there was certainly the very real possibility that I could become a better writer if I watched how he writes week-by-week so that I might learn to write professionally as he does. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery as they say but in this case JHK is pretty well one of the best political bloggers on Internet to emulate when it comes to writing style.
Back in university my last English course was _Writing, Style, & Immagination_ which was a full credit course and third year level. My professor for that class was an edifying old gentleman with a profound sense of the wordsmith industry. He recommended emulating writers that we liked so that we could learn the trade. JHK is exactly the type of writer that I have chosen to emulate for writing style & composition along structural lines. Furthermore, I have never written one book whereas JHK has written multiple.
If you could settle down a bit and realize that JHK is likely a better writer than you are you might be able to settle down enough to learn from his ability and thoughtful approach to understanding Clusterfuck Nation and the bugaboos that encircle it.
You probably have some redeeming qualities but being angst ridden & angry will get you nowhere in life believe me.
RW
Too funny. You’ve actually written several paragraphs to validate the perception I had of you. Ease back eager beaver, your hero will be flatulating again in just a couple of days. And at the ryhthm and pitch you so enjoy.
GTH,
It seems to me that you don’t understand that a college degree has no more value today than a high school diploma, and that socialised medicine currently means sub par procedures performed by kids fresh out of school. This isn’t going to change because people wish for it to, and it’s definitely not going to change because you vote for it to. Reality doesn’t care what you wish for, it cares what works and what doesn’t. What we have now, as I’m sure you would agree, does not work very well. Why would you think piling on more of what doesn’t work would change things? That seems like the definition of insanity to me, and exactly what Mr. K is right to be railing against.
Do you have a fact based response that doesn’t involve name calling? I don’t care for verbal flatulance either.
When I was a small kid growing up in Toronto in the 60s I knew I was going to be the finest drummer in the world when I grew up. I knew that if I continued watching & listening to Gene Krupa I was sure to become untouchable eventually.
When I would see Krupa on the tube I knew that he was the guy to watch above all the wannabes.
After suffering myriad humilities like my brother throwing the Hoover Upright vacuum cleaner down a flight of stairs straight into my face & drum set, I soon realized that I was correct and that my brother would eventually be eating his words of defeatism. As he threw the vacuum cleaner directly at me he stated that ‘I sucked on drums’ but just as that Hoover vacuum cleaner was approaching my face I realized in that instant that I was going to be a really great drummer sooner than I had ever imagined.
RW
>>> Medicare for all is not free, as Bernie Sanders has mentioned on many occasions. Bernie has admitted taxes will go up. But there will be offsets in that there are no more continuous and relentless insurance premium increases.
LOL. Reminds me of: “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.”
So instead of “continuous and relentless insurance premium increases” we’ll get continuous and relentless tax increases?
The bottom line is this: if you want to pay for illegal immigrant health care, be our guest! Let us know how that works out for you.
Missing the plot, and inserting a host of logical fallacies along the way. As always.
The point is that so many people are so easily convinced.
“A must-see film”
Where tens of millions of people are duped into handing over money to see a ridiculous CGI comic book story.
It’s viral marketing. Implanted, like your suggestion that they have little power and few options.
Untrue.
I guess you won’t be giving us a review of “Hellboy”.
We are on the way down on this pendulum we call culture; the other side will swing up…..for those who make it!
TraffickingInDivinity.com
Coincidentally, this is what was going on in “literate” Spain at the time of the writing of Don Quixote – which is why Cervantes wrote the book. An absurd, but fun, worship of Super Heroes.
I thought I should mention that to give the place some class!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Because it’s summer!
http://www.got-truth.com/docs/Because%20its%20summer.pdf
#oathkeepers
Q.
You are, no doubt, referring to this:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/americans-are-some-most-stressed-out-people-world-reporting-negative-emotions-highest-rates-decade-180972047/
My US inlaws are visiting me here in the UK soon.
God help us – they suffer from severe Trump Derangement Syndrome and can’t wait to vote for Biden or Beto or some other corporate whore.
In conversation, and when I have a contradictory comment to add, I have to do as advised by a very smart friend – “Hold it in like a fart”!
There’s one thing worse than holding in a fart. – Lighting one when your home is a meth lab.
https://thevalleyreport.com/2016/02/13/florida-man-dies-in-meth-lab-explosion-after-lighting-farts-on-fire/
Sounds like a class act.
Check out the ‘Florida Man’ site.
Brh
How Dems manage to TDS over Trump’s character deficiencies while ignoring Biden’s wins this year’s cognitive dissonance award.
If character is all that matters, I’ll take a boorish Trump over creepy child-groping Biden any day.
Indeed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pgG9mDxRNQ
LOL!
I’m with ya. I live in a place infested with TDS-infected Canucks and Pacific Northwesterners. My sphincter muscles are getting buff and cut!
Don’t let Anderson Cooper hear you talking like that.
I am happy to report that I am not suffering from TDS, although I may have suffered from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) starting with his 2004 State of the Union address, the one that dealt with the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. I was particularly upset that many religious Jews had forgotten what it must have been like to be Jewish in 1930’s Nazi Germany.
In what way had they forgotten?
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 included marriage restrictions on Jews, specifically on their ability to marry or even to have sex with non-Jews (i.e. Aryans) of the opposite sex. Of course in 1935, most if not all countries criminalized same sex encounters and none recognized same sex marriages.
In 2019, lots of Americans have reason to be insecure and stressed out. Many young people with only a high school diploma face a rather grim financial future. College graduates burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and low wage jobs aren’t in a much better position or maybe they are actually worse off. The country’s government debt (Federal, state and local) and unfunded liabilities are in the tens of trillions of dollars. But these issues don’t especially bother me. This isn’t 1942 and I am not worried about being deported to an American version of Belzec. At the age of 70+, I have been out of the labor force for over a decade.
If life ever becomes really grim and I am left with no good choices, there is always the way out taken by the grandparents in the 1978 TV mini series “Holocaust”. You can watch it for free on YouTube.
No disrespect intended, but I’m not sure what your point is. Are you saying you support same sex marriage and denying it would be a Nazi attitude?
hmuller @ 7:50pm: The Republican war against gay Americans was never as brutal as Hitler’s war against the Jews. No American gays were rounded up and shipped off to a slave labor camp or marked for extermination. But a number of years ago, I did meet an American who had fallen in love with a Japanese man while he was teaching in Japan. When the American returned to the US, his Japanese partner was able to join him using a student visa. When the visa expired, the couple faced some very unpleasant choices. The American was able to find a job in Canada, where the couple married under Canadian law. I don’t know whether the couple ever returned to the US after gay marriage was legalized in all 50 states under a US Supreme Court ruling.
As the old saying goes, those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.
OK Thank you for clarifying that. You’re entitled to your opinion. I suspect there may be some orthodox rabbi’s who would not see the issues as parallel, but they can speak for themselves.
@Anon, formalized legalized same-sex unions have been possible for some time. But that wasn’t good enough; gays wanted “marriage”.
That term has a very specific etymology and usage that simply doesn’t apply to gays. And obviously it’s against Western religion.
Now once you’re willing to throw out culture and religion and history and just let the state decide these things, I think it’s fair to ask why polygamy is unlawful. If three people want to share their lives together, why can’t this union be formally and legally recognized? And why can’t we call that a “marriage”?
“Biden is a Fraud”:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/joe-biden-is-a-phony-plain-and-simple/
Who would’a guessed!
The forms of financial manipulation are so many and so varied that it really is staggering, the worst being derivatives that amount to trillions of dollars.
All of this financialization of the economy is waiting to be destroyed as it is supported by no collateral worth anything.
This is an extremely well-considered essay, Mr. Kuntsler.
Excuse me, Mr. Kunstler.
The problems of 2008 were papered over but never fixed. Gradually the governments and central banks have become more manipulative of markets, until we no longer have the mechanisms to determine “free market value” for financial assets and much else.
Long ago, no one ever envisioned permanently suppressed interest rates; and negative interest rates were considered impossible.
Look at what happened to the stock market since December 2018. It fell a little (maybe trying to reach its fair value). Trump and Powell opened the money spigots, the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund bought shares, the equity indexes bounced back; and there was much rejoicing throughout the land.
A lot of people love government intervention when it props up their portfolios or puts food on their table. Socialism for the rich and for the poor. Meanwhile, the shrinking middle class carries the burden in ways both open and hidden. It goes on until it can’t.
So the middle class needs some socialism.
I’ll vote for Bernie Sanders in next year’s prez-primary, of course, but I fully expect him to be blocked from winning again. The Democratic Party has always been far more interested in being a compliant partner in empire than it has been in winning. The problem with that is, this will turn them into an irrelevant regional rump-party because Americans by and large don’t respect losers.
Maybe Bernie can at least say a few nice words about Seth Rich, murdered by the DNC because he opposed the dirty tricks of one Debbie Wasserman Schultz.to deny Bernie the 2016 nomination.
Having been a victim of a mugging myself many years ago, I am more inclined to believe that Seth Rich was also a victim of a mugging that went horribly bad and left him dead on the mean streets of DC.
I may join you Venus if Bernie changes his positions on border enforcement and immigration. If he were to support the Wall, ending illegal immigration and reducing legal immigration then I would vote for him too.
Anon, do you find it strange that the muggers didn’t take anything? John Podesta believed in making examples of leakers. We know that courtesy of Julian. So sure, it is possible that Seth was simply mugged but again nothing was taken. So then it is a murder. Was it then just a random act of barbarity or something more?
Except nothing was stolen from Seth Rich. The police bodycam footage was erased and DC police were given a stand-down order on furhter investigation.
then we have Donna Brasile saying Seth’s murder made her fear for her own life and that she kept the blinds closed in her office out of fear of being shot. All media inquiries on the case have been handled by a DNC lawyer.
Not fishy at all. Nothing to see here, move along.
Anon, You really are a hoot, you make me chuckle because….
Having been a victim of a splinter myself many years ago, I am more inclined to believe that Jesus Christ was also a victim of a wood shop project that went horribly bad and left him dead on the mean streets of Jerusalem.
One day, the whole financial system as we know it may come tumbling done. The Weimar Republic in Germany lasted less than 14 years.
There is never going to be a driverless car that works.
America is never going to be energy independent.
Robots are never going to replace humans anywhere.
Artificial intelligence is always going to be artificial.
Oh don’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you
Don’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you
I’ll be your bleedin’ heart, I’ll be your cryin’ fool
Don’t let this go too far
Don’t let it get to you <– T. Petty
Babylon, with president Molock, and the cocophany of babble reaches to 5G cel networks, the skies and beyond.
Meanwhile back at my Doomstead, more playing with balls.
what of G5?
I was to have been fully deployed by next year and the consumer economy depends on you buying new equipment every two years or the foundations of our society rests upon crumble to dust don’t you know! Yet G5 is behind schedule as the insanity of endless growth is encounters blowback.
the foundations our society rests upon crumble to dust <– An extraneous 'of'.
the insanity of endless growth encounters blowback
Dogs make mistakes too.
Dog, “I was to be deployed…” or “It was…” ???
Bad Doggy?
It was
iT was? how much radiation?
when I walk into a department store, how much am I zapped by scanner?
Dog,
5G…I can’t wait!
I can’t wait until I get cell phone service….
For G5 to work, there would need to be a transmission tower every 1000 feet. I don’t see that happening.
All this time I thought Tom Petty was some NASCAR driver.
You are thinking Richard Petty.
Didn’t Richard Petty write the song “Breakdown” after he lost a race? Damn I just crack myself up.
When is Doomsday? Or as the Muslims call it, the Hour? Because automation has already taken many jobs. I don’t know if we want to call such machines, “robots”, but it has in any case. And unless you know the Hour, its bids fair to take many more if this Age continues.
Mr. K-Dog,
Sounds like you read Tom Lewis’ latest post, Anti-Predictions You Can Rely On.
Good post Jim.
At this point it does seem that in terms of finance, energy and culture we have cross the Rubicon, event horizon- pick your metaphor.
All we are doing now is increasing the potential energy into the thing to come.
Not sure what will happen or when.
But the chances for a long emergency or slow decline are diminishing.
As we add more potential energy the chances for chaos and something spectacular increase.
Not yet though.
But closer every day.
Avoidance and course correction are most likely no longer an option so for me- at least I’m enjoying the ride.
Whether the Great Reckoning of financial affairs hits first, or as a consequence of the collapsing understructure of a livable environment, what we’re doing now is obviously not going to last forever. Or even half that long. The retreat into one form of denial or another is presently a common phenomenon.
It’s a real-time demonstration of the power of belief, focused in the wrong place.
Yeah, at some point reality is going to slap us in the face, and it might come from a direction we least suspect.
For example, a relatively cheap, land based, Exocet style missile slamming into one or two of our aircraft carriers (in the Persian Gulf, the Med?) sending them to the bottom. That would be a wake up call like no other.
Brh
JMG’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming! I think that could be a trigger; the non-nuclear destruction of a carrier (or two) would be a shock to the system, for sure.
Hit it on the head there and my thoughts also watching 60 MInutes Sunday evening. JMG may have been prophetic. A land based supersonic cruise missile transported in a typical 40-foot shipping container. Nearly undetectable and ubiquitous.
Novel’s summary point, aircraft carriers are now obsolete.
And who would the US choose to blame for this event? Would it be like 9/11?
I think we can tell whether it is a false flag or a real one by how quickly the narrative falls into place and whom it benefits.
My guess is that it will be a dirty bomb detonated in a large port city.
Cheers
Yep. Everyone who sees all of this wonders how the hell this has gone on for so long.
The sad part is that if the failure (i.e. bankruptcy, instead of extend-and-pretend) had happened earlier, we might have had enough time to rebuild or stabilize things.
The next questions are what will be the spark, and how fast will things go. Events in the Middle East unraveled when food prices spiked; what will it take in the US?
And food prices are rising…
Probably the same thing. The flooding and the wet spring has covered a good portion of arable land and it’s going to hit us right in the breadbasket. It drowned a lot of future meat on the hoof too. Inflation in foodstuffs is baked into the cake.It might be a good idea to stock up on dried beans, rice and vitamins. Canned tuna, chicken and Spam might also be nice for Christmas dinner or birthday celebrations.
Better yet. Stock up on the SEEDS necessary to GROW beans, rice, and vitamin rich foods, and learn how to grow more seeds. Learn to milk a cow (talk about lots of rich food — milk, cream, cheese, butter…). Spam is a great long-term storage protein and fat source.
But then, so is the steer calf you got from your milk cow.
Let’s be realistic here. That’s for the young. My knowledge of such activities is academic, and I wonder how far a lot of book learning will take you in such an endeavor. Besides that, I’m too damn old and out of shape. I don’t expect to survive if things go really bad. I have the equipment and rudimentary experience in canning and preserving. I could butcher and preserve meat, Pulling something edible out of the ground by brute force is probably beyond my capabilities. Animal husbandry is tricky. I think goats would be a better bet, they’re probably hardier than cows and lower maintenance.
Wrongo on the ‘low maintenance’ part. On that account, I’ll take my sedate little Jersey cows over any goat on the planet; they’re a pain in the arse. Cow is more productive as well.
Book learning is a good start, and you no doubt have valuable skills that could well be put to use in a communal (community) effort to strive toward self-sufficiency. It’ll take community efforts to get there — I know this well as I push in that direction. I’m learning, but simply can’t do it all.
Isn’t there an old joke about curing a friend’s boredom by giving him a goat?
Not sure about a goat, but my brother-in-law from Casper, Wyoming calls that town “the armpit of the west, where men are men and sheep are nervous.”
A guy I used to know said that of Wisconsin.
I second you FM. I’d take cattle over goats in a doomstead survival situation any day of the week.
https://peakfuture.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/the-wait/
David Collum on Jim’s podcast, Chris Martenson, and a few other folks have been saying similar things.
The wait is tiring, for sure…
Maximum abstraction has arrived! Theoretically, we should all live joyfully and peacefully together forever, as the earth’s bounty overfloweth and sustains us. In reality, we won’t and it doesn’t, Green New Deal and other such flights of fancy notwithstanding.
B A L T I M O R E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqxDmnM_g5Q
I asked a liberal friend of mine to explain why Baltimore isn’t thriving given that it’s everything the Left wants: majority-minority, a sanctuary city, thoroughly Democrat, and thoroughly under minority leadership. I mean how can you blame racism when minorities control everything?
The answer was that it’s suffering due to racist banks and corporations who refuse to invest, and racist fleeing whites.
I was told [by a man with a 140? IQ] Blacks are they was they are due to slavery.
i kid you not.
Same with New Haven, Ex.
By lefty standards it should be a paradise.
Instead its dystopic, Hell on Earth.
Brh
That is too bad Brh!!! I was thinking of migrating North when times get real tough.
Did you ask me a question, last week?
SSL winters can be brutal here.
And they last forever. On Nov 15 we had about a half a foot of snow, the other night, 51/2 months later, it was sleeting.
You’re better off in the southland, SSL, on a piece of fertile land away from the city, AR15 strapped to your back … a country girl will survive.
brh
Yikes that is a whole lot of time to be cold! I don’t know if I can handle that lol. But I bet your summers are not quite as hot and maybe less humid? It seems like its 100 here from May to September and like 100% humidity. But the flip side is that fall-winter-spring is basically awesome with some cold here and there.
I am not sure malthuss. I probably did ask you a question. I feel like I ask you something at least once every thread :-).
Tuesday Apr 30 @ 1047 Snowing as I type this. Woodstove is going; hopefully for the last day until sometime in September/October.
North America is very extreme in its conditions. More so than Europe or South America for the most part. Much of Asia can get very hot and cold too. Continental Climate
Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, St. Louis, East St. Louis Illinois, Gary, In, Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, NYC, LA, Frisco, Seattle, Baltimore, D.C., Portland… the list goes on and on. All are Dem Progressive run and every single one are shitholes.
Any of the progressives that post here want to know what real racism looks like? As a white person go to Memphis or St. Louis, or Chicago’s south side. Go there at night by yourself, I dare any of you progressives to do so. Please do it. You can find out what racism truly is. Of course your chances of living through the experience will be slim.
Sure why not? Any excuse to excuse the inexcusable. That is so much easier than taking responsibility and holding people accountable for their actions. Some people exist to create and some people exist to blame others for their lack of creativity.
It’s a backhanded way of saying Blacks are incompetent and Whites are superior. Such people want the high to be the slaves of the low, metaphorically if not literally. The Low will take all such pronouncements literally though, have no doubt.
And of course the High should take care of the Low – but on their terms and staring with their own poor relations. Such arrangements (social contract) used to be called States or Nations….
>>> It’s a backhanded way of saying Blacks are incompetent and Whites are superior.
That’s your interpretation and not what I intended.
What I would say is that black culture and lefty ideology don’t appear to be helping blacks achieve success.
So you think all races are the same and therefore equal? Prove it. And the burden is on you since all the evidence goes the other way.
>>> So you think all races are the same and therefore equal?
I’m guessing here that you mean with regard to innate intelligence or something along those lines?
There are plenty of blacks both smarter and more successful than both of us put together. The burden is on you to explain how this is possible given their allegedly inferior genes.
Meanwhile, have you ever been to West Virginia?
13% of Blacks are above the White average IQ of 100. You haven’t studied this at all, have you? You actually think all races are equal. How many medals did Whites win in sprinting in the last Olympics? Or in the Marathon? The best in those two classes of sports being the West African Blacks and East African Blacks respectively.
>>> How many medals did Whites win in sprinting in the last Olympics? Or in the Marathon?
The fact that blacks dominate many sports could simply be a cultural phenomenon. I’ll wait while you explain how the same genes responsible for skin color are also responsible for all the other traits you want to infer…
Many elephants in the house. In every room.
What is being avoided, or at least until very recently is the neanderthal/denisovan factor in modern humanity.
And its effects.
The human progeny of these species in the genus homo kept a few genes along and for good reason.
We didn’t land on the Horn of Africa.
The horn landed on us.
Culture indicates success in sports?
janos has mentioned ‘race is not just skin color’–thats the deal.
Libs want to get me to believe a yellow is just a black w a paint job.
Not so.
Well whatever the case in terms of IQ, athletic ability, etc., it does appear that racial groups are different. Certainly culturally and behaviorally speaking there are sometimes dramatic differences. Nature or nurture? Well, IMO it seems like these differences that we notice outright are enough to justify the idea that groups adapt to their environments differently based on varied capabilities. Also, notice how people will naturally segregate if there is no interference. There is no reason that we should expect equal outcomes for the various racial groups like we don’t expect equal outcomes for individuals.
If Harvard admissions standards are any measure then it’s Asians that are the superior race.
I could also make that argument using homelessness stats in Seattle. Asians are the vast minority in terms of the Seattle homeless racial dynamic.
>>> Culture indicates success in sports?
Why not? Perhaps if I spent my entire youth shooting hoops instead of reading books…
>>> race is not just skin color
Sure. Hair, eyes, noses, etc. But intelligence? Even Janos claims that “13% of Blacks are above the White average IQ of 100”. So what good is claiming that they’re “incompetent” as a race, when there’s a 13% chance (according to Janos) that they’ll have above-average IQ?
Well but what I get from what he is saying is that there is an 87% chance you will interact with a Black person whose IQ is less than 100. So the majority of interactions will be with those of lesser intelligence. Unless you happen to live in a pocket of high IQ Blacks which may be possible if they choose to live around one another. There are on average differences between the various racial groups that is all. Humans are very adaptable and can be trained over time to do things that may traditionally fall outside of their capabilities. Thus a White man can practice and train his way to be an awesome basket ball player even if he can’t jump quite as high as his Black peers. Alternatively, a Black man can practice and train to be a nuclear physicist even though most of his peers are Whites and Asians and he never had the grades they did without lots of trial and error.
>>> Well but what I get from what he is saying is that there is an 87% chance you will interact with a Black person whose IQ is less than 100.
No it’s a bell curve (normal distribution). So if we accept Janos’s stats, there’s a 13% chance that IQ will be higher, 13% that it will be lower, and 77% that it will be average.
Yeah, Blacks are on a Bell Curve too – their own, not ours. Their dome is at IQ 85.
Will you please read the Bell Curve? I hate to see an intelligent man talk like a moron. And yeah, I never said race was just skin color. Many Dravidians are blacker than our American Blacks but are very different in every other way. And Blacks have many physical traits that allow them to excel in many sports. Thicker skulls, heavier bones, low fat, high degree of fast twitch muscle good for explosive force, long legs, an elongated achilles heel that makes for speed, etc.
The East African distance men all stem from on people, the Kalenjin. Very different from the above. Different kind of muscles. Likewise our Blacks aren’t typically good at distance running.
>>> Their dome is at IQ 85.
And this is why I don’t put too much faith in IQ scores. 85 is the threshold for legal mental retardation. Congratulations, you’ve just given blacks another excuse to avoid personal responsibility.
If IQ is a measure of innate intelligence, then it shouldn’t be influenced by cultural factors such as wealth and education. Guess what? It is. There’s a correlation between national development and national IQ averages. Oops!
>>> And Blacks have many physical traits that allow them to excel in many sports.
Some blacks do; some blacks don’t. Meanwhile, someone should tell Larry Bird that he violated Janos’s race rules!
Next you’re going to qualify and say “most” or “on average”, which may indeed be true from a statistical viewpoint. But correlation does not imply causation. As I said, the reasons could be cultural or environmental.
>>> Likewise our Blacks aren’t typically good at distance running.
LOL. So now we have two races of blacks? If “our” blacks differ from “their” blacks, then that’s a sure sign of cultural influence—not race.
ExScot:
Hypothetically speaking, let’s say a scientific research survey showed that Swedish adult men were on average 2 inches taller than Greek adult men
Would you.rant and rave about the racism of such a survey? Would you mock it with specious arguments? Would you be deeply, morally, personally outraged?
People who normally believe in science, stop believing when the hot button issue of IQ comes up. But you have to use science to refute science, not emotion.
>>> Would you.rant and rave about the racism of such a survey?
Is that your interpretation? That I’m ranting and raving? Did I call Janos a moron as he called me? Show me where I even used the word: “racism”.
I’m not even disputing Janos’s stats—merely his conclusions.
>>> let’s say a scientific research survey showed that Swedish adult men were on average 2 inches taller than Greek adult men
So would you then conclude that Swedes are a race of giants? And Greeks are a race of midgets? And that it’s all due to genetics? Are you certain it’s not environmental? Did you test for that?
Did you know that Chinese used to be shorter and now they’re taller? Do you know why? Nutrition has improved a great deal since Mao’s time…
hmuller
When I last read about such things (a decade or two ago) Australian, Scottish and Irish men were all shorter than English men.
Human beings became shorter and sicker for a quite long period after the transition to agriculture from hunting and gathering.
Neither of these phenomena has anything to do with race, but a lot to do with how long it takes a population group to recover from the effects of poor nutrition and living conditions.
Japanese people, including first-generation immigrants to the US, were the subject of many medical studies because of their extremely low cancer rates. They mostly ate fish, vegetables and rice. Once they started eating what other Americans ate their cancer rates joined everyone else’s.
“People who normally believe in science, stop believing when the hot button issue of IQ comes up. But you have to use science to refute science, not emotion.”
I take it you’ve forgotten how emotionally bothered you became when I pointed out the reverse correlation between IQ and religious belief? You became extremely defensive and accused me of all sorts, when I was merely repeating the results that studies have shown, time after time.
He who lives by IQ dies by IQ. I find myself, unusually, with Exscotticus on this one.
You don’t need a high IQ to live a decent life and take care of those for whom you are responsible. Although if there’s no decent-paying work available and the housing market has been turned into yet another money spinner for wealthy people, you’re going to have an uphill struggle forever, no matter what colour you are.
Green Alba,
That IQ study you referenced was bogus. The “researchers” declared the people of Japan, South Korea, and Singapore unreligious. Then noted their higher than world average IQ’s. Gee notice anything else? Like they are East Asians.
Then they classifiied Africans as very religious people. Then they discovered that, lo and behold, Africans had lower IQ’s. Do you see a pattern here?
I believe IQ is the result of both environmental factors (like nutrition, culture) and heredity. Much scientific research has been devoted to trying to determine how big a role various factors play. But all the best minds of left wing academia have been unable to dismiss the hereditary (tribal racial) component as irrelevant. And believe me, they have wanted to do so. But respect for truth and science still has some adherents.
I am not saying IQ makes anyone a better person or deserving or more rights and privileges – same with good looks, musical talent, leadership abilities, athletic and artistic talents, or a high ancestral Celtic name. Though the last may merit a song from Enya.
>>> I believe IQ is the result of both environmental factors (like nutrition, culture) and heredity.
I agree, which is why we can’t make the kind of racial inferences that Janos makes.
The reality is that we have genes and natural selection. The degree to which one group of people or another exhibit some trait is likely due to that trait being the most successful for their environment over looooong periods of time.
But given that we now have civilizations and welfare states and globalism, does any of this even matter anymore? Maybe we’re beyond the point where the glacially slow process of natural selection is significant.
hmuller
Why do you think there is only one study?
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/01/26/are-religious-people-really-less-smart-on-average-than-atheists/
This one was done by researchers from Imperial College. I would assume, since the same tests were done by all 63,000 people, that they’d have to be at least people whose first language was English, otherwise it simply wouldn’t work. I’m guessing the people were actually British.
And assumptions weren’t made about people in Sg or anywhere else – the people themselves were asked to say if they were religious or not.
“To investigate, Daws and Hampshire surveyed more than 63,000 people online, and had them complete a 30-minute set of 12 cognitive tasks that measured planning, reasoning, attention and working memory. The participants also indicated whether they were religious, agnostic or atheist.
So I guess you’re thinking of another study. There are many, and they all say the same thing.
Not that I care, as I don’t judge people by their IQ anyway.
My husband once told me – a couple of decades ago – that that song (by Enya) was his mother’s favourite song (although presumably before Enya’s time).
Now he can’t remember ever saying that. Men eh! 🙂
I have a lowly name and it appears my genes are Scandinavian… maybe I should arrange for them to push my funeral pyre out on a longship.
When a man tells you that his favorite singer is Enya, it’s a sure sign that he just wants to get in ya.
Cliches get to be cliches typically because they have much truth in them. I figured that out in high school. But you, X, still seem to be struggling with the Obvious.
Some breeds of dogs are better at certain things, have certain traits, look a certain way, etc. They are enough alike to be called x or y. They’re a thing. Race is like that. Don’t fight your own commonsense. There’s more to know, but don’t bother if you can’t even admit there’s a there there. That makes you a Liberal. And from the broader perspective, Libertarians are Liberals, denying basic realities and identities just as they do in favor of some demented Idealism.
“Look before you leap,” is a cliche. But so is “He who hesitates is lost.”
So much for finding truth in cliches.
Before you make extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary proof. And when it comes to claiming all these racial qualities, you lack the proof. True you have all kinds of metrics on the generally poor academic performance of blacks. But correlation is not causation. You haven’t ruled out environmental factors. All you have are cliches.
And every time you see an example of someone who doesn’t fit your racial rules, your mind does a little dance…
Not sure you’re right about that – in Whites that called dull normal I think – and in most of the World 85-90 is the normal. Seventy is considered retarded in Whites but it is the norm for pure Negroes. And note – they exhibit none of the emotional or physical disabilities associated with retardation in Whites at that IQ. For them, it is Normal. Needless to say, such semi-tards have no business in our Society. Seventy IQ means a much lower level of morality. So they may not be spastic or silly, but they may well be cunning – and they Will be brutal.
As one born & bred in Baltimore and who lived there (the Northern and NW ‘burbs) from 1950 to 1998 until decamping to VT and NY, I can tell you: political corruption, fear of the underclass and crime by the older middle and wealthy class, and, yes, there most certainly is institutional racism of the type mentioned. Baltimore has always been, in it’s essence, more of a southern than northern city, but it does thrive, selectively, and it is a city of great character and unique charm in many ways, to those who know it well. After all, a city known for such diverse characters as Babe Ruth, Frank Zappa, Poe, and the great HL Mencken, would have to be one-of-a-kind.
snarkmatic9000 – …and David Simon, who gave us a chilling insight to the town through “The Wire” and on whose work “Homicide: Life on the Street” was based.
It makes one wonder why Republicans would want to force young black unmarried girls and women to carry their pregnancies to full term when the baby was unplanned, is unwanted and there is no father around to help support the child.
Maybe because they have traditional values and are not genocidally racist as are liberal Democrats (who will of course deny it.) Research Margaret Sanger’s express wish to eliminate as many people of color as possible.
Tate–‘they didnt want too much anarchy’\
\Oh, yes, they wanted their anarchy. Which reminds me \of a protest that happened near Lydons home.
I went to see an anti Google protest. by the Google[ front for CIA] building.
There was none.
Instead 100? 200? antifa types marched main street in Venice screaming
no borders
no nation
no mass deportations.
I thought, if any of them had their car stolen, they would go to police.
If any of them were threatened by a wetback neighbor, they would go to police.
They wanted Anarchy, but they didn’t want too much Anarchy.
IOW, they wanted ‘Controlled Anarchy’ LOL. This is the furry sigil of the Left, LARPing through life as if it were a style, never serious.
But serious men are going to respond.
Why, Green Alba, why?
Why did IRA attack?
Why do muslims attack?
with regard to,
Sadiq Khan said terror attacks were ‘part and parcel’ of living in London.
Terror attacks are indeed part and parcel of living in London.
If someone wants to attack somewhere symbolic of England or Britain, they will first attack London, then Manchester and Birmingham. Just as the IRA did.
Londoners are used to it. It never becomes ‘no big deal’. But it remains part and parcel of their lives.
The idea of inclusion is to exclude me. Why? Because I’m a white man.
Last week a millennial nearly ran me off the road. He was angry even before he came speeding up to my tail. As he illegally passed me he flipped me off and yelled, “Old man.” He had a “Love the Earth” bumper sticker.
wow–thanks for sharing.
I was at the beach. On a walk way. someone [young] wanted to bike across the walk way and told me to get out of his way.
The walkway is ‘no bikes allowed’.
I know an old guy who was biking on the bike path. A mexican? smiles as he pushed the guys bike over. The old guy broke his hip.
The attacker smiled and walked away.
OMG. When an old person breaks their hip, they usually die within about a year. 🙁
He is about 60. He said the latino smiled and walked away. I think the broken bone was hip, may have been leg.
Go to the East South Central Florida coast. Gangs of elderly roam around, many in souped up motorized wheelchairs, harassing and attacking the Young and Beautiful. It’s a ghetto….
I never yell “Get off my lawn!” because I want this to be a ‘kid-friendly’ cul-de-sac because that’s how you keep the property values high. The little ones & their millennial parents & their free-range dogs run amok. Mrs. Tate did yell “Get out of our rocks!” few months back & I could tell the millennial ‘helicopter’ Mom didn’t take it too well.
JHK said: What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens?
I haven’t owned a TV for several years or bothered to stream anything online. But, I had a few minutes to kill the other day waiting for my wife, and I wandered into one of the big chain stores in Poland that sells anything and everything media related, and I have to admit I was impressed as I strolled down the TV aisle (do they still call it TV?). Huge screens with sports action/battle action/cartoons/nature shows. It was actually better than lifelike. There was something very artificial about it. I can only imagine what porn would look like. Why even bother to go outside when you can see nature in all its glory with such high resolution?
TV and marketing. End game. How many hours/day are people spending in front of a screen? I’m sure just before I die, I’ll mutter something like: I wish I had watched Game of Thrones…
Brain changes and redirections emotional disconnections- 2013 DISCNECTD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANvdF4B0AIU
you’ll have to clip and paste
Jim,
Bravo! What an excellent piece you have put together for your CFN readers. Insightful, well written (as always) and spot on. You still have the chops, my friend. What you have written rings so true, but it also shows the depths to which we have fallen. We are all denizens of a clouded and dark virtual reality now. Clearly, it will not end well.
JDH
Here in San Francisco, black cars, usually SUVs, project the “fuck it” attitude of their drivers, who contend with soul-crushing traffic as perfectly healthy young people opt for private car rides (driven by Uber and Lyft gig workers) to get them to their ass-fattening laptop jobs. In this rather walkable and bikable city, the reliable presence of zombie-drugged street denizens makes walking into downtown a questionable proposition, especially for the hoards of inexperienced under-30 kids who just got off the boat to shoot for the stars on the economic rocket-ship of San Francisco and nearby Silicon Valley.
Recently, a “green” and “Certified B-corporation” “startup” business recently moved their offices, and in the process sent vast amounts of barely-used office equipment to the dump, apparently calculating it was cheaper to re-buy everything they needed instead of trucking it 2 miles down the road. Their whole business proposition is predicated on the fake reality that buying your household consumables (walnut scrubber sponge, anti-bacterial hand soap, soy candle, and related bullshit) in small amounts, shipped to your door, is not part of the same hyper-consumerist death-rattle that buying a 48-pack of Ivory Soap at Walmart is. The new business that moved in had a party at which they found it too troublesome to separate the empty beer cans and bottles from the rest of their garbage, and sent everything to the landfill. Recycling is for poor people, right? And those youngsters, who I confronted, didn’t want to consider that the shit world they were striving to survive in was being made all the shittier by their thoughtless actions. Each generation contends with the world they’re born into, and each would sacrifice it to secure their position and keep the party going.
are cities really walk able?
what of air pollution and crime.
dodging jump motorized bikes and scooters and old style bikes.
and meth heads.
I walk. I know. I hope I am not injured by the free spirits.
“are cities really walk able?
what of air pollution and crime.”
he heh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf2zx6xFPBk
>>> Here in San Francisco…
Hey at least you don’t have to contend with falling cranes. Also I heard your bums are better than their bums. Always consider the upside!
And that is exactly the attitude that needs elimination. Unregulated individualism is one of the most pernicious ideas to have ever come about.
“Unregulated individualism”
Coffee out the nose on that one 🙂
Code named UI henceforth.
Sorry about that but glad you enjoyed it at the same time :-). UI is killing us. Moving past the ego to realize one is part of a greater whole is a must if we are actually to be a real community again IMHO.
You are my Heir Apparent. All shall bow to you or face the Consequences. In the meantime, U and I shall rule together.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8951952/saudi-execution-gay-confessions-beheading/
I am simply humbled. If it is your wish then it is my command.
They (the Elohim) don’t make them like you anymore. Maybe they are on strike?
Well I am a limited deluxe edition and I took up a lot of their special ingredients when They made me ;-). They made others like me too but I think I am the most talkative one lol.
>>> Unregulated individualism
Clever!
Thanks!
Hive mind? Communism-Social Rating PRC-style?
Doesn’t really sound like your thing really, unless, of course, you (and Janos) get to decide what the regulations are, I guess.
Yep, the adoption of ‘unregulated individualism’ as a bad thing surprised me as well. On other days they’d want to call it ‘freedom’. What is free speech if it isn’t unregulated individualism?
If you want to indulge in some nostalgia go watch “Dirty Harry”.
San Francisco circa 1971. A nice place to live. The junkies in the Haight were civil and didn’t shit on the streets.
In LA, one Black bought a million dollars of furniture for his city job.
I cant find it on duckduck, sorry.
Recycling should be enforced by municipal codes. But it never will be. See, in a Democracy, the ‘people’ decide.
It’s the highest form of government, democracy, LOL. That means the lowest common denominator of people are in charge. We recycled all our cans, bottles, plastic & paper up until about 8 months ago. Then, our trash company eliminated the option. Oh well, in a democracy, you take the bad with the good.
In a better world — there is no such thing as a perfect world — the broad franchise would be narrowed down to patriarchal property owners of sound mind & good character.
Given how well you write & articulate angst you are welcome to leave that shitpit called SF and become a Canadian. We need more smart writers in Canada. Please defect from the USA pronto.
If you move to our nation’s capital I will buy you a beer.
RW
Just another one of the many fuck ups by the boomer generation. They raised shitty kids because they were such shitty parents. Don’t blame the kids.
JHK asked, “Are we too far gone now? ”
The answer unfortunately is yes, hell yes. As Gail Tverberg has written on many occasions, there are NO solutions to our problems. The Gov’t knows it, which is why it’s ‘pedal to the metal’ because they know the end result will be the Wile E. Coyote moment for not just the USA but for the entire World.
Meanwhile China is building it’s Silk Road in Asia and building Ghost Cities and Factories and tearing them down just to make their GDP look good. Eventually the music is going to stop and the Titanic will sink for good. That’s just the reality where we are all at.
I have heard about these Chinese ghost cities. It’s also true in regards to North Korea no? Now how is that for a gigantic misallocation of resources!!!
I’ve never heard or read that about NK. They virtually have no economy or money to pull that off.
NK has at least one ghost city. This is an interesting article that highlights it, among others.
https://www.cracked.com/article_20995_5-enormous-modern-ghost-towns-you-wont-believe-exist.html
This post, despite my personal convictions, in its first part is an attempt to assess the real state of affairs from a secular point of view.
This is due to the fact that futurism and globalism are obviously not Christian concepts.
The only possible Christian futurism is called “Apocalypse” and the mystical nature of Globalism is also described there. Nevertheless, both futurism and Globalism are undoubtedly the basis for decision-making by the leaders of the largest states, including Russia.
Paradoxically, the consideration of this contradiction makes it possible to clearly identify Orthodox Christian philosophy and ethics as an invaluable resource for overcoming the global economic crisis.
Over the past 200 years, after Malthus articulated the problem of the contradiction between the limited planetary resources and the number of humanity growing exponentially, 3 fundamentally different futurological concepts have stood the test of time:
1. Humanity is divided into two biologically different types – “supermen” and “subhumans”. Supermen destroy subhumans as competitors for exhausted natural resources, providing the remaining few gentlemen to a high standard of living.
2. Humanity continues to evolve and multiply, compensating for the exhausted natural resources by the achievements of scientific and technological progress.
3. Humanity uses the remaining resources to enter the Space and gain access to the unlimited resources of the Solar System and the Galaxy. And the Earth turns into a resort for the brave explorers of the Cosmos.
These concepts appeared especially strongly after 1945, during the Cold War. This is most likely due to the fact that at that time the concept #1, hereinafter referred to as pessimistic, lost its relevance in the first place due to its obvious connection with Nazism, and secondly because the use of nuclear weapons made those resources that was supposed to conquer, unavailable.
After the geopolitical catastrophe of the collapse of the USSR, humanity lost an alternative to the madness of financial capitalism and the contradiction between the limited resources of the Earth and the unlimited ability to print dollars came to the fore.
Moreover, honest attempts by the US government to limit and take control of its own printing press, in the absence of external restraining power, which was the USSR until 1990, reminds me of Baron Munchausen, who was pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair, and were objectively doomed to failure.
As a result, the concept of postmodern has emerged, essentially identical to the futurological concept No. 1, and in its most presentable form, formulated by Francis Fukuyama.
Moreover, it should be noted that, apparently, the administration of Bill Clinton put an end to futurological concepts #2 and #3, hereinafter named optimistic. This conclusion follows from the fact that funding for research in the field of energy (thermonuclear) and space, which are key to these concepts, has ceased.
The only sign of the existence of these optimistic concepts #2 and #3 in the postmodern world is the EU Hadron Collider project. Unfortunately, the postmodern crisis has affected not only morality (I consider it obvious that concept #1 is immoral), but also the scientific method as the basis of Western civilization, which manifested itself in the failure of this project.
Western science has lost the criterion of truth and became a victim of the collapse of the concept of “reality” as a philosophical category.
In the economic field, this was manifested in the separation of economic indicators from material production and in de-industrialization of the most developed countries. In the field of physics, the emergence of theories of the so-called gauge invariance fields, that can not be compared with experiment due to an arbitrary number of adjustable parameters and “world constants”.
Based on this, in the next 20 years, the hadron colider will be busy searching for the Higgs boson and adjusting the “world constants” to the fact of its absence. It cannot even be ruled out that the Higgs boson and the corresponding Nobel Prizes will be discovered several times.
Most likely with their subsequent disappearance into the black holes of the Colider’s enormous budget.
Even in the field of mathematics, the crisis of the scientific method manifested itself in the lack of interest in the study of the correspondence of exact and numerical solutions of partial differential equations.
This crisis of scientific thinking is associated not so much with the development of science as such, but with the Western European mentality formed by the Great Schism.
To be continued…
The Purpose of Life …is Life, amen.
The sole purpose of life, and therefore our only human purpose may simply be, life itself. That, upon reflection, would appear to be quite enough. The life force does have its urges though, lots of them, it would appear. After countless eons of self-replication along came sexual reproduction, life had apparently gotten to be in somewhat more of a hurry. Life then pursued bigger and better forms of itself as mobility, size, vision etc. ensued over time.
Vision was very unique and a promising end in itself, but life appeared to desire a different platform with which to fully employ this new sense. Many prototypes came and went, and eventually on the scene appeared humankind complete with a newly acquired awareness. Did life, with this move, express desire for an ego to admire itself or, more positively, to express itself? Why else create a platform embellished with consciousness? Then, alas, something went very wrong with life’s dedicated pursuit of life? Human behavior. We know large portions of the recent history of our species and it’s not very good. Considering our known history, can we begin to significantly amend our ways if life demands a timely accounting?
So if and when life decides we have exhausted all possibility of further usefulness, and our excesses overwhelm life’s other vital interests, do we then risk severance of the thread with life? Should not we begin to tug ever more gently at this tether to lessen our risk? Does life even care about the fate of us, its creature? Probably not, countless other species have traveled along on life’s quest, prospered to a degree and vanished. Will we join them?
Whence came then, this thing, this awareness, this brightness in the void, so cherished by life our very species could be made forfeit to preserve it? Perhaps it was the animal curiosity of some lumbering hominid possessed of sufficient cranial matter that chanced upon a source. The menu of vegetable suspects is quite large. The plants, cacti, mushrooms and vines that possess the chemical soups that have the ability, and perhaps desire to exert themselves aggressively when combined with suitable host brain, is legion. We currently regard these substances as “mind altering” but could they perhaps have been “mind creating” at some remote point in time?
Students of psychedelic phenomenon have reported a tendency among this family of substances to exhibit a strong urge to promote its own agenda over the host consciousness at times. Life, in this way, may have introduced the initial spark of awareness in receptive hominid brains with suitable vegetable matter containing psychedelic chemical ingredients. Imagine the wonder this revelation surely produced in a previously unconscious world. The binges and quest for more light shows that followed in the still only partially illuminated minds of these creatures must have been incredible.
Perhaps this initial visitation of consciousness onto a receptive human brain and the incredible awakening produced therein is responsible for the ongoing human quest for enlightenment. Our species has demonstrated a universal affinity for various visions, ecstasies and raptures and they have been zealously sought for millennia. Perhaps then, a racial memory of, and longing for a return to that original staggering event gives impetus to the universal spiritual quests we humans faithfully follow to this day.
Of course it is possible life may now be providing itself with a non-life fallback to the dilemma posed by our misuse of awareness and consciousness. If humankind becomes suspect of probable catastrophic losses to many of its other progeny, life then may seek to substitute Artificial Intelligence for flawed human intelligence. We, ourselves, may rapidly be creating the instruments for our future replacement with life’s resigned encouragement. Life may value this tediously acquired awareness beyond all measure. More the pity for humankind.
These phenomena are unique on the planet; life, the life force and the awareness/consciousness of one primate species. What we regard as ultimate reality is simply the stories we tell ourselves and others combined with whatever actions humans are capable of accomplishing. Humanity must now learn to live with 5 Gigabit technology becoming a reality and should perhaps begin to wonder which future Gigabit number will be the one to provide the artificial intelligence and awareness deemed sufficient by the life force to render our kind redundant if it chooses to do so?
Aren’t you worried about 5G radiation giving everyone cancer?
Be careful if you’re in the market for a new home. The 5G antennas are everywhere, even buried in the street right out front of your house. Some of them vibrate at high-pitched frequencies, causing people to lose sleep. It can be as irritating as tinnitus.
A nice read Robert Magill
My own belief is that consciousness pervades the entire universe or multi-verse if you want to lean that way. People often conflate mind and consciousness but they are not interchangeable words. Mind is consciousness attached to matter. Perception is creation, the overwhelming sensation of a visionary experience is not a sense or realization of a new experience but rather a profound vast remembering. We’ve deliberately stuck ourselves here with amnesia and our mission is to discover the way back again. We’ve planted clues to the simple answer but so far haven’t advanced enough to realize we are even playing a game we made up ourselves. One of the clues meant to point the way is how dogs behave towards their masters. Unconditional love.
Evelyn,
I hold similar beliefs. Maybe there’s a worldwide awakening going on as to our true metaphysical condition, which we’ve forgotten.
Putting it into metaphors we understand: are we amnesiac voluntary players of a video game or prisoners of a malevolent power?
I recently read “The Simulation Hypothesis” by Rizwan Virk. He presents evidence that the universe is pixelated in time and space (thus digitally manageable). And the results of quantum experiments could mean storage space is conserved by just putting reality where we are looking at the moment.
Fincaln,
If the Hadron Collider creates a black hole that tears the Earth apart and sucks it in…..will it happen so fast we feel no pain? I worry about that.
Also, I think your points 2 and 3 are really parts of the same process.
“…the real state of affairs from a secular point of view.”
An impossibility, in my ostentatious opinion.
If you haven’t seen it already some of you may enjoy a short story by Paolo Bacigalupi include in of all places the latest edition of the MIT Technology review: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613349/a-full-life/
Short but sweet.
But then came a summer night when the electric grid went down. A hundred and ten degrees at 3 a.m. Everyone already on water restrictions. Pitch-dark in the middle of a city. Everyone out on the streets, desperate to catch a breeze.
Many good comments today.
Your post upstream about driverless cars was especially good, KDog.
Brh
Hmmm. What if “Make America Great Again” wasn’t just relegated to the scrap heap of inanity as it only referred to the desire to regain the manufacturing base and world dominance the US had in the 50’s and 60’s? What if we looked at that slogan as more than just pure economics but rather, to a desire to regain the stable family structure, communities, volunteerism, and “class” that we once had?
What if we looked upon this slogan as a desire to return to a time when the nuclear family was the norm, when men were men and women were women and gender wasn’t optional or multiple choice? When black Americans were more likely to have stable families and not the current 80% or so out-of-wedlock birthrate? When you really could raise a family on one income if you wanted to do that. When people dressed appropriately for a trip to the store, church, to take the kids to school,travel etc; wearing your PJ’s to Walmart, cut-offs to church or anything with your underwear exposed wasn’t considered acceptable. When getting a college degree meant that you really were equipped for a good professional job and that you hadn’t just spent the equivalent of a mortgage to acquire it?
So perhaps, instead of mocking the MAGA folks, what if we embraced them instead?
I agree but I am afraid that isn’t going to happen. The old fashioned morality and cultural norms are entirely associated with White Supremacy now. All of the behaviors and ideals you list out are racism. I don’t believe this. But let’s say that one half of the country believes it. The styles of behavior and dress that you see as undesirable are in fact desirable for much of the population. There was far more agreement about who and what we were in the 50’s and 60’s from everything I have read and heard. There are simply too many competing subcultures now to form a working whole. Unfortunately, I think fragmentation and separation are the future.
I read an interesting article the other day about a school principal in Houston Texas who put out a notice to the parents that the school was going to have a parental dress code. Essentially, there was a level of decency that parents were expected to adhere to when they came to the school. Huge uproar and to-do from the parents plus all of the defenders who thought this was so terribly unfair and classist. The interesting thing of course was that this school was majority black and so is the principal. Yet she was being attacked for demanding that the parents provide a good example to their children and dress appropriately. The Houston Teacher’s Organization head attacked her for this too(white guy); guess they don’t want to see blacks demand that other blacks behave and dress in accordance with middle-class norms or something. So yeah, I suppose my ideas are just hopelessly white or something(although I expect that school principal would agree with me!)
And yeah, I see pics from the 50’s and such and people definitely dressed nicer. I just think this is a big part perhaps of what the MAGA crowd is trying to regain.
Oh yes I heard about the Houston incident as well. Thank you for bringing that up actually because it is a good point. When there are people within the Black community who see that fatherlessness, lack of a proper upbringing, non-existent manners, etc., are terrible maladies that need remedying they are utterly savaged by other Blacks and White leftists. The left, and really it is the Marxist left benefits from the Black community being at odds with the rest of society. What better way to tear society apart then to mix groups together and ensure that the various groups do not assimilate to common norms. That is the Marxist playbook for creating chaos in order to fill the power vacuum with Marxism. It is also the folly of the Capitalist system to believe these groups will ever be able to assimilate to common norms when natural group tendencies are to self segregate.
Mountain gal,
I believe that brand-name slogan has the Trip G’s fingerprints all over it… and I guess we all now know how “genuine” *that* guy is.
Just call it “besmirched” and have done with it. (This acronym bullshit has got to stop as well; it’s purpose is only to dilute meaning and destroy understanding, and I think we’ve gone quite far enough down that road, thanks very much.)
The Old Guard Revolutionaries (like you) always get shouldered aside by the Young Guard as per China’s Cultural Revolution or the Bolsheviks, the Menshavics. Ditto the French Revolution. Phillip Egalitaire (a made up name), lost his head. He was helping to fund the Revolution and he just didn’t seem authentic enough, somehow. In other words, they found out he was rich and had his own Agenda, just like the rest of the Revolutionary Aristocrats.
If you had done your homework you would have realized that this would happen. But how many young idealists really think things through?
I like you speculations about the intent/motive behind the “G” but you left out a few.
I would include striving for a time when presidential adultery, fornication, and obscenity was instant disqualification for having any chance of respect from the electorate.
Also, a time when leaders were expected not to behave towards their loyal opposition like a baboon mimicking itself in a mirror.
And of course a time when hypocrisy wasn’t portrayed as a virtue simply because you knew your supporters were too addled to recognize it as such.
Things like that.
Sad indeed your other post about the Texas principal seeking to elevate social norms of self presentation. What’s truly sad also is that any squawking objector to anything either on the right or left is falsely portrayed as a person or persons wielding a megaphone speaking for more than just a tiny agitated sliver of an otherwise approving or indifferent population.
One of the things admirable in a place like Italy, nicely dressed people who make it seem like you’ve returned to a cattle feed lot when you get back to the states again.
Yes indeed. Spent a fair amount of time in France, Italy etc and I could always pick out the Americans by how they dressed. Sad.
So much nonsense and arrogance rolled up in one post.
Your list of disqualifiying criteria would have served to disqualify every US president in history.
Here in Europe I see just as many members of the bovine masses walking around in track suits and sweat pants. The only difference is that Europeans buy clothes that fit.
You’e rather rude. Would you speak to me this way if we were sitting together at the table?
Only when called for. The post was intended for Evelyn. The software used here makes it rather difficult to respond directly as part of a thread.
My apologies for the mix-up.
Hmm Lyndon Johnson was by all accounts rude, crass and couldn’t keep it in his pants.
He was by all accounts fond of whipping out his Johnson and showing people as well as making people talk to him while he took a dump with the door open.
He was a racist and a bigot the essence of what you describe and best of all a DEMOCRAT!
Once again you prove to have zero grasp of history or reality.
We could look at John F. Kennedy and his affair with Miss Monroe with his brother probably at the same time!
Wanna talk about Truman he had plenty of scandals and left office with a 22% rating.
The list is endless since we are dealing with human beings imagine if they had the internet back then!
“What if we looked at that slogan as more than just pure economics but rather, to a desire to regain the stable family structure, communities, volunteerism, and “class” that we once had?”
This would be “Make America Free Again”.
When I was growing up in my small city in Oregon, what you listed, Mountain Gal, was a given. One knew how to dress for school, for church, for special occasions, for play. No one ever wore their pajamas out in public. People didn’t name call constantly. We were a polite society. JFK said it very well: “So let us begin anew–remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.”
From his inauguration address.
Males who attended college were called college men and were respected. Women who attended were role models for those of us watching.
I grew up in a time when we had a common culture. When we started each day at school with the Pledge of Allegiance and then sang a patriotic song. We revered Kate Smith for singing “God Bless America” and we agreed with the sentiment in the song. We were a mostly united nation. But this, of course, was right after WWII.
Now so much diversity is our undoing. We have few common or shared values, and we have very little civil discourse. Free speech is threatened especially on campus and college attendees demand safe spaces.
Hat tip to SSL and her “unregulated individualism” which I also fear is tearing our nation apart.
I voted for Trump because underneath his bloviating exterior he seemed to reflect a lot of my values. Love of country. Love of the Constitution and respect for it. It has certainly been a long journey from my youth and our shared and common values to our present day predicament.
Yes. Sadly, I mostly missed much of that but am old enough to notice a difference. And we did recite the Pledge of Allegiance in school which I suspect now might not be looked upon favorably now? Had college students of mine come to class in jammies……. We dressed like slobs in college by the time I got there but even we didn’t wear our PJ’s!
Thank you Linda! In addition to having little in the way of common values anymore we also now have a situation where we no longer share a common language. And many newcomers have made it clear they have no intention of assimilating “American” values. They will be recreating our country for their purposes and needs. So ultimately our country has become a buffet for foreigners.
One day soon (actually maybe it has already happened?) the Constitution itself is going to be condemned for being a White Supremacist document. Just wait for it.
Great essay, Jim.
This part pretty much sums up the whole problem;
“There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis.”
I’m afraid we’re in a trap from which escape is impossible.
Thought the Tom Petty reference was going to be the song; Running Down a Dream. But, the one chosen was even more germane.
It was fun guessing though. I was leaning toward “Even the Losers”
“Don’t come around here no more”
Lyrics
Don’t come around here no more
Don’t come around here no more
Whatever you’re looking for
(Hey)
Don’t come around here no more
I’ve given up
(Stop!)
I’ve given up
(Stop! Ahh, ahh, ahh, ooh, ooh)
I’ve given up
(Stop!)
On waiting any longer
I’ve given up
On this love getting stronger
I don’t feel you anymore
You darken my door
Whatever you’re lookin’ for
(Hey)
Don’t come around here no more
I’ve given up
(Stop! Waah-hoo-ooh)
I’ve given up
(Stop! Ahh, ahh, ahh, ooh, ooh)
I’ve given up
(Stop!)
You tangled my emotions
I’ve given up
Honey please, admit it’s over
Lady
(Don’t come around here no more)
Stop walking down my street
(Don’t come around here no more)
Who do you expect to meet?
(Don’t come around here no more)
And whatever you’re lookin’ for
(Hey)
Don’t come around here no more
(Hey)
Honey please
(Honey please)
Don’t come around here no more
Whatever you’re lookin’ for
Ah, oh, ah, ah
(Aahh, ahh, ahh, ohh)
Don’t come around here no more
Oh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah
Songwriters: TOM PETTY / DAVID ALLAN STEWART
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0JvF9vpqx8
The alice in wonderland theme of the video fits the current US mentality well.
If you don’t live here, don’t surf here. And if you don’t surf here, don’t live here. Stasis. Peace profound. Prosperity. Whites on the beach at the end of creation as it begins again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4vJM4L2D2U
Well, she was standing by the highway
In her boots and silver spurs
Gonna hitchhike to the yellow moon
When a Cadillac stopped for her
And she said, “Hey, nice to meet you, are you goin’ my way?”
Yeah, that’s when it happened
The world caught fire that day
And she went down swingin’
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Well, she was over twenty-one
In trouble with the law
And it didn’t faze her none
She called her mother-in-law
And said I need a little money
I knew I could count on you
After that night in Vegas
And the hell that we went through
We went down swingin’
Like Benny Goodman
Yeah, we went down swingin’
Moonlight on the interstate
She was ‘cross the Georgia line
Looked out the window feeling great
Yeah, it had to come in time
And she said I’m never goin’ back
She said at last I’m free
I wish ma could see me now, she’d be so proud of me
She went down swingin’
Like Glenn Miller
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Like Tommy Dorsey
Yeah, she went down swingin’
Like Sammy Davis
She went down swingin’
Like Sonny Liston
“Tom Petty was right: the waiting is the hardest part, and a hard way to learn that a virtual life is not an adequate substitute for an authentic one.”
yeah, that’s why I try to work on something productive outside right now, and listen to robin redbreast as he comes back after the winter.
You make an interesting point once again Jim. For just as you have stated, the way out of the debacle of 2008 was for those with the power to control the herd to go into full blown damage and then mind control over the masses to convince them all that everything was just fine and was only going to get better. No bad guys were removed from the corrupt systems. In fact they were rewarded and the few who paid fines, (or shared the take with the government), were forgiven and promoted. Buy, buy, buy, fed by borrow, borrow, borrow have exacerbated the problem which once gain appears to be on the hairy edge.
Almost every one of the sheep I know are all expressing fears and anxieties over something they can sense but that none can put their fingers on (not that fingering it would help). The sheep dog that I know, and am one of them, understand that TS is close to hitting TF, and that a low or no debt profile is the best posture to maintain to even have a chance of getting through the Big One. The shepherds, well there are a few and I include you among them that are seeking higher ground on which to drive the flock, but far too many of those that are supposed to care for the flock are wearing their best hip boots and are using the sheep for unholy entertainment. When it all goes South, they will feed upon the flock you can be sure.
In the meanwhile let us do what we can to enlighten and protect the few that will hear and wait as patiently as we can for the inevitable. Coming to an economy near you soon, and yes, waiting IS the hardest part.
I know it sounds terrible but many times I think to myself, “Just get it over with already!” I feel bad though because it means that there will be a great deal of suffering but it almost feels like this slow walk to the cliff edge is just as destructive. It just comes in increments. But it is also difficult to be as productive as possible knowing that disaster awaits and is lurking right around the corner.
I am becoming cynical about the whole enlightening and protecting part. For example, the other day I was waiting in line at the store and the woman behind me was talking about a problem she was having with her garden. A little background: I have been gardening since I was a kid. I studied horticulture in college. I have relied on a garden for food every year for the last ten years. I know how to garden. So when I turned around and told her I could help her with her problem I should have known to keep my mouth shut. What I got back was an obvious “I don’t want to hear you” coming out of her mouth in a stream of incoherent babble. I sighed, explained, “Lady, I have been where you are and I am really just trying to help you.” She stopped, and seemed to be listening, and so I explained how to solve her problem. When I was done I stopped and looked her in the eye to see that she understood. She looked me right back in the eye and said one word, “No.” I look at her in bewilderment, I then look at the man she is with who is looking at me like I’m an idiot. That’s when I turned around and shut up
I think if people want protecting they do it themselves. I also think that something freely given has no value, even if it is golden. My advice is don’t be in a rush to rescue anyone. I know that’s not nice or what people want to hear, but my experience is that most people, once they find themselves in a rut, don’t get themselves out of it. No, they furnish the thing and call it home.
I hope you don’t become a cynic. People will benefit from the knowledge you have. A lot of people are weird now because they don’t even have common manners or know how to interact pleasantly with strangers. Think about how that will all change once people realize they need one another to survive. We don’t have problems like that quite yet so people take other people for granted as they do most things. People will change with the times or they just want make it. And those with knowledge and skills will get the upper hand. So be happy :-).
Absolutely right Farmer Joe, and I do not reach out any hand to those that clearly do not want to see one extended in their direction. Natural selection must be allowed to take place you know if we are to have any hope to go on. The most common response I see to anything anymore is the same “NO” that you mentioned. By taking the “no” approach, those who refuse to acknowledge solutions or courses of action that might lead to solution are clearly stating that “there is nothing that they want to do themselves”. Far too many are inclined to inaction, to doing nothing and hoping that someone else will do the hard work for them so that they can do as little as possible. That is what those people do best, nothing.
In the end, doing as little as possible will solve at least their problems for them, I assure you. In the meanwhile if and when you find at least a slightly receptive listener or two, it fulfills our responsibility to at least give it the old college try. That’s the “Old” college try, NOT the new one.
The Gipper sure gave it the ‘the old college try’ when he launched the asset inflation era & Trickledown Economics, eh.
Notice how well that worked out for the millennial cohort of shiftless lazy bums that never knew what it meant to give something ‘the old college try’ too, eh.
During the Nixon era my father often said the hippies should be lined up against a wall & shot whenever their shiftless lazy images appeared on the boob tube. He started to reform around the time Archie Bunker because a household name.
I very much appreciate how the older generations had to walk uphill for ten or twenty miles into blizzards of snow in -50F temperatures with holes in their shoes and Cornflakes cardboard box liners but what does that have to do with the victims of your generation that lined their pocketbooks with the futures of the millennial generation so that they were eliminated from the workforce entirely as intended by the planners of your incompetent generation?
I think ‘the old college try’ rhetoric is more about ego dystonia occurring in the minds of generations lost to old memories & bygone eras that offered them hope towards a future. The millennials you disparage are merely a product of their generation as all are including you.
Smoke some marijuana, Walter. Buy some hash & a bong, buddy.
RW
I was only joking with the “got any extra” comment Jim, sorry.
Jim…
Jim…
Jim, I said I was only joking,
please tell me I’m forgiven Jim…
Oh Jim, I’m so so sorry…!
I love you too Evee.
I agree Farmer Joe, most people don’t value things they get for free, they just don’t/can’t realize what is going on, and they abuse it.
I learned the hard way about human nature working on people’s cars- if you fix a problem that you know will later on cause them to break down on the road, they resent having to spend the money. Let them break down on the road, and then go help them (which costs more than preventing the problem in the first place), and you’re a hero…
They have a right to be asked though before you just fix it and charge them, right? Right?
Yes, we need a subservient peasantry again. People must know their place and recognize their betters. I’m putting in baldly here and thus unpleasantly – but it remains true nonetheless. By one theory, the Elite got too much of this attitude and washed their hands of us long ago. Noblesse Oblige cannot work if the lower classes have a niggerish attitude. And since it cannot work, they will not bother to try.
I don’t say this is the whole truth of course. The Elite have turned to Evil in any case.
“we need a subservient peasantry”
Isn’t that what we already have in the USA, by and large? Or maybe you consider the Resistance to actually be something other than a media inspired ploy by the democrats to do everything in their power to undermine the president. It seems to me the only time Americans “rise up” is in service of their masters. Or maybe you’d argue that occupying wall street did something other than foreshadow the coming of Tent City, USA. How are we not a subservient peasantry?
I have to wonder if the ‘subservient peasantry’ he is suggesting contains an element of realistic humility that is largely absent from the great bulk of the sheeple in this society.
The peasants of past eras knew their ‘place’ and had to submit themselves to it in order to survive. In our day, the complete institutionalization of the processes that provide our necessities allows us — that is, the bulk of our society — to carry on in a state of arrogant delusion without the threat of perishing from it. Until that system which eliminates the need for personal inter-dependence finally collapses, leaving ‘us’ on our own to survive by providing our own necessities, ‘we’ can continue on in our belligerent self-aggrandizing fantasy.
A subservient peasant is, perhaps, a person whose survival is dependent on honesty, hard work, humility, and civility; since you are inter-dependent with others, getting along well with others is another survival necessity.
Interestingly, these traits were once known as “virtues”.
Yes, surrendered to Natural Law and their human superiors who embody it. In return, such an Elite would give them protection and guidance. But as of now, obviously the social contract is in tatters and all interest, care, and compassion go to minorities instead of poor White Americans.
And yeah, there’s no reason to surrender to Elites like this. The opposite is called for.
That is true. See! Sometimes attitude is all that matters. You can definitely get very far with a simple smile and sweet disposition. Alot of people are going to need to learn their place very quickly. Another problem with our allegedly egalitarian society is that we are not all equal but we have been trained to feel that we are equal. And then some people have just not been raised with the right manners. So therefore many difficult attitudes prevail.
We were considered equal “before the law”. Not any more.
Hey! If yer lookin’ for subservient check out Walter’s petulanty winsome posts to “Jim”.
Farmer Joe
Your tale of the spurned good Samaritan suggests to me you probably reek of corn likker and have the appearance of someone who has escaped from a detention facility for the criminally insane.
No doubt the woman had good reason to think that if she wanted to keep on living she’d best no be providing any encouragement for you to continue glowering at her. Were you able to keep your eyes from looking at her breasts or straying down to where you know the jelly donut was hidden?
Wow, that’s a hell of an assumption. 1. I hardly ever drink. 2. She was easily 20 years older than me, and not attractive.
Now, Evelyn, you can go fuck yourself, you crazy old bat.
Ev, based on your other comments here I would guess that you reacted this way to my story because you can relate to the woman. Have you ever heard the saying, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”? I have seen you on numerous occasions make arguments that sounds like they were fed to you by Rachel Maddow. Others have pointed you in the direction of facts and you have refused. Just like this woman. So while I would never think to lower to your ranks a prize winning thoroughbred, I would definitely say that you are nothing but a stubborn, angry, and therefore untrustworthy old mare.
Thanks for that comment, Walter.
Personally, I’ll aid those it is within my meager power to aid and leave the deluded to their own devices. As one of Clint Eastwood’s movie characters was known to pithily opine: “A man’s got to know his limitations.” I certainly agree and attempt to keep them firmly in mind.
(Yes, the scent of The Shit is getting stronger as it gets nearer The Fan. It’s my belief that the malefactors appearing from behind their curtains to support the status quo narrative is a prime factor in the increasing anxiety-producing stench.)
Ozone that is cliche ridden drivel.
Please try harder, you written some readable stuff now and then 🙂
Evelyn,
Although I’m certain your critique is well-intentioned, I don’t really give enough of a shit to try harder at anything that doesn’t tend to give me “return on investment”. …And I’m not referring to filthy lucre.
Thanks for the encouragement, but I’ve turned to a simple pragmatism that doesn’t allow for much people pleasing or the meeting of previous expectations.
Have fun!
*clap clap clap*
Walter B, I hope you don’t take this wrong, I mean it in a nice way.
Having read many of your posts reaching out with heartfelt man-love for “Jim” and how his writing stirs you, I’ve sort of come to a conclusion…
…you sound like a bit of an ass-kisser.
* * *
To show my nice intention I’ve included a few ways you could have sweetened up this post I’m responding to.
“… and Jim, and I include you, yes you Jim, among them that are seeking higher ground on which to drive the flock…”
“…In the meanwhile, Jim, let us do what we, yes you and me Jim, can to enlighten…”
Maybe we should all run our posts by you first, Evelyn. LOL I can see why you chose to become a far left-wingers; you’re all control freaks.
You just aren’t a very astute guy are you hmuller? There is enough room for the wing of a B-52 bomber between me and the far left wing.
OK, You tell us what kind of control freak you are.
Well, first of all I want to note that is so often with the folks on your side of the bell curve, you either unwittingly or wittingly rely on framing or trying to frame the topic.
For example a typical right wing christian hypocrite who expresses admiration for the golden cockatoo will answer a question about the fornicating factor while his wife was giving birth to another at least half potential disastrous cockatoo by trying to frame the question to include bubba’s marital infidelities.
Now that I re-read all that I see it is a mistake. The issue I’m trying to get at isn’t framing. It’s more along the lines of begging the question. Assuming from the start that a premise is true. I’m not a control freak.
However I do have a strong need to interfere with people trying to assert false information.
In my personal life it often gets me into social difficulties. I would be better off keeping my mouth shut.
Oh Evelyn, you know I just love busting your balls (figuratively) because you’re a woman of such strong and misdirected convictions. No animosity.
Funny you should mention an old eighties song. I often catch myself wishing it could be the eighties again on account of the laundry-list of anxieties you mentioned in this post, even though I know full well that’s when so many of the problems we’re experiencing now really began. 🙂
Short and sweet and completely to the point. A mass of delusions cloud the netscape and real consensus and community have been shattered. The sense that there is no consensus on how to move forward or even what path to go down has also fed into the urgency of creating consensus, through coercion if necessary in the estimation of some. Perhaps there is nothing that can fully bring our culture back together as one? And perhaps that was intended and not just an unintended consequence of “modernity”. Add to that the fact that cultural patchworks never really work for long. Case in point, Rome. I guess the jury is still out and we will all find out one way or another. It is certain that there won’t be much productive dialogue about this issue from the political classes.
If by “there won’t be much”, you mean “less than zero”, then yes.
Ok well then less than zero. Perhaps I still had a speck of hope in me ;-).
SSL
I’ve changed my thoughts about you some over time.
In a place like this heads are what draw me first. Most of the time the hearts are right along there with the heads (Green Alba, K-Dog et al) so no conflicts.
Your heart is mostly in the right place, but your head not so much. I blame it for having to use the qualifier “mostly”.
With Pompeo in the wheelhouse and Abrams and Bolton navigating the waiting, while the hardest part, may not be indefinite.
How many here can identify the flight of an F-35 from the sound profile? Keep your ears tuned. Targeting a carrier is a kidney punch, The S-AA systems relieving the sky of a few aircraft is a more likely slap in the face. I wonder how many volunteers are lined up to fly sorties into Venezuela from Brazil? Windows 10 is not the only thing to have received a Spring Update.
Hey Dog – Braced for Impact?
best text from the tubes last couple of weeks – Rachel Madcow
“Rachel Madcow”
Is she still on tv? I don’t know why anyone would lend her credibility.
I just want to shave her head and send her to Parris Island.
Farmer Joe,
It is kind of odd. She has more than she needs already. And there are so many on faux news that could use it by the bucket load.
Just come out and say it, you lust to run your hands over her smooth skin and go someplace you can show her your masculinity.
Your fantasies tend to make other want to gag.
Were you talking to Farmer Joe or me? Because you have pierced my dirty little secret – I want to teach Rachel Maddow how to be a real woman again.
I think you’ve gone off the deep end, Evelyn.
Probably for the very same reasons some people still find Alex Jones at all credible.
I always find it funny hos worst critics have never listened to him.
Alex is entertaining.
Benr,
What does “always” mean? Are you saying you are in a constant state of reflection on something that – how could you possibly be so definitive about? “Never” implies a degree of absolute knowledge I could only marvel at if you can provide any proof it is true.
@evilyn
Come on admit it you HAVE never listened to the man except as a carefully massaged sound bite.
Go and have a listen it will get you angry I promise but you will also hear some truths that you WILL not hear anywhere else.
Jezusss benr, don’t get yourself into a lather.
I’ve never listened, probably never will. I’ve seen in writing enough to know he’s a fruitcake. I’ve heard enough to know hitching your wagon to his star would be enough to make you an eligible candidate to have your brain sucked out and used for fertilizer in a more just world.
Yes wm5135. Tom wrote something new. You spotted the rhyme. More though went into it than just ‘repackaging it’ though.
http://www.dailyimpact.net/2019/04/28/anti-predictions-you-can-rely-on/
Perhaps I should have given Tom credit but I am an expert in these areas and I really have though to these things myself. As you can see in my response to malthuss. I have:
New Information
It is all a remix.
Speaking of a virtual world, I’ve recently been reminded of an old Peter Sellers movie, Being There.
We have our own Chauncey Gardiner of sorts right now, as the New Face of the Democrats is a simpleminded but visually appealing girl.
It is not a true parallel, as the girl isn’t making her own remarks which are being mistaken for wisdom. She has been scripted, much like the ‘reality” TV genre that appeals so much to younger Americans.
On the occasions when she speaks her on mind, she makes really foolish and nonsensical remarks. That being, because she is a fool.
Don’t take my word for it, the evidence is there, from her own mouth.She has admitted as much, without being aware of what she was saying.
The old faces of the Democrats, the Chucks, The Nancys, the Diannes, were becoming so hideous, that they were beginning to remind one of a picture Dorian Gray in reverse, to bring another novel turned film into it.
Another problem with the old faces, they have records to run on, and although you won’t hear it in the media, people do notice that the accomplishments for the people they allegedly represent are conspicuously nonexistent.
Cher has pointed out the lack of wisdom of importing more needy people into areas that are already collapsing under the weight of the needs of the current residents.
Cher is not exactly a rocket scientist, but if she can recognize this, surely San Fran Nan can.
Yet Nancy persists in her love for these people, over her legitimate responsibilities to the people who pay her salary.
I sais pay her salary, you notice I did not say “made her wealthy”.
That’s another story, one that ties into the major racket we know as The Border.
Chuck and Dianne also have a little problem with spies, as in they employed them.
Whatever the New Face does or doesn’t do, she doesn’t bear any responsibility for any of the spies; she just got here.
Chauncey Gardiner –Peter Sellers.
so 1980s.
I’m still trying to figure out how a cocktail waitress with nice tits and a 90 IQ (I’m being generous) can be the Democrats’ Wunderkind. Where is the talent, the intelligence, the vision?
“…women and children shall rule over them.”
Good catch, Messianicdruid. I hadn’t thought about Isaiah Chapter 3 verses 11-12
11 Woe to the wicked! Disaster is upon them! They will be paid back for what their hands have done.
12 Youths oppress my people, women rule over them. My people, your guides lead you astray; they turn you from the path.
identity politics, Identity politician.
she is
non White
young
cute [at least no visible tattoos]
leftist
soros backed
what more is needed to know?
She is an agent of change that can be utilized so I judge her from that standpoint now. But let’s do all be honest and realize that she was chosen via a casting call.
What utter crap.
You, and many of the other nut-jobs righties in here, suffer from a serious case of cognitive dissonance, underlying your delusions that:
1) The ‘liberals’ are out to destroy Western Civilisation,
2) ‘Socialism’ will destroy the US,
3) Healthcare, as currently delivered by the corrupt insurance cabal, is ‘freedom’.
4) Trump actually gives a shit about ANYTHING but Trump
5) The Deep State (whatever that actually IS, if it exists at all) corruptly harrassed Trump with the SP Enquiry and
6) Trump & some obscure Fed Prosecutor, holed up in the middle of Flyoverstan, are about to turn the tables on these evil nasty liberal left-wing conspirators and deliver MAGA to the keening masses
7) Trump is in cahoots with an internet meme called ‘Q’ (hahahahaaaa!)
and to cap it all off
8) George Soros runs everything
Laughable, and deluded. You’re all really entertaining!
What a bizarre post Majella. It’s as if you had a prepared list of grievances that you were eager to toss at me at the earliest opportunity. None of them relate to my contention regarding AOC. Sorry but you’ll have to try again haha!
Cheap shot, hmuller – “90 IQ (I’m being generous)”
She’d run rings around you, fella. Here she is exposing the corruption of the US Congress. Yes, we all KNOW that it is corrupt, but she’s digging out the specifics and it’s frightening:
https://youtu.be/lFhgXP2lze4
But I guess you won’t bother to watch it. You’re way clever and already know all the answers, and can simply dismiss a smart. motivated young woman because…(insert reason here).
I want to drain the swamp, too. But I don’t think Pelosi, Schumer and the other dinosaurs of both parties share that aspiration. And we’ll see what AOC and her merry band of milleniums can do on their own.
By the way, Majella, is it too much to expect a Congress woman,(a smart motivated young woman) to know the three branches of government? LOL
“Don’t take my word for it…”
Bery of Oly, not something to concern yourself about. I’m guessing no one ever has and unless you improve your communication skills, no one ever will.
Great post today!
…A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that make up the crumbling armature of “normal” life in the USA. The political Right seeks to Make America Great Again, as though we might return to a 1962 heyday of industrial mass production by wishing hard enough. The Left seeks the equivalent of an extended childhood for all, lived out in a universal safe space, where all goods and services come magically free from a kindly parent-like government, and the sunny days are spent training unicorns to find rainbows…
Everybody I know seems so unhinged and in dire need of anti-depressants.
Are you the lone sane one? Be careful :-)! You just might get drafted to be a leader.
I try not to get caught up in the madness, but I’ve been having terrible problems sleeping properly the past few years because I really do believe that I’m absorbing all this anomie into my subconscious through psychic osmosis. Part of me wants the next big {kaboom} to happen because then maybe I’ll be able to sleep better. (But then again, it could be a literal {kaboom}, as in bright flashes of light and mushroom clouds!)
I have trouble sleeping too. I always have a lot on my mind, including worrying about the bigger world in addition to my smaller world, as well as thinking of all the things I could get done if I wasn’t laying in bed thinking lol. The quandaries of modern life!!!
I am having problems sleeping as well. We are all caught in the Matrix I suppose. But according to some, it IS just a computer simulation!
“But according to some, it IS just a computer simulation?”
Not a very meaningful statement. After the words “according to some…”, there is nothing you could insert that wouldn’t be true. e.g. the earth is flat, the world was created 6000 years ago, lizards are controlling mankind and the word, fat men in red suits squeeze down chimneys loaded with packages not made in China,
Anyway I’m not mocking you, I’m just being arrogant mistakenly and narcissistically thinking somebody might be amused, amused by what you ask
So, getting back to my point,
Instead you could have written
“But according to some writers about physics (and the true nature of reality), it IS considered by credible physicist to possibly be just a computer simulation?”
If you take that a certain way, I’m thinking, our brains are the computer. Each computer taking what it chooses from the aether we all share together, to put together the private picture show we are all watching. Inside every one of those picture shows anxiety builds in the watchers. Most don’t know its even happening. Which makes harder to know how to quell the anxieties. Others who don’t know nevertheless gravitate in a direction that quells anxiety. In its place they feel a much higher measure of Love. It’s directly proportional. Love goes up Fear goes down. Ironclad rule that can’t be changed.
You obviously have more time on your hands than I do.
Sounds like Brooklyn hipster describing her latest work of modern art — where the art is the result of some cooked spaghetti doused in paint and dragged across a canvas.
Word salad.
I’m a lucky one. Back in ’71 an industrial accident injured my back and caused residual nerve damage in my right leg, resulting in tingling and sleeplessness. Eventually I connected with a doctor who prescribed amitriptyline.
Amitriptyline suppressed the pain. It also caused drowsiness. So I kept cutting the dose until I could stay awake most of the day. At such a trace (2 1/2 mg) dose it also serves as a sleeping pill – one with very mild side effects.
Most of the internet info on this drug refers to it as an antidepressant, but I have seen assertions that it is also prescribed as a sleep aid. Something to try if you’re so inclined.
Maybe that’s it! I’m doing 10 or 20 mg (can’t remember which without looking at the bottle) of that stuff and I can barely stay awake at work all day. I initially tried it for phantom arthritic hip pain, as I heard it was useful for that, but turned out the pain was real and not amenable to a pill. The hip is now due for a ball joint replacement as soon as I can work it in the schedule. Won’t THAT be fun!
Can’t sleep either now, largely due to the damn CPAP mask leaking all night, so I’m thinking of going cold turkey on both now for a while to see how that shakes out. The damn sleep doctor has evidently extracted all the revenue from me that he deems worth collecting, so the mask replacements have gradually become intermittent to non-existent of late. Took a full year to get used to wearing the damn thing, but I’ll bet I can get unused to it in just a night or two. Getting old is just one damn humiliation after another!
The Italians say: La vechhiaia e brutta – old age is ugly.
The last line you wrote is very apt. “Getting old is just one damn humiliation after another’ is even better than that line of Bette Davis…’getting old isn’t for sissies’. If you have an inflammatory response to tissue injury the best medicine would be an anti-inflammatory med. Pain is described subjectively and treated objectively by limiting receptivity of pain receptors in the brain. If you have been prescribed medication by an MD it would not be rational to not take the prescribed advice and switch unilaterally to another type of medication without first consulting with your MD.
Stay away from any caffeinated drinks if you are having trouble sleeping.
Hope you get well soon.
RW
I sleep very well, thank you. It helps to have a spiritual practice or connection of some kind. And it can be healthy to take a media fast for a few days if not more. Get out in the wilderness for a few days or a week. Life in the American West…
Its either old age or a guilty conscious you decide which.
venuspluto
likely a widespread and common phenomenon. Everyone of us weirdlings who spent so much time on doomer-ish websites and even more so the ones who direct their mental energies into keeping the dialogue going probably have an inner wish to be vindicated for what clearly is regarded disdainfully by a large segment of the population as odd-ball fascination.
Probably it shares something in common with young testosterone throbbing males who yearn to become a warrior on a battlefield.
Total unfamiliarity due to lack of experience with the unalterable fact that war is utter hell.
The big kaboom to worry about most is the blood vessel that keeps your brain alive.
I think this phase of financial capitalism is to keep the exponential growth going: only it’s the exponential growth of claims upon stagnant or diminishing stores of wealth, whether supplied by human effort (e.g.,buildings) or the biosphere (e.g., topsoil production.) The 2020’s are shaping up to be the Decade of Doom.
In a few words, you nailed it, Greg.
Others can explain it better than I do, but here’s how I see our situation:
Our money is not wealth. It is a claim upon wealth,and it is born as someone’s debt obligation. Student loans, home mortgages, credit card debt – they all represent getting something real now in return for a promised share of our future income stream.
It takes ever growing amounts of debt to keep the beast fed.
If we as a society ever tried to live within our means, we’d have to cut back spending and live more austere lives. This would set off the cascading bankruptcies of businesses not equipped to survive economic shrinkage (being highly in debt themselves). Businesses close, job layoffs follow.
People who have no jobs can’t pay today’s rent, much less their accumulated debt. Most forms of debt become unpayable and the economy collapses like dominoes – sucked into a black hole. Printing quadrillions of dollars only ensures a different kind of collapse – one where the currency becomes worthless..
Climate Change or Global Warming was/is a major con job.
How many times do you have to see the lies and frauds the government is willing to perpetrate on the people (us), before you get that they would do this too?
A consensus, a percentage, of scientists say it is so?
Do we do science by vote, now?
Who are these people? How do we know what percentage agrees, if we don’t know who or how many they are?
If you look, you will see that the New Face of that movement is too young to realize that the goalposts have been moved numerous times already, that the “twelve years” we have been given to save the planet from extinction is merely the latest extension.
Sixty Minutes, that bastion of credibility, recently did a segment with actual children presenting their “evidence”.
I kid you not. Pun unintended.
Thank you for this post. Now be prepared to be quickly labeled a “denier”. I remember my indoctrination into global warming during school. Like most other PCisms this indoctrination begins as soon as you are able to think and speak. Via education of course but also all forms of media content developed for children. How else to develop an inevitable consensus than to raise all children up to believe these things as self-evident truth.
And the alternative is… ?
“Hey kids, atmospheric carbon is not a real big deal at all…. scientists worldwide are worried, about absolutely nothing… They’re a bunch of morons, controlled by Globalist Deep State Wokesters… ”
“Field trip everybody! We’re going to ‘The Ark’ in Kentucky… to learn about God’s plan for all y’all.”
(Except young Gertie who was born with half a brain and wears a bike helmet and sits in the back of class on Thursdays and drools- God has other plans for her.)
Wishful thinking is an cause and result of unending chains of rationalization.
You believe in Globalist domination… therefore climate change is a hoax… therefore scientists are lying money-grubbers… therefore children are being indoctrinated… the teachers are corrupted too… the temperature gauges are corrupted… the meteorologist is lying to you… the grass isn’t dead… these bugs have been in the area forever… its was just as dry last year… etc.
Fertile ground for a feverish imagination.
Well I have a big imagination period if you haven’t noticed :-). Climate change is not a hoax. The climate definitely changes. But we start getting into arguments once it comes down to what and who may be causing the changes. I did already tell you I am very open to lowering energy usage. You can tell me it is because of climate change but I want to believe we are doing to cut down on our entire footprint not just carbon footprint.
SSL – nice, heart and head working together (for a change, snuk snuk:)
Too bad we can’t look at our world resource supply and figure out a way to best economize such that it sustains people’s living conditions everywhere.
No country in history has tried as hard as the US to make that happen in terms of setting forth to make it happen politically. At the same time no country had at the same time powerful interests at work to “unfairly” exploit resource rich countries.
Our good angel and simultaneously our bad angel competing on the same landscape. The bad angel seized so much it took over everything from the good angels.
Anyway in the ideal world we’d find a way to avoid all the agony and suffering and get on with “what the hell is really going on? WHAT IS CONSCIOUSESS?! Physics does not yet have an answer.
I wonder if the New York Times informs its woke readers that China’s CO2 output is greater than all of the EU and US combined. Climate warrior Obama greenlighted unlimited CO2 output through 2030.
The climate issue would be taken more seriously if it’s most ardent supporters actually seemed to care.
SSL, I take back anything favorable I said about you recently. Beryl of Oyl is an idiot. Your slobbering reply to it makes you an idiot.
You are amazing Evelyn lol! You were becoming ok with me then you determine soon thereafter that I am an idiot again. I change my mind about things too, sometimes several times a day so I get it. I try not to think out loud though too much though lol.
Now anytime you want to talk about the nature of consciousness I would be interested to hear your opinions.
Start by offering yours.
Blame da left
Blame da left
Blame da left
Don’t worry!!!! The right has given consent to all of this so they are not part of it and have just as much blame on their shoulders.
are part of it….
It is easy and appropriate to blame the Loony Left for they are upon the stump making the most noise and aggravation. The right remains relatively quiet yet still fundamentally wrong and useless. It is from the thinkers and the doers in the middle that any hope for salvation remains, and that is why Mr. Trump has the degree of popularity that he enjoys. He is neither one of the entrenched party-goer sellouts.
Yes, silence and inaction are ultimately consent. The political right has let us down too. Just in a different way than the political left. Both ultimately report to the same bosses. IMO President Trump is starting to look an awful lot like a George Bush 2.0 with illegal immigration on steroids. His abandonment of his most important campaign promises has disillusioned me. But pickings are slim so what to do?
yer funny walter blah blah blah
You funny too!
>>> Blame da left 3x
Is that the latest magical charm for warding off reason and logic? Sorry dude but incanting “blame da left” three times from your book of spells doesn’t counter any arguments and doesn’t make you the superior NYT-reading liberal you think you are.
Blame da left… when there’s no one else to blame… blame da left. Always and forever, Blame de left.
Beryl
I had not read your post before I posted mine (a little further down thread) yesterday.
I assume your New Face of global warming is little Greta from Sweden.
There have been a number of studies purporting to prove an overwhelming consenus among the scientist. The most well-known, the one quoted by Obama, is Cook’s 97% paper.
Dutch economist Richard Tol is a believer in AGW but he is not afraid to call a spade a spade and a fool a fool. He discusses Cook’s paper in this article in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2014/jun/06/97-consensus-global-warming
A few extracts to give the flavour of the piece:
“Cook’s sample is not representative. Any conclusion they draw is not about “the literature” but rather about the papers they happened to find.
“Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless. Papers on carbon taxes naturally assume that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming – but assumptions are not conclusions. Cook’s claim of an increasing consensus over time is entirely due to an increase of the number of irrelevant papers that Cook and co mistook for evidence.
“The abstracts of the 12,000 papers were rated, twice, by 24 volunteers. Twelve rapidly dropped out, leaving an enormous task for the rest. This shows. There are patterns in the data that suggest that raters may have fallen asleep with their nose on the keyboard. In July 2013, Mr Cook claimed to have data that showed this is not the case. In May 2014, he claimed that data never existed.
“The data is also ridden with error. By Cook’s own calculations, 7% of the ratings are wrong. Spot checks suggest a much larger number of errors, up to one-third.
“Cook tried to validate the results by having authors rate their own papers. In almost two out of three cases, the author disagreed with Cook’s team about the message of the paper in question.
“Attempts to obtain Cook’s data for independent verification have been in vain. Cook sometimes claims that the raters are interviewees who are entitled to privacy – but the raters were never asked any personal detail. At other times, Cook claims that the raters are not interviewees but interviewers…
“The theologist Michael Rosenberger has described climate protection as a new religion, based on a fear for the apocalypse, with dogmas, heretics and inquisitors like Nuccitelli. I prefer my politics secular and my science sound.”
Bery of Oyl
Everytime I stumble across this post of yours I want to scream that you are a infuriatingly ignorant person.
But really, that in itself is a self degrading way to react as well. It’s only because I know you represent so many other similarly self deluded folks that I give a whit about what one particular misguided under educated person thinks.
You would have to truly be an oaf to watch this Nat’l Geographic documentary and still cling to the words you wrote like an ape clinging to its own chunks of feces due to the boredom of being trapped in a cage. You of course being trapped in your own mental cage.
Do yourself a favor and take the time to get a little education by watching this.
https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/global-dimming/
JDH… my sentiments exactly, a brilliant post by Jim today
I thought it was pretty good too.
He’s kind of been on fire lately.
Oh, and one more thing (while we’re on the topic of make believe), did anyone get a load of Sally and Andrea just making it up as they went along?
Andrea forewent her usual signature sleeveless look, in favor of the look her pal Hillary pioneered during the 2016 campaign, of wearing some sort of house attire in public.
I say pioneered of Hillary, because although the Walmart base has been wearing pajamas in there for decades (but can they really be said to be in public?), Hillary was the first in her class to show up in a housecoat. That’s fashion-forward.
In Andrea’s case it was some kind of fluffy pink bathrobe.
Anyway, Andrea was helping Sally “get out in front” of the fallout over the Russia hoax, and Sally was explaining her position and expounding on the concept that Mueller also adheres to, that there are people in government who reserve the right to examine decisions made by our elected president, decide whether the ‘intent’ by the man passes their secret PC test, and then take it upon themselves to put a stop to his actions based on their personal judgement.
Ann Coulter has written about this:
http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2019-04-24.html
You can’t tell me those in the profession of “journalism” today don’t understand it.
No wonder they won’t allow Ann to speak on campuses. Can’t have any future reporters exposed to ideas or opposing points of view or anything.
They know exactly what they are doing. They receive the scripts to read aloud daily. They get the memos and the emails detailing the appropriate narratives to convey. Most media outlets are simply extensions of the Democrat Party. Some could say Fox is an extension of the Republican Party but I would actually say that with their more recent changes and shakeups they are actually an arm of the old Democrat Party now. All other voices are being de-platformed and censored as we type.
More utter bullshit…
“Some could say Fox is an extension of the Republican Party but I would actually say that with their more recent changes and shakeups they are actually an arm of the old Democrat Party now”
Really, what has happened at Fox is that Shep Smith, Judge Napolitano and Chris Matthews (who were always skeptical) have recently turned feral on Trump and his pathetic lies & prevarications and calling him on them more & more vociferously. More power to them.
As well, Fox is now inviting liberal politicians on – those courageous enough to front up – to espouse their views and hopefully inject a microgram of common sense into its otherwise brainwashed audience. You can sometimes see the penny dropping in the mind of the interviewer.
The only hold-out seems to be “The President’s Show”, aka Fox & Friends…
Then we have just had a repeat performance of Trump ranting & raving without taking a breath, much to the discomfort of the Fox presenter(s), in the most recent case, poor hapless Maria Bartiromo.
What a bizarre post Majella. It’s as if you had a prepared list of grievances that you were eager to toss at me at the earliest opportunity. None of them relate to my contention regarding AOC. Sorry but you’ll have to try again haha!
Accidental double post from upthread re your cray cray list. Anyway you are so slanted when it comes to Fox. Murdochs sons are major SJWs and thus Fox is careening towards unfettered PC mania. Hiring Donna Brazile was a new and unexpected low but when you’re dealing with cuckservatives what can you expect?!
My goodness you are a goof a second the only utter bullshit I see is your vacuous and vicious posts!
Not a truth in any of them.
Typical leftist turd.
Great song by Tom Petty.
Another favorite of mine is Meja’s ‘It’s all About the Money’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcXMhwF4EtQ
What is really heartening is how everyone here admits to personal responsibility for this mess.
You know:
– “I never give the Dems (Repubs) their due;”
– “I never get involved in politics;”
– “I bank where it’s easy;”
– “I’ve never studied logic or rhetoric and so I’m conned too easily;”
“AND THIS IS WHERE IT GETS ME.”
Great column today James, plus a nod to my hometown hero. Bottom line, world population is double what it was when I finished High School, and there were too many people then. TPTB are clueless as is the population in general. Get ready, it’s fix’in to get real.
Especially given that so many are dependent on meds to survive, taking illegal drugs etc. Most have no clue how to feed themselves other than eating out, getting take-out or going to the grocery store. Most people in the US would “starve to death with a field full of wheat and a fresh cow in the barn” as the saying goes. Should the power go out long-term, an epidemic hit or whatever, good luck to all. Between outright starvation and the attacks by brutal gangs intent on ruling their “territory” and taking all they find, most of the US would go down pretty fast. Ditto for much of the rest of the world. Maybe the Inuit would be fine? And those isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in Brazil’s rain forest?
“And those isolated hunter-gatherer tribes in Brazil’s rain forest?”
I’m afraid Sr Bolsonaro is going to make quick work of Brazil’s indigenous peoples.
https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/12060
There should be no mystery when trying to understand the state of things on our globe. There’s a reason that history repeats itself, it’s because humans keep on insisting on acting like humans. It’s why things move in cycles, from economics to the fates of empires. It’s human nature to react in certain ways to various stimuli. This is why the US is going down now, and the cycle of power is happening at a faster rate, because technology makes everything happen at a faster pace than it ever has before. It’s the reason why the cycle of power of the Empire of the US only lasted about 50 years ie: roughly since the end of WWII.
It’s also the reason that climate change is gonna kick our ass. Human nature doesn’t welcome change, it generally doesn’t change, especially if it’s an unpleasant change, until it is forced to by circumstances. It’s also the reason the Republican party won’t change it’s tune about deregulation and cutting taxes for the wealthy, You would have thought the message was received when we tanked in 2008, but noooooo, it was not to be. I am absolutely not counting on humans to do much of anything, because they still want to live in the past. Hell, JHK as much as says the same things when he writes about people’s reluctance to do the things necessary to sustain any sort of decent life. Am I a cynic? Hell yes, but it wasn’t by choice. I don’t necessarily agree with some of JHK’s current opinions, but in his earlier writings, “The Long Emergency”, etc, he was prophetic, and the stuff he said back then is still true today. I’m trying to keep this short, so people don’t skip over it like I do Fincain’s stuff.
I think that for the most part people don’t even understand much of anything in their lives anymore. They get how to go online or use their smartphone but how it really all works is beyond them. They have no clue how the banking system works. No clue whatsoever about how to grow food or, for many, cook from scratch. No clue how to live without electricity, central AC, electronics etc. Kids have no clue how to entertain themselves without video games, phones, TV’s etc.
All of this has sped up to a great degree in recent years. Contrast how we live now compared to how people lived in the 40’s or 50’s even. I think a lot of people sense that technology has gotten out of hand and that they have little understanding or control over the most essential things needed to keep them alive. So people are nervous and anxious.
“They get how to go online or use their smartphone but how it really all works is beyond them.”
The collected wisdom of the ages available on a device we carry in our pockets, so we send our friends pictures of kittens.
😉
*lol*!
I think the real issue is everyone wants everything now at microwave speeds instead of cooking over an open flame.
Everyone is impatient stressed out and refuse to slow down even a little.
Now add in ridiculous politics of I want everything for FREE at least to me screw the guy that actually has to work for all the crap I feel I am entitled too!
The further down the progressive maw America descends the worse the attitude of everyone involved.
This is more of a US/UK phenomenon than anything else, IMO. Many of my neighbors here in Germany (and in my experience much of mainland Europe) build their own additions to their houses; have very impressive veggie gardens; keep chickens, pigs, etc.; make their own wine; and more.
We live in a med-sized city between two major cities in NRW, so not like we are out in the sticks.
Cap’n.,
Our perspectives of wha’happen? and wha’now? align perfectly.
As I am less and less inclined to expound upon my own views or counter omnipresent bullshittery, I thank you very much.
Great post, Jim.
Some delusions can be “cured” by adversity, while others are [counter-intuitively] strengthened. It’s a conundrum that will only be revealed by the severe degradation of the current American “lifestyle” (and the destruction of its false promises to the rest of the world).
Regarding a never-quiet portion of the deluded herd:
“To darkness they are doomed
who worship only the body, and
to greater darkness they who
worship only the spirit”
You are so esoteric. But I think I know what you are communicating and whom you intend to communicate it too. Mysteries are so exciting and clues are always fun!!!! Scooby dooby doo where are you :-)…….
“never quiet-portion” – Hey! Some people like to talk. And obviously some are of very few words too. It takes all kinds right.
Hearing the word “esoteric” right there was like someone hit a cowbell by mistake in the orchestra pit.
SSL – every fool who spends time on this board “like to hear themselves talk”.
Except me of course.
Wow, you’re definitely not crazy at all, Eve.
We worship the Spirit. But if your eye is single, the body will be full of light. Thus Christianity is body positive in the deepest sense.
The christian religion in its many forms is toxic waste.
Well it’s all about perspective.
Cockroaches in a dark room scurry and hide when light is shined upon them. They consider the light to be sort of like toxic waste and flee accordingly.
But the light helps to guide in the sweet young couple who are going to thoroughly clean and totally revamp the room to become a nursery for their soon to be born bundle of joy.
The Light can be Death for some and is Life for others. What do you want the Light to be for you?
SSL – that is some really really sappy drool and what a pathetic metaphor. You think cockroaches consider things?
You do have some potential if you re-work your material though I’ll give you that much. I’m pretty sure you can work up some sort of analogy having to do with breeders producing too many cockroach-like bundles or, breeding like coachroachs with the room is dark, or so much coachroach like breeding their bundles are like toxic waste. Hell I don’t know but keep working on it, it reads like goo-goo talk the way it is right now.
“What do you want the Light to be for you?”
Personally I like natural daylight much more than an invented lightbulb to cope with a dark room. You get a better perspective on things if you look at them from the outside in the clear light of day. It’s much less limiting.
Although artificial light can be a support when you perceive the need for artificial support. As long as you realise it’s an invention and don’t stop appreciating the natural light.
Evelyn and Alba – please develop some more imagination and creativity. Simple analogies put together on the fly. No literary masterpieces were intended here but I will take the advice to continue working on my writing skills. Let’s not read too much into them. But clearly you both received the most important kernels of information that were being conveyed. I encourage both of you to come into the Light. Clearly both of you are attracted to it but are not yet ready to take the leap of faith. It’s coming though so continue to prepare yourselves. Trust me, once you make it you will never ever want to go back.
Eat dirt, Squaw.
Janos, have you read Fred Reed’s latest essay? It concerns Christianity and it’s none too flattering.
Hey, that’s no way to talk about the Reformation.
in the deepest sense. – Janos
============
I’d like to have a count on how many times you’ve used this phrase over the years.
Into the compendium it goes.
Christianity is mental excrement in any sense.
“Christianity is mental excrement in any sense”
If you said or wrote that about Islam, you could be jailed in some countries. And I’m not talking about Islamic countries, but European ones.
But you are free to denounce Christianity in the most vulgar terms because of Christian tolerance.
I’m not sure I get your point. Any religion that thinks deities exist is fucked up. No thanks to christians I’m not prevented from saying it in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
If they had their way we’d still be getting the Galileo treatment, don’t kid yourself.
So the belief in boha and the teaching of the boha gande are presumably included in in all of this mental excrement?
So you have no reverence for your ancestors then?
SSL – I said “deities” – believing there is a superman in the sky.
A supreme being who watches what is going on and slaps the ones around who it/he/she disapproves of.
I believe there is a supreme being but only when you realize “being” is a verb and not a noun. Capisch?
Enlightened beings is a totally different subject.
I have no reverence for much of anything. A lot of appreciation for maybe some things here and there but reverence not so much.
As I’ve suggested before, we are all just watching a movie that we have the starring role in.
If you really believe that, why spend so much time telling us about it?
“Regarding a never-quiet portion of the deluded herd:”
“To darkness they are doomed
who worship only the body, and
to greater darkness they who
worship only the spirit”
I detect a note of self-exclusion in that first sentence.
It includes for all practical purposes, everyone.
JHK’s recent articles have been excellent but I have not had time to post anything. This one gets close to nailing it. I have been arguing something similar for a good while now. We are living in a collective fantasy, more specifically a collective media fantasy. The Russian conspiracy was just the latest example. The educated fools of the Resistance swallow it and never to think to fact-check the fantasy against the evidence, of which there is no lack. The Deplorables are not taken in by this nonsense but too many of them believe in absurd conspiracies involving imaginary paedophile rings, the Vatican and the Royal Family (in England the chase has moved on, in recent years, from workers in ‘children’s’ homes to elderly male light entertainers and dead disc jockeys). Or it is all blamed on the One Per Cent or the ‘Corporations’.
I don’t believe anything will bring them to their senses as it is too far gone. In his book about the collective fantasy that is mass immigration, The Diversity Illusion, Ed West compares it to a millenial cult which, when the alien saviours from outer space fail to turn up on cue, rather than losing its followers instead doubles in size. I expect this applies across the board to all of our many weird and wonderful fantasies. I include AGW in that: it has all the characteristics. Currently I hear there is an undersized bossy Swedish schoolgirl travelling the world lecturing governments.
Has anyone noticed the amnesia, that nobody seems able to remember what happened before last Thursday? Anyone in England remember the school pupils’ strike of the 1970s?
What about AIDS? Remember when the Pope (John Paul II) as I recall was blamed for the deaths of millions of Africans? Well, what happened to it. I had just been musing on this when I came across an E Michael Jones video where he mentioned in passing that he had been in Nairobi 17 years ago and had told people there was no epidemic and, indeed, there was no AIDs either. He has just come back from another visit where he spoke in the same room as earlier. How many of you are worried about dying of AIDS?, he asked. Not one hand was raised. So where did it go? I will need to follow this up but my hunch is that Jones is right. (The reason I had been musing about this is because I had just posted a comment on YT about the curious way Pope Pius was blamed for covering up the Holocaust. Like the BBC covering up for Jimmy Savile it is a nonsense, not least because there was not anything to cover up).
Oh yes, in the same video, two minutes earlier, he mentioned that he thought Harvey Weinstein was a scape goat. Well, that is exactly what I have always believed, based on no more than that it fits the existing pattern and (what else?), oh yeah, no evidence whatsoever. What Jones said made me laugh though. The Weinstein accusers he looked up had all apparently made, at some stage in their useful lives, sex videos, and posted them onto the internet. Given a choice between ‘Ibelieveher’ and ‘IbelieveEMJ’ I choose the latter.
Any looked into the Michael Jackson claims? I have. More nonsense.
What did I read in the newspaper last week that made me laugh? Some British MP (a minister I think) claiming in all seriousness that the Russians had been conspiring to stop the West getting vaccinated. Perhaps I got that wrong. Perhaps I just dreamt that bit.
I don’t necessarily disbelieve the premise that the Russians conspire to undermine western society given the track record. In high and low ways. They’re unredeemable as currently organized.
As for mass immigration, I think the non-plan is to absorb them. I’ve come to some comfortable realization by simply imagining North America without borders. Not hard to do.
Saying the Russians are unredeemable is utter bullshit.
The willingly sacrificed themselves to save the West from Germany at the start of WWI.
The unquestionably saved the West during WWII albeit not willingly.
They have certainly behaved competitively throughout the world but sure as hell motivated more by self preservation necessitate by US hostility than any other factor beyond protecting their own territory. The Polish after WWII might disagree but every attack on Russia came through Poland and the US certainly wasted no time abandoning the Poles to work it out for themselves.
Russia and the US as friends makes a lot more sense than Russia and China as friends against a implacable common threat who is for all practical purposes now, the biggest threat to the American people – the Frankenstein corporate-military oligarchy we grew in our own social laborartory.
So then logically, Evelyn, you would oppose those trying to poison US-Russian relations with a lot of invented or exaggerated stories of election interference. You should support Trump against the Democratic Party propagandists and their MSM lapdogs who invent anti-Russian narratives.
I’m opposed to any kind of poisoning of US-Russian relations. I’ve scoffed at the foolish claim that the Russians have somehow interfered in our elections by 1) pointing out that compared to the way we’ve interfered in elections everywhere else in the world it makes us ludicrous hypocrites to whine about anything Russians could have done 2) that in all likelihood infinitely more damage to our so called democracy could be laid at the feet of the Koch brothers 3) rage at the fact that the worst thing the Russians might have done is reveal what the DNC and Hillary did to foist Trump on us.
I blame Hillary for Trump, that corrupt self-entitled bitch brought upon us the worst of all presidencies in the history of the US.
Like all of his other promises, he has failed on his promise to put her away.
Going after Trump for whatever interactions he’s had with Putin is analogous to some family slob (trump) coming into your house tracking the pig shit he’s covered in all over the brand new carpets, drunkenly crashing into furniture breaking things, slurring words so badly he’s barely understandable and then the house owner standing aside shaking their finger at the guy scolding him for wearing a polka dot shirt with striped pants.
We probably could have got along with Russia just fine when they were Communists even, so we sure as hell should be able to accept them as friends now that they’ve embraced our own corrupt ideology.
is analogous to some family slob (trump) coming into your house tracking the pig shit he’s covered in all over the brand new carpets, drunkenly crashing into furniture breaking things, slurring words so badly he’s barely understandable and then… – Eve
===========
Damn, this sounds sooo much like my b-i-l, Peter who, if I’ve failed to mention it before, has been living on the third floor of my home since mid January. Somehow he was able to finally sell his house out in Washington, NJ which raised enough money for him to pay off umpteen thousands of long past due bills. As we speak, in fact, Peter is back in the area of his former home meeting with the lawyer (to argue over yet more fees) who helped mitigate the fines and penalties that resulted when he resisted arrest when a cop pulled him over for failure to come to a full stop at a four-way stop sign. The tab for this stupidity — fines, penalties, higher car insurance, a state license surcharge, lawyers fees — has already cost him between 5 and 10K. And he is on probation until sometime in June and can’t leave the state without special permission. If it had not been for yours truly loaning him thousands at the last second the house would have been foreclosed on.
Technical observations:
“The willingly sacrificed themselves to save the West from Germany at the start of WWI.”
I’m pretty sure most of the plebs on the front line were not willingly sacrificing themselves. The Head Honcho was one of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynasty, that somehow or other, was sitting in most of the European monarchic thrones at the time.
“The unquestionably saved the West during WWII albeit not willingly.”
Firstly, the Soviet hierarchy abandoned the West when it signed the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact (aka Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) in 1939, weeks before the first move against Poland.
Then once attacked despite their deal with Herr Hitler, they were forced to defend themselves.
When they prevailed in their defense, the Soviet elite then took advantage of the German collapse and sought to extend a new hegemony, which they successfully did for all of 45 years.
This was not ‘saving the West’. That required the Brits & US allies to stand firm or the USSR would have continued on a march to the Atlantic.
As for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, my take is that Stalin felt he had no choice. He’d skimmed off the top of his military leadership and knew Russia was in a bad way in terms of being able to cope with the invasion from Germany he knew was coming. Russia made a number of near desperate attempts to get France and the Brits to agree to an alliance to defend Czechoslovakia who at the time have a very robust military of their own. The Bolsheviks were so despised Stalin was rebuffed in every attempt he made.
Signing the non-aggression pact was merely to buy time for Russia to get their own act together.
There isn’t any doubt Stalin was a wily old bear looking out strictly for the interests of Russia. The allies were fortunate someone by the name of Winston was running the war effort from our side because without him Germany would have conquered Europe and probably most of the rest of the world before the US would have bestirred themselves to come to the rescue.
The US and UK could never have stopped the march of the Axis powers without Russia. The UK got pummeled by the Germans on nearly all fronts and there was no real turnaround until the Russians stepped in. In aggregate, US contribution was miniscule.
The body counts (both civilian and military deaths) bear this out, too, and will absolutely shock anyone who has never checked.
Brilliant! What a gloriously succinct & poignant analogy. Thanks, EvelynV!
“Going after Trump for whatever interactions he’s had with Putin is analogous to some family slob (trump) coming into your house tracking the pig shit he’s covered in all over the brand new carpets, drunkenly crashing into furniture breaking things, slurring words so badly he’s barely understandable and then the house owner standing aside shaking their finger at the guy scolding him for wearing a polka dot shirt with striped pants.”
I guess that makes the DNC leadership and their media lapdogs the stupid house owner who focuses on the irrelevant fashion issues. (Russiagate)
Why do you suppose that is? Why don’t they see the important issues like Evelyn and Majella? Maybe you should write and remind them of the important issues!
Amen, Evelyn. While I grew up a Cold War liberal (Air Force brat) and was brainwashed to fear and despise the USSR it was clearly a monstrous swindle, mostly on our side but also by the Russian version of the MIC.
Today there are no major conflicts of interest between the Russian Federation and the West. Gas sales? Come on. Crimea? Excuse me: they’ve been speaking Russian there for hundreds of years. The Russians have more rights to Crimea than the USA has to Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands (or Hawaii, for that matter).
Mutual interests? Oh boy you betcha, and number one is standing against resurgent Islam. Mix in energy and the ‘useless fools’ arguing for unlimited immigration and borderless states and Putin can be seen as clear-headed and a natural ally. He could even help save Eurabia from itself.
I don’t know if they’re all that clueless.
The bill to ban sanctuary cities in FL?
“Leaders from more than 120 state businesses signed an open letter to the governor and lawmakers cautioning them that the legislation could hurt numerous sectors of the state economy.
“‘There goes agriculture,’ said Mike Fernandez, a billionaire healthcare executive who helped organize the opposition. “There goes construction. There goes home health service.”
The New York Times, 04/26/2019
“According to an analysis of American Community Survey data by the Institute for Family Studies, only 17 percent of mothers with children 3 or younger say they prefer to work full time. Many career moms manage their stressful work-life balance thanks only to low-wage immigrant labor to take care of their children, clean their houses and deliver their takeout.”
The New York Times, 04/28/19
The political establishment is hoping to steer around the chaos of recognizing the huge problem that reliance on immigration has created for steering the country toward a sustainable future. In the meantime there are class issues about who profits from these economic and social developments.
At first, the immigration distortions were held in sectors like agriculture, low-paid services, manufacturing, etc. Now, they’ve metastasized into other, more integral industries including high tech and health care.
Immigration became a primary source of economic power through ability of corporations to capitalize on its open borders. Everyone was sucked into the undertow of its leveraging effect on profits in all industries. You may have not been an immigration supporter, but you still have to buy food, cheap food, picked by immigrants. You still have to find shelter and you did so buying homes built with immigrant labor. The economy is something that, thanks to Republicans, we don’t control. The means justify the ends.
What you will not see is any sort of self-sacrifice. Modern people do not even know what it means. They aren’t going to pay a marginally higher cost for food. They aren’t going to agitate to take profits from their neighbor’s pockets. They aren’t going to change their behavior if it means sweat and effort. They are not going to “downgrade”…. only forever, up, up, up.
The genesis of Wishful Thinking is really grounded in clearly self-interested rationality. You prefer to believe one thing but not the other based on personal motivations, which at a basic level can be as low-level as (A) makes me feel bad and (B) makes me feel better.
>>> The economy is something that, thanks to Republicans, we don’t control.
You mean thanks to RINOs and open-border Dems. You conveniently forgot Dems, who exploit immigrants for votes and the political power it confers.
>>> They aren’t going to pay a marginally higher cost for food.
They can and they do. Clearly you’ve never been to Whole Foods.
The idea that Americans survive on the margins provided by illegal immigrants is laughable. In fact it’s quite the opposite; immigrants are storming are borders for economic opportunities they can’t get from home. In the process, they lower wages, steal opportunities from Americans, cost us billions in social welfare, and degrade our shared national values and culture.
I’m uninterested in blaming the Dems, because they have not been in control for a very long time. The political axis has crept steadily to the right for over 3 decades.
The Republicans played a great filibuster game across three decades. There were only 2 stretches of 2 years, 1992-94 and 2008-2010 where Dems were in ostensible control. And during those eras the Dem’s center of political gravity was right of center.
Under the aegis of fiscal responsibility, or defense, or austerity, or shrinking government, vast amounts of debt were created, industries were granted exemption for innumerable regulations, and certain individuals and businesses were granted de facto public welfare. In respect to Agriculture, the amnesties for what we could refer to as H2-A temporary agricultural workers came at pivotal times during Republican administrations, whose constituent powerbases tended to rural, agricultural economies. Those constituencies were serviced by the 6 year, annual Farm Bill, an omnibus bill full of various corporate welfare giveaways and insurance and debt obligations that drove the general development of industrial agriculture to what it is today.
Meanwhile the trade deficit exploded under Republican-led efforts to liberalize global trade. As other types of exports fell, agriculture became a more and more important export sector.
Agriculture is not a sector a lot of people know much about. Few people realize they are subsidizing farmers at the fuel pump and in the grocery store. Few realize they are subsidizing climate change. Few realize their food supply is 5000 miles long. Few realize there is nothing at all like a “free market”.
And fewer still realize our agricultural system is an outgrowth of plantation slavery. You don’t pay the real cost of your food. Not even remotely. Its all subsidized. The cost savings went into someone’s pocket. Around here, into the pockets of various interests stemming from the development of fertile bottomlands into real estate.
You can get into agriculture, too, at the deadened level of the status quo. Just mow your lawn, sprinkle chemicals (subsidize the Middle East and DuPont). Plant your starts (plastic, fossil peat moss, maybe some mined elemental SuperGro). Maybe even hire a Central American to do it for you (No one checking the H1-A).
Nothing different between these two systems except for the scale. They are totally compatible.
I know only a few people who know the farmers who they get their food from. The rest pay that guy less than 0.10 of the dollar. Those farmers use fossil fuels and non-national labor. They mine fossil water supplies. They ship product on fully subsidized end-to-end delivery systems. Thats where you get the 9 kcal of fossil fuels to 1 kcal of food calorie production disparity.
The consumer could make an effort to pay a premium price and find more sustainable food produced without immigrant labor- but they do not, by and large, care.
Needless to say, its complicated, but the bottom line is it is the Republicans’ fault. If you’re fully gaslit on the issue, and you’re a Republican who thought he was supporting the anti-immigration, anti-deficit party… I’m sorry but “Blame da left” is your campfire song not a description of reality.
Anyway it all metastasizes from Agriculture into the other areas, these quotes I showed nakedly reveal. Health care, services, hospitality, there really isn’t any industry that isn’t affected now by this model of, bring ’em in, keep wages low, corporate profits up. And Republicans have every intention of keeping this status quo going.
>>> The political axis has crept steadily to the right for over 3 decades.
No it hasn’t. It swings back and forth. Meanwhile, despite the periodic 180s in American politics, the Left thoroughly dominates the USA. They’ve taken over the judiciary, the MSM, education, and most government bureaucracy. Even when a so-called Conservative Republican gets elected, chances are it’s another RINO with a largely liberal agenda. Bush, for example, expanded Medicare!
Gay marriage is a done deal. Pot is now essentially legalized. Our first black President. Muslims elected to Congress. Socialists coming right out into the open and getting elected. You want to keep arguing that the nation has moved to the right?
>>> but the bottom line is it is the Republicans’ fault
Blame da right? Oh that’s right; the spell only works if I say it three times…
Over the last 3 decades we’ve had very conservative administrations, including Clinton and Obama. They had to track center right to win swing states.
Republicans have been waging a war of attrition for decades. Filibusters are the strategy. Being unreasonable, and forcing compromise is their game.
The core issues for the Right have ostensibly been dismantling government, limiting regulation, increasing war power, increasing trade liberalization, and for the sake of constituencies, social conservatism which means grotesque displays of religious piety including the occasional shame-making
Dismantling government with the influence of think tanks, Gerrymandering voting districts, asylum for immigration, sweetheart deals for developers, bailouts for congress.
Deregulation of the banks, housing market, lending standards, ecological oversight, industry oversight, etc. AEI, Heartland, and the army of lobbyists writing all their legislation. Why the national debt? They systematically dismantled the balance between revenue and expenditure over successive administrations by weakening enforcement.
Religion has made huge inroads into the legislative infrastructure and continues to chew like a termite at reproductive rights. The impetus for all political religiosity is pandering to conservative blocs.
Pot as an issue was just red meat for keeping blacks in jail, White boys in uniform, Cash in prison development, and of course, assuming the posture of moral superiority. (Now that it is big agriculture, allowances are made).
Gay marriage is not a done deal. They are going to fight it as long as they have to answer to the religious demographic. States’ Rights, remember?
War is big business for Republicans, I don’t think you can make the argument there are more hawks on the Democratic side.
In respect to immigration, Republicans are clearly at fault. The Bushes (Texas) and Reagan (California) were never going to say no to big agriculture lobbies. The rural scene is dominated by Republican conservatives. That whole economy is propped up on Ag subsidy, illegal labor, and free trade agreements.
Blame da Right… might be a refreshing change of tune for so-called moderate CFNers.
Being unreasonable, un-rational, un-scientific, and unbelievably stupid… these are the province and capital of the Right.
>>> They had to track center right to win swing states.
Track center right? Can we agree that means: a bit to the right of center.
Give us an examples of Clinton and Obama campaigning “a bit to the right of center”.
They didn’t promise to strengthen gun rights, reduce abortions, promote small business, etc. They promised massive government health care and education initiatives.
Now I agree that what they promised and what they delivered are certainly different. I agree that when we examine their actual policies, we have a mixed bag that could be construed as moderate.
>>> Republicans have been waging a war of attrition for decades. Filibusters are the strategy. Being unreasonable, and forcing compromise is their game.
You ignorant slut. It was Harry Reid who triggered the “nuclear option” to get Obamacare passed. Not a single Republican vote! Sorry dude but your liberal NYT education is failing you.
>>> War is big business for Republicans, I don’t think you can make the argument there are more hawks on the Democratic side.
The argument I would make is that Republicans are just more honest. While “doves” like Obama promise one-world kumbaya, they wage secret drone army wars that kill women and children in droves. Obama has the distinction of being the first Prez to kill a 15-year-old American citizen with a drone strike. Congrats, Obama!
>>> In respect to immigration, Republicans are clearly at fault.
LOL. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re talking pre-Trump ancient history? I’ve already agreed that both RINOs and Dems are responsible for our nation’s 25+ million illegals. But if you try to pin this on Trump, you’re in the terminal stages of TDS.
>>> Being unreasonable, un-rational, un-scientific, and unbelievably stupid… these are the province and capital of the Right.
Now that’s the sort of arrogance one expects from the Left. Thanks for staying true to form and not disappointing.
BAM!
I was a farmer for quite some time. I gave it up due to the impossibly long hours and inability to support myself beyond basic subsistence. People are more willing to pay insane amounts of money on a per/lb basis for french fries or chips but balk at paying a local organic farmer a decent price for potatoes. I couldn’t compete with buy 1, get 2 free blueberry specials at the chain grocery. Those were generally “loss leaders” to get the customers in who then bought soda and snacks which is where the store made their money.
It’s depressing, Mountain Gal. When you look at the time, effort and investment that goes into producing a pint of milk (on a real farm, not a cow factory) and people expect it to be cheaper than coloured, fizzy, sugary muck in a plastic bottle.
L’il Debbie
Exscotticus appears to have stereotyped you as female with that egregious ‘slut’ remark…
Exscotticus – you make the case that the RINOs were “pre-Trump ancient history”..? Are you seriously saying that, in fundamental reality, anything has changed?
Trump MIGHT last another 18 months, but he’ll be unceremoniously dumped on 3 November 2020. It’ll have been a brutal but mercifully short lesson.
>>> that egregious ‘slut’ remark…
LOL and I thought the left likes SNL.
>>> Are you seriously saying that, in fundamental reality, anything has changed?
Yes I am. Before Trump, our open border wasn’t even on the national agenda. Now it is.
>>> Trump MIGHT last another 18 months
Riiiight. Just like the Mueller report was going to reveal shocking collusion. Just like Hillary’s victory was a foregone conclusion.
You don’t have enough votes to impeach. So all this grandstanding by Dems just gives them something to do. Virtue-signalling for their base. It’s not like they’re passing any actual legislation…
Meanwhile, while you try to convince yourself that Trump has changed nothing, the fact is that SCOTUS is now conservative. That change is already paying dividends, and will continue to pay long after Trump is gone.
Please ban immigration. I know you want to stop immigration for environmental reasons and I agree in all of that with you. But immigration is shifting jobs from the native to the foreign born as your are pointing out. And what better way of getting Americans who aren’t doing their fair share in terms of contribution into the workplace than having empty seats that need to be filled in the labor market? People will have to go to school or trade school. Then the education level of the population can be lifted altogether. There would be so many benefits to ending immigration. I urge you to reconsider. Oh well if things cost more for a while. It’s called a “getting your country back” tax. Republicans should love it right. We need major and drastic actions now. These business owners and billionaires are always going to be for whatever makes their bottom line better.
Unfortunately I think the Democrats love immigration in general as they think many of those(Hispanics, etc) will become Democratic voters should they become citizens.
Agreed though. Many areas of the country where it’s hopeless to even think one could get a reasonable wage now for work such as gardening, construction, etc as the wages are severely depressed by both legal and illegal immigrants from our south.
Our unemployment rate is theoretically very low but many US adults are still not working or only working p/t. Some of this is that they look at the prospect of earning Fed minimum wage and assess they are better off relying on benefits.
Yep you are right. The Democrats want new voters and a large class of people who are largely dependent on government. Republicans want the cheap labor, depressed wages, and any votes they can eek out too (not very many). Both want to replace the traditional American White Middle Class.
Unfortunately , Tom Petty’s best friend was Jack Daniels .
8 different substances — few of them legal — were found in Tom Pettys blood at his autopsy. i think JD was one of them.
brh
supposedly due to pain from a fracture.
These stress levels are already destroying the young, who are being endlessly inundated with information that paints a very bleak future.
My daughter, currently in the 8th grade, is already stressed out over the end of the world. Her social studies is more like social just warrior training, and science is mainly illustrating the coming apocalypse in its many possible forms. Even her literature classes are promoting nothing but dystopian novels.
Only her math classes provide a break from a bleak and terrible picture being planted in her head.
Is it any wonder kids are so confused about themselves and life, and acting in such bizarre manners?
Yeah, but plenty of kids went to school during the days of “duck and cover drills”, hiding under the desks in case the Russians dropped a bomb on them. They managed to deal with this and move on to adulthood. And hey, if math class is a relief then maybe your daughter will excel in math!
Did you get to see Raymond Briggs’ (of The Snowman fame) When the Wind Blows back then, Mountain Gal, or was it a bit too British?
“Jim and Hilda Bloggs are a middle-aged couple who put their faith in the government as they prepare for nuclear war. When the countdown begins, they roll up their sleeves and follow the advice contained in the real-life official booklet of the time, ‘Protect and Survive’. They whitewash their windows, build a shelter out of doors and cushions, take the washing in and put away packets of ginger nuts, a tin of pineapple chunks and a good supply of tea’.
Title song sung by David Bowie!
Never heard of it. Sorry.
Hi GA – Yes, I remember “When the Wind Blows” very well.. still have a copy.
I was a teacher in the 70s-80s and introduced many children from those generations to this frightening tale. I don’t think it did them any harm – it was still an issue, though less so, by then. More importantly, it did ask children to question authority.
My God I can only imagine the damage you did to children with your leftist nonsense.
Except when we were kids, that was pretty much a single idea, and it wasn’t slammed in to our heads every single day, and it was quickly forgotten by minds preoccupied with more childish thoughts.
In today’s classes, it’s an endless barrage on a daily basis, so the comparison is not applicable.
What selective-memory BS this is. The threat of nuclear annihilation was real, palpable, dominated the culture for over four decades, and came within a hair of being realized in October 1962.
Children are quite capable of understanding the difference between dystopian fiction and a real threat to their lives, especially when it’s being drilled into their heads on a daily basis. The problem these days isn’t The Hunger Games, it’s active-shooter drills.
They’re training them young for their Crisis Actor roles. Some even have a chance at stardom, such as the lantern-jawed David Hogg, a hog of a ‘man.’
Yes. I’ve looked into the Cuban missile crisis and realize what a serious threat this was. But yes, I don’t think kids had to worry back then that a crazed guy with a AK whatever would come crashing into their kindergarten and blow them all away. It was more of a fear that a missile or nuke would wipe them all out.
Still, reality is that we have to prepare kids for whatever may conceivably happen. I was recently at a school when they had an earthquake/tsunami drill.
No we did not have to worry Mountain Gal, because we were not playing gore filled violent video games, or watching violent murders and destruction in Hollywood movies or TV shows about satanic and zombie apocalypses. Anyone who wonders why the kids of today are acting so badly cannot have much in the way of thought process, can they? Oh yes, and our parents were home for us, not shipping us off to pre-care, day care, after care or our grandparent so that they could “afford” to make the huge payments on all of their stuff.
You know Walter, you make a good point. I don’t remember hearing Ike suggesting that maybe the 2nd Amendment folks would take care of his Adlai Stevenson problem either.
Also, I’m pretty sure back in the day the men elected has enough class they didn’t have to rely on paid whor…sex workers to find some place to plant their unworthy seeds.
Men have engaged in less then discretionary entanglements with women since the dawn of time and there has never been a lack of willing females to go with it. Our human sexuality can be a joy as well as a curse unfortunately.
Sure Walter sure.
I’ll bet you were out there front and center defending Bubba when your party of cohorts were chasing him with torches and pitchforks.
The threat of nuclear annihilation has never left, so I’m not sure what you think has changed. It’s just another item on an ever expanding list.
Sorry, but I think my point went over your head.
@evilyn
-Also, I’m pretty sure back in the day the men elected has enough class they didn’t have to rely on paid whor…sex workers to find some place to plant their unworthy seeds.-
First you come off as jealous as hell everyone is getting some but you and as nasty as your attitude is I can see why.
Second off I reference Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy brothers!
Sure I do benr (what is that? short for BENd oveR?)
You do realize when a guy claims his Conestoga covered wagon was a chick magnet he’s talking about chicks who probably wear the same brand of Depends as him don’t you?
This crisis of scientific thinking is associated not so much with the development of science as such, but with the Western European mentality formed by the Great Schism.
This is manifested in the fact that since the time of Barlaam of Calabria and William of Ockham in the West, the individual (private) and / or material is considered real.
Within the Eastern European mentality formed by Orthodoxy, “reality” as a philosophical category is derived from the so-called ontological reality (as created from nothing by the Lord God) within the framework of the Abrahamic tradition of pre-Christian Judaism and received final confirmation by the fact of God-incarnation.
Russian science, spawned by Peter the Great and Mikhail Lomonosov, initially took technical competition with Western science, without taking Western European mentality as a basis.
Moreover, it successfully withstood this competition, which was manifested in particular in the works of Nikolai Lobachevsky, Dmitri Mendeleev, Nikolai Vavilov, Alexander Friedman, Igor Tamm, etc. The works of these scientists not only accounted for the glory of Russian science and demonstrated the advantages of the Eastern European mentality as a philosophical basis of science, but also show ways to overcome the current crisis of the scientific method, thereby allowing you to breathe a new life into the secular optimism of futurological concepts #2 and # 3.
Moreover, the fact that for Christian morality the pessimistic scenario is categorically unacceptable, since the hypothesis of the collapse of mankind into two biologically different species makes the incarnation of God into man absurd, means that it is possible to use a powerful resource of Orthodox ethics in Russia as a source of social optimism and socially conservative synthesis.
Indeed, only Orthodoxy makes it possible to combine the history of the Russian Empire and the history of the Soviet Union from the confrontation with the Livonian Order to the Red Banner on the roof of the Reichstag and form the concept of Katechon as the “Restraining Power”.
If we proceed from the Abrahamist concept of “In the beginning was the Word,” Russia cannot emerge from an almost hundred-year crisis without restoring the “the time which out of joint” and not overcoming the concept imposed by the West on Russia as a completely new state that has no connection with the destroyed “Empire of Evil” and pre-revolutionary Russia.
Indeed, it is quite obvious that modern Russia, having assumed the role of the successor of the historic Russia, denies itself, and this cannot but affect the consciousness of Russian citizens.
The restoration of the unity of consciousness of the Russians, expressed by the words of St. Alexander Nevsky “God is not in strength, but in Truth” and Stalin’s words “Our cause is Right – Victory will be Ours” can not only prevent the pessimistic scenario (futurological concept #1) and minimize negative effects of the global crisis on the Russian economy, but also turn Russia into a leader in building a post-crisis economy.
While I am waiting for all the catastrophes to arrive, I have moved to horror of all horrors, a golf community. It is out in the willy wags and alas, my car score is “zero”. I grew up in the sixties in suburbia and unfortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with city life. High taxes, poor services, bad schools, cars being broken into ….no thanks. If the City of Baltimore wants to blame me for its ills, go for it. Of course in S.F., I could spend my time chasing the poopers off my block. How special is that?
Oh, and I see the stars at night and if I am very lucky, I can hear a train in the distance.
Sadly, we’re quickly running out of places to escape to.
I visited friends at a golf community. Few drove cars, as everyone just did their shopping using their electric golf carts. It allowed the elderly to be extremely mobile. Better for the environment, too.
And for those who think that a golf course is an environmental disaster, I would ask: compared to what? Being paved over for a parking lot? Being developed into tract housing? Wildlife seems to adapt to golf courses pretty well. I’ll take open green spaces over many other competing alternatives.
“Sadly, we’re quickly running out of places to escape to.” And yet they keep admitting more immigrants to the US which keeps growing. I can’t stand being around lots of people, concrete, noise, traffic. Hard to find a place like that anymore if you don’t want to live in the middle of a desert or something.
Is an electric golf car really better?
I seriously doubt it that electricity is produced using “dirty perto-tech or bird murdering wind power or worse Nuclear power the very dirtiest and hardest to clean up when it all goes wrong.
If its solar cells they are toxic as hell to make with a limited life cycle some would have us believe there is such a thing as green energy the very concept at this point is a joke they all have their toxic by products!
Lest we forgot the very batteries themselves are toxic and dirty.
Mature writers are great for getting into that which is existential & sociological. I’m a big fan of the existentialist era of writing and kept thinking about Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock & The Third Wave as I was reading today’s article. And I agree with the totality of today’s lecture as we are all living in somewhat of a depersonalized lifestyle via metadata collected whilst we surf.
When we analyse our current illusory civilization it is easy to see that it is hierarchically driven top down both economically & socially to a point of a great divide between those that control the so-called ‘matrix’ and those that don’t. In Mechanical Engineering we have driver gears driving the driven gears for machine work in applications like lathes. In society the driver gears & driven gears are highly worn leading to systemic breakdown of the overall mechanistic ‘machine’ world view that the lion’s share of the population has towards our current existential conundrum.
The ghost in the machine is the haunting specter of the breakdown of the glue that binds civilization cohesively and allows it to be productive with some semblance of growth whether micro or macro.
Today we have a parasitic class reaping the whirlwind off of the indentured into servitude class which promulgates a class consciousness that seems to be simmering along the lines of overthrow of the elite class that are driving us into mass conflagration with the driving lash of the tyrannous corporate elite that care not for our worldview or that of civilization.
As human beings we are tasked to live life as a unified whole in terms of population. As citizens we are obligated to be fair and show compassion for our fellow human beings whereas the corporate citizen is fully permitted to undermine our collective social safety & economic safety by becoming predatory towards us instead of helpful & compassionate as we have all been raised to be towards others as part of a shared social structure we call civilization.
The corporatist elite are a predatory class of individuals that need to be removed from our midst and replaced with some semblance of order that is less destructive towards civilization and the people it houses. The corporatist class has victimized us all to a point of the breakdown of vast proportions of our populations worldwide and it looks as though there is going to be no let up in their agenda to grind us all down to dust or Soylent Green if they can profit from it.
The time is ripe for revolution when the systemic suffering is never addressed or ameliorated by the elite scumbaggery that are currently doing everything they can do to undermine the power that the population has towards its own future. We all know how we got here on the path set since Bretton Woods was instituted. We all know that William Jefferson Clinton, Republican Senator Phil Gramm, & the Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan conspired to repeal Glass-Steagall Act so that the Securities & Exchange Commission could extend their leverage limits to the wholly insolvent Wall Street marquee banks and allow incompetent investment bankers like Richard ‘the gorilla of Wall Street’ Fuld to leverage the fourth largest investment bank in the world 44:1 and blow trillions of US taxpayer dollars up the butts of American taxpayers in the form of smoke just for the profit & bonus that was due to the executive class of predators & parasites.
I’m all for bringing the entire predator class under complete control before they annihilate us all systemically by their collective incompetence which is obviously fueling the normlessness or anomie that is prevailing in terms of our current modern day culture of depersonalization & discontent of most that are consciously aware of what is manifesting social & politically since the GFC woke us all up from our illusory consumerist cultural death in 08.
RW
Look at the bright side, Jim. You spent the bulk of your time on this Earth riding the waive at the very pinnacle of energy extraction, progress, and human achievement. With the pace at which the collapse has been unfolding, you’re likely to join Jay Hanson in the safety of the grave before the schumer really hits the fan. At 40, I’m afraid I’m likely to be well into my dotage right when the need for physical stamina and strength is greatest. I’m betting my way out of this world is likely to be by way of violence or privation.
Also, my children are still young. 10 or 20 more years of extend and pretend would be fine by me as our bellies are still full each night, and our beds warm. I’ll take that with the accompanying cultural circus over the long emergency every time.
You mean this guy?
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-04-09/jay-hanson-dies-in-diving-accident/
Wow. Apparently this was Mr. Peak Oil.
Now he’s dead.
brh
the Model T had about 20 horsepower, 45 miles per hour, and 21 miles per gallon. Aside from the warmongering and financial crackups, America has plenty of wiggle room to produce most of the comforts and conventions Americans produce and that that Americans like to produce and consume.
I have always had that suspicion too. I know that economically from a profit and cost perspective it doesn’t make sense for us to produce most everything here at home but shouldn’t we do so for national security reasons if anything else? We have the resources and capacity for it. What better way to bring manufacturing back once and for all. And we could keep every able bodied adult busy in one form or another. The system we have now does not make any sense but as others here suggest we are simply in a safe and comfortable rut. Well I should say the people making all of the profits because of the current arrangements are comfortable and the peasants with pitchforks are still at home being good boys and girls.
most of the money is in advertising!
Gotta jump on that Model T info: Yes, about 20 HP with a young engine hitting well on all cylinders — each cylinder had its own spark coil, and they could be finicky if not tuned correctly or had iffy connections in the ‘coil box’. And the spark advance was manually controlled so it took some skill to trim it just right to avoid overheating and engine knock.
21 MPG? Not so much, maybe in optimal highway conditions. Maybe. Super inefficient carburetor (the one on your lawn mower is much more sophisticated) combined with a crude engine put it closer to 10 to 15 MPG. Maybe.
I’ve put a fair number of miles on a “T”, and I can tell you that if you got one up to 45 MPH it was going downhill with a tail wind. And then it would scare the bejeezus outa ya’ cuz you’d think it was gonna fly into pieces. The steering gearbox ratio was such that a slight turn of the steering wheel had a large impact on the aspect of the front tires which were around 30 inches in diameter with wooden spokes and definitely not balanced or well aligned — not difficult to collapse if hit with much lateral force. At 45 that clunky engine was way over red line.
I won’t even go into the problems with the brakes which were actuated within the transmission, acting only on the drive train and rear wheels. It was virtually impossible to lock the brakes without tearing something up, and if they were not kept properly adjusted they might not work at all.
Helluva lot of fun to drive, though. A total chick magnet in a college town. Used to use the crank to start the engine when in public even though the 1922 and up models had electric starters.
And yet Farmer McGregor you claim the woman terrorized by your leering at the grocery story was 20 years older than you? If you were a BMOC with a model “T” she must have been a hottie in a buckboard.
You do realize there are people who own history cars that were not alive when said car was in production?
Honestly why are you always so nasty?
Sure I do benr (what is that? short for BENd oveR?)
You do realize when a guy claims his Conestoga covered wagon was a chick magnet he’s talking about chicks who probably wear the same brand of Depends as him don’t you?
Green Alba,
Just want to tie up a loose end from earlier this month:
Google says: Putting periods after abbreviations (or not) is a little-known difference between British English and American English. … British writers, however, make a distinction: abbreviations that are written with the first and last letter of the word (as in Dr. for Doctor and Mr. for Mister) do not get a period.
So it’s one of those British vs (vs.) American English things.
I was in Asia. Were you?
I think that’s what I said, Q, when I said ‘we’ don’t use etc. etc. 🙂
That’s what I meant anyway, that it was a ‘tomahtoes/tomaytoes’ thing.
I think our way is logical, though (well, I would…) because the full stop stands for something truncated and there’s nothing truncated after the ‘r’ in ‘Dr’ or ‘Mr’.
But I’m sure you’ll remember it now and not think we’ve just lazily left off the period! And it’s not one to fall out about.
lateStarter … thanks for the Paolo Bacigalupi article. It’s brilliant, sobering, and dovetails nicely with JHK’s post today.
Interesting, as always. I am not sure whether Jim is aware of the debate between Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Driscoll over the future of AI. Ray holds that we are on our way even better and more reliable future super-complex AI systems, whereas Kevin believes that IT systems have already maxed out, are beginning to break down, and will continue to slide. The two opposing views are an important as – unbeknowst to most people – trading on world financial markets is now almost fully controlled by machine algorithms which are not controlled by humans. In fact, as Andrew Smart has pointed out (in “Beyond Zero and One”), humans simply take cues from machines, because no one individual is capable of understanding the complexity of the calculations. So, the take-home point is that the post-2008 calibrations of the markets with its fast-corrected “corrections” projecting upward are machine designed and procured. This, on the hand explains Kurzweil’s optimism – as he imagines the upward trend can be sustained forever – as it is built into the logic that humans slavishly follow, but on the other hand, makes Driscoll’s grasp of Heisenberg ever more scary because in it the overall structural stability of the systems eventually crashes under its own weight. But, and there is a pointer to Jim Kunstler, it is not the weight of the immorality in the racket, but technological issues with boards and chips that if they get even little unstable will, in the humungous complexity easily cascade to a complete system shutdown. Driscoll gives an example of a 2008 Space Shuttle incident in which the mission had to be aborted because of a failure of a single resistor on a single board. There have been already crashes on the NYSE, with NASDAQ down because of a technical glitch, in 2013 and a mysterious “Flash Crash” in 2010 in which DJIA went down and up 600 points within minutes! As someone put it Smart’s book, the big crash will most likely come because the probability of an event occuring will not be as negligible, as the machines told humans it would be.
These technical glitches cause ‘flash crashes’, which are ephemeral events. It’s when trend uniformity breaks that major events happen, that is to say, when real people intervene due to value considerations. Someone said that business cycles have been replaced by credit cycles. Tail wagging the dog kind of thing.
business cycles have been replaced by credit cycles.
I guess, when industry is in China and Banks are in London.
Globalism.
So basically the current status quo is even more flimsy than we thought. We have put ourselves in such a corner that a small little chip could cause Armageddon, or an errant algorithm could herald the Apocalypse. More miracles from wolves in sheep’s clothing I guess.
“Artificial Intelligence” is an euphemism for “Statistical Inference from Large Data Sets” which is less sexy, and less intelligent, according to one expert recently interviewed for Sam Harris’s podcast.
These same techniques are being used to patch the problems of outlier Black Swans in the financial system, though. So prior incidents don’t necessarily mean the system is more sensitive to freak accidents going forward as long as technical issues are resolved. If there is a “Big Crash” I expect it will have relatively mundane as opposed to esoteric causes. All that is required is overvaluation and a cascade of liquidation.
I have heard that AI is no more than turbocharged “statistical inference”. I don’t subscribe to that notion, especially since in the last twenty years the AI greatest thrust has been in Machine Learning. ML assumes discrete strategies in data selection and pattern recognition which go way beyond “mere” inferences. There are active operations of creating “fuzzy” and “focused” algorithmic concepts which are then tested against general and specific data. In many functions AI is by definition “meta-statistical” as it assumes purposeful (or quasi-purposeful) selection and targeting of data. IIUC, this has especially played out of the Artificial Neuronal Network research.
The problem with all this is that at some point the machine’s “thinking” will (or actually already has) become too complex to read for a single human or even a group of smart humans. On a rudimentary level one can describe it as Kasparov’s headache. So, I don’t believe in Black Swans in financial systems “glitches” for the same reason I don’t believe two Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed because of a “mundane” software bug. It was a multi-level systemic error in the MCAS automation. And this is a plane design which was run through exhaustive battery of tests before launch. It did not “manifest” itself before it killed hundreds of people. Now imagine thousands of robot traders optimizing yields and cutting losses against each other based on quadrillion calculations. Incidentally, I don’t know how the programs hedge against overvaluation and cascading liquidation. Do you?
All Automated Intelligence-AI software is programmed & coded logic that simply executes order buy & sell side trading of whatever commodities the programmers want to program trades in. The written code is simply directing computer computation of ‘if & ‘then’ decision rules that direct either ‘0’ or ‘1’ digital ASCII Machine Language to perform high frequency trading within nanoseconds of trade executions so that the high frequency traders can front-run order buying & selling just before orders are cleared on exchanges.
High Frequency Trading is simple machine language that is all traceable whereby any gumshoe could follow the paper trail from analysis of the trading exchange tape. It is no mystery to anyone with any knowledge of machine language.
You can’t blame the machines when the profits go to the bankers that own the machines and the losses go to the poor sot taxpayers as socialized financial loss that bankers only profit from when they lose their bets. Heads the bankers win & tails the bankers win again, eh.
RW
Dear Robert, the AI software is anything but “simple”. It is looking at huge amounts of data and compares different outcomes of similar trends before buying and selling. BTW, I am not blaming the machines for anything. Actually, even blaming the bankers strikes me like blaming dogs for having fleas.
I learned to programme very early in life with Computerized Numerical Control-CNC & Computer Aided Manufacture-CAM.
Previous to that I was programming Numerical Control-NC Machines for metalwork. Programming is extremely easy and simple most of the time. High Frequency Trading is by no means more difficult than circular interpolation on computerized numerical control with a five axis capability.
Machine Language is so simple that even Gomer Pile could do it. Reading the tape is not difficult if one knows how to read the tape. And anything controlled by a machine is programmed with ‘0’s & ‘1’s in ASCII code. Digital binary evidence cannot be erased or manipulated. The software either works or it doesn’t.
Lastly, bankers are responsible for their underlings & subordinates. Criminal Intent laws & plausible deniability allow the bankster class of predators to fleece at will with impunity.
In the case of Wall Street the bankers are both the fleas & dogs as well as tape worms and any other parasites you can think of off the top of your head.
Bankers should be put on a leash just like a dog too. Frankly, we should fit them with muzzles & electronic shock collars for good measure. And we should get them neutered so that they can’t procreate. That ought to fix the little bastards.
RW
If that was the case then we would have a glut of programmers the opposite is actually the reality and even more so when the coding requires higher math.
I just read a neat article on just how hard it is to find decent programmers now.
https://www.itworld.com/article/2703927/the–1-million-a-year-software-developer.html
Kurzweil, like a lucky dog, had his day.
Brilliant essay today Jim!
The following is excerpted from a March 8, 2019, essay on the Epsilon Theory webpage entitled “Fiat World” written by Ben Hunt.
“So it struck me … OF COURSE we borrow record sums to live a daily life beyond our means. OF COURSE we swallow (literally) the inflation that engulfs us with our $4.99 per lb. chicken breasts and our $1000 smartphones.
THIS is the cave in which inflation hides … our Fiat Lifestyle, where we simply declare into existence the manner in which we deserve to live. Declared into existence exactly like everything else in the Fiat World.
Pulled into the present from our future selves and our children. Without a second thought.”
https://www.epsilontheory.com/fiat-world/
On April 28, Tate said:
“No big deal if it’s [a terrorist attack] meted out to Christians. If the target is a mosque or synagogue, for some reason, it becomes a very big deal.”
On April 29, GreenAlba replied:
“No big deal? You people keep coming out with this grotesque nonsense, as if you were totally unaware of the reaction all over the world to Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, Nice, London, Manchester or Sri Lanka. I haven’t seen the New Zealand flag superimposed on buildings and on pictures everywhere online the way the French one was. Or everyone saying the equivalent of ‘Je suis Charlie’ – everywhere.
‘Someone else’ did this the other day, claiming the reaction to the Sri Lankan attack was nothing about the victims and all about the poor Muslims who risked reprisals. To which I offered three articles within the very same day all about the victims from the pretty liberal Guardian – no mention about the Muslim population until a couple of days later when it was mentioned that 800 ordinary Muslims had had to be hidden for their own safety, which was justified news too but didn’t get any more than that mention, as far as I could see.
It’s pathetic – why don’t you give it up.
I didn’t put a question mark at the end of that question because it’s not really a question. We know why you won’t give it up.”
Tate comment:
A couple of weeks back I was watching a Netflix 3-part documentary on the Paris attacks culminating with Bataclan. It was in French with English subtitles. Not one mention during the entire three hour production of the religious/ethnic background of the attackers, as if their crimes were completely without motive. The viewer is left to assume some free-floating angst on the Terrorists’ part.
This is how the globalist corporatist media shape the narrative & is key to the difference in treatment, which you seek to obscure. Obviously, the media can’t completely ignore a large-scale outrage such as this. But when it’s a mosque or synagogue, it’s always because of “white nationalism” or some such handy label (this is true, hilariously, even when it’s discovered much later after the hasty judgement is rushed to the public what the actual motives of the attacker is — who is usually a Lone Wolf by the way. Often it has nothing to do with white identity or supremacy or anything of the sort.) But when the attackerS are Islamists, their identity & motives are downplayed, because, you know, we can’t rush to judgement & risk offending the delicate sensibilities of the Muslim squatters who have taken up residence in our lands.
Furthermore, who is “we” & how do YOU know why I won’t “give it up?”
Oh dear, this is going to be a rough one so buckle up lol. We all know the general consensus of the Western MSM masters and the political establishment is to always genuflect to Islam. I mean look, after Christchurch all of New Zealand was supposed to don the hijab and probably profess the shahada too (yes exaggeration on my part!). Not one political figure that I am aware of said that we all have to wear crucifixes to remember those killed in Sri Lanka. I mean it is so in your face it isn’t funny. It is actually angering and its insulting to non-Muslims (most people in the world). But heaven forbid you recognize their psychological games. Then you are just becoming a far-right nut job who can’t put together sentences or think logically.
“I mean look, after Christchurch all of New Zealand was supposed to don the hijab and probably profess the shahada too (yes exaggeration on my part!).”
So, since you are making this up entirely, and confess to making it up, why follow with:
” Not one political figure that I am aware of said that we all have to wear crucifixes to remember those killed in Sri Lanka. ”
Until you find a suggestion from a political figure that everyone in New Zealand was supposed to don the hijab, you er…don’t have a point.
Do you have no critical faculties whatsoever?
https://www.newsweek.com/men-and-women-invited-wear-headscarf-solidarity-muslims-after-christchurch-1370828
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111462185/my-issue-with-kiwis-being-encouraged-to-wear-headscarves-in-solidarity
I guess it all depends on your perspective GA your perspective always seems to be well I did not hear it so its poppycock and then to denigrate critical thinking skills.
Simply put you don’t know everything nor understand all the minutia involved nor is perspective all just black and white.
>>> I was watching a Netflix 3-part documentary
I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s “The Silence”. This idiotic film is what every city-dwelling liberal thinks is going to happen when calamity strikes, the restaurants close, and even the Korean deli on the corner shutters its doors.
First, they’ll use their superior intelligence to egress the dense urban areas where they live, somehow bypassing all traffic jams, and make it out to the countryside where all the deplorable Trump voters live.
Then they’ll use their city-privilege and superior intelligence to commandeer resources from the country-bumpkin morons, who will mostly be dead already. The rural areas will be vast swathes of empty homesteads fully stocked with food and firearms just waiting for superior liberals to take over!
Although they despise firearms, have never owned or used them, and vote against their lawful ownership every chance they get, these liberals will somehow be completely familiar with firearm operation and use, and will depend on firearms for their survival.
Naturally, they’ll encounter a few rural holdouts who refuse to let social Darwinism win. These will be religious nutters of course. And despite the fact that these local yokels know the area and have all the advantages, they’ll be easily defeated because they lack liberal intelligence, values, and social media (which liberals invented right after Al Gore invented the Internet).
With the power of social media, which will remarkably still work even after entire cities are laid to waste, they’ll be able to find a safe haven and ultimately adopt the ways of the very country-bumpkin morons they once despised. Only they’ll have the aforementioned social media. Which makes them human.
“Then they’ll use their city-privilege and superior intelligence to commandeer resources from the country-bumpkin morons,”
Exscott,
“…Why sure, we can put you up for the night…but you’ll have to sleep with my daughter….”
Oh liberals know all about that, too! The mountain folk are desperate for new genes after generations of inbreeding…
Anti-white racism really isn’t any better than any other kinda racism.
Tate
“A couple of weeks back I was watching a Netflix 3-part documentary on the Paris attacks culminating with Bataclan. It was in French with English subtitles. Not one mention during the entire three hour production of the religious/ethnic background of the attackers, as if their crimes were completely without motive. The viewer is left to assume some free-floating angst on the Terrorists’ part.”
Sadly (owing to your dishonest and inaccurate ‘quotes’ from ‘Call the Midwife’ on a previous occasion – which I was able to verify for myself) I don’t entirely trust you enough to believe that without seeing it myself and I don’t have access to Netflix.
But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt. Why would you think one Netflix documentary would wipe out the experience of all the people who held vigils after Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan. Who stated and re-stated their refusal to give in to the forces of anti-liberalism and the values of true secularism. Who marched and held vigils to re-iterate their commitment to free speech and expression even in in the form of ‘offensive’ cartoons?
All of which was extensively covered in the media, where I personally viewed it all.
I haven’t read so much about the attacks on synagogues in San Diego and Pittsburgh, for example, but that’s entirely my fault.
I assure you there was absolutely no mention of the terrorists’ ethnicity or beliefs, although their ethnic identities were suggested by their names as they addressed one another as overheard by their hostages.
I have only a vague recollection of ‘Call the Midwife.’ Can you give me a date where I made that comment? I can’t recall ever watching that show.
No I can’t. And the comment won’t be there any more. It wasn’t from the show, you quoted an incident from the original book, which wasn’t what actually happened. I googled it and, unusually, found the full text of the book online so I found the incident and it wasn’t the same at all, as I told you at the time.
From memory you said that the (black or other ‘foreign’) owners of a cafe had made an innocent young girl (white, naturally) dance on a table then service the clients in the cafe, when what actually happened was that the girl was only in the cafe – no-one harmed her – and she was there while a prostitute came in, by agreement and for a fee, to dance on the table and all the rest.
Then you entirely missed out the bit where she was taken (by an innocent priest who was genuinely concerned with her care) to a Catholic institution where the Reverend Mother sold her child without her permission. So what harm was actually done to her wasn’t done by anyone black but by a white religious order. None of it mentioned by you, naturally. Probably because you were repeating someone else’s propaganda from some grubby corner of the internet, unless you prefer to take responsibility for the dishonesty entirely on yourself.
But I’m happy to take your word for the Netflix programme, although it sounds highly unlikely. As I said it’s one documentary and doesn’t negate what I said.
I followed all of these Islamist attacks closely. You’ll remember I was in Paris the weekend of the Bataclan attack and I take a close interest anyway because I have strong French connections – and the idea that the identify of the perpetrators, their motives, the horror of what they did or anything else to do with them was glossed over is ridiculous. The individuals were mostly identified in very short order – one of them was in my friend’s daughter’s class at school.
Here they all are having their identity entirely ignored by the media:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34832512
So next you’ll claim that the Muslim rape gangs of numerous towns in Britain are a figment of the febrile imaginations of us ‘far right-wingers’, I suppose. Despite the fact that many of the Paki scum have been duly convicted in courts of law & sent to prison.
And then you make a low-down accusation against a nun that she sold a white girl into slavery. Have you no shame?
Anyone who witnessed that Netflix program knows that I speak the truth. The most innocent interpretation is that the producers of the show thought that since everyone knew the identities of the terrorists, there was no point in dwelling on it.
You can assign any motive you want to the omission, but I think it’s of a piece with the whole, the whole being a certain mindset among the wokester brigades that by shaping the narrative to downplay the threat until it’s impossible to be resisted, the takeover will become a fait accompli. Their goal: the complete dissolution of Western civilization. So far, right on schedule & according to plan.
Tate, she is Cleo, Queen of Denial.
UK is ruined.
Tate
“Anyone who witnessed that Netflix program knows that I speak the truth. “
I agreed to take your word for it, Tate, even though you previously demonstrated that your word should not be taken at face value. Put it down to unjustified magnanimity on my part.
The most innocent interpretation is that the producers of the show thought that since everyone knew the identities of the terrorists, there was no point in dwelling on it.”
I would have thought that was an entirely obvious conclusion. It was certainly mine. If they didn’t want to attract attention to the phenomenon of Islamist terrorism, why make the programme at all?
“So next you’ll claim that the Muslim rape gangs of numerous towns in Britain are a figment of the febrile imaginations of us ‘far right-wingers’, I suppose. Despite the fact that many of the Paki scum have been duly convicted in courts of law & sent to prison.
Since you have entirely made that up, you merely remind me, yet again, of previous instances where you have shown yourself to be a nasty, shameless old man who is quite happy to engage in slander and calumny. I find you worse than Janos and that’s saying something. You ‘suppose’? Don’t suppose, nasty old man, read my posts on the matter.
“And then you make a low-down accusation against a nun that she sold a white girl into slavery. Have you no shame?
You, Tate, were the person who directed me to the book. It is not a novel, it is the memoirs of a midwife and her experiences in the East End of London. I have it on my Kindle, since the bits I read (thanks to your shameless lies) put me in the mood to read it, not that I have yet, my Kindle being rather full of such impulse purchases. But I shall.
Please point to the part in my post where I said the child was sold into slavery? Is this how you process information? Don’t bother to answer that…
The child – a baby – was sold to adoptive parents. The child’s mother (the one you were so concerned about that you posted your comment in the first place) was not consulted, as was the way. The child was stolen. The author of the book – the midwife – went to seethe mother because she was concerned at the heartbroken letter the young women wrote to her – and discovered that the Reverend Mother had stolen her child for adoption.
Since the story comes from the author of the book, I would say please do feel free to take the matter up with her, but unfortunately she died in 2011.
You say you agree to take my word for it, & then everything else you say undercuts that statement. But that’s not being dishonest, no.
You say I “have entirely made” up a provable fact, that the Pakis who belonged to these rape gangs, many of them, have been convicted in courts of law for their abuses & sent to prison. Really? None of that happened? Can you point me to sources to prove that I made it all up?
I do enjoy seeing your facade of civility slip occasionally so that you reveal the person behind the mask, so if that makes me a “nasty, shameless old man,” then it’s worth the price.
As for adoption by persons biologically unrelated to the child, to my mind, that is the equivalent of slavery, although I know this isn’t a common opinion. But the nun who sold the child is guilty of an unconscionable act to be sure.
Tate
Let’s take this slowly…
“You say you agree to take my word for it, & then everything else you say undercuts that statement. But that’s not being dishonest, no.
I said already that I’d take your word for what was in your Netflix documentary, even though it seemed unlikely. Put it the other way round if you prefer – it seems unlikely but I nevertheless take your word for it. I don’t see what’s unfair or dishonest about that. Maybe I’m missing something. I then agreed that the likeliest reason was the one you described as the most innocent option, thereby implicitly agreeing yet again that I took your word for what was – or rather wasn’t – in the documentary. I don’t know what your problem is with that.
You say I “have entirely made” up a provable fact, that the Pakis who belonged to these rape gangs, many of them, have been convicted in courts of law for their abuses & sent to prison. Really? None of that happened? Can you point me to sources to prove that I made it all up?
Oh dear. If you’d bothered to pay attention to what I actually said (e.g. where I indicated that you should read my posts on the subject, of which have been quite a few), that would have helped. I didn’t accuse you of making up the story about the grooming gangs, but of gratuitously inventing my supposed denial of it, which I consider a quite disgraceful calumny. That is why I said ‘don’t suppose’, since what you supposed, somewhat bizarrely, is that I’d deny the existence of grooming gangs which I have repeatedly denounced on this very site, as any decent person would.
I hope we are now clear.
And yes, I still have the same opinion of you, in part because of the above gratuitous invention, and in part because of the lies you made up regarding the East End story, which bore no resemblance to what was actually in the book, for your own propagandist purposes.
What happened to ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’?
“As for adoption by persons biologically unrelated to the child, to my mind, that is the equivalent of slavery, although I know this isn’t a common opinion. But the nun who sold the child is guilty of an unconscionable act to be sure.
Well I don’t know anyone who thinks adoption by persons biologically unrelated to a child, given that that’s the case in practically all adoptions, has anything to do with slavery, but you’re entitled to your unusual opinion.
However, I’m glad we agree that the practice of taking young women’s babies and giving them to third parties without the permission of the mother is indeed unconscionable. It appears nevertheless not to have been an isolated incident.
Sam Harris’s latest podcast on “What do Jihadists want” is a literal reading of the ISIS publication “Dabiq”, which neatly demonstrates that you literally cannot separate the ideology from the doctrine and touches on the phenomenon of avoiding any attribution for responsibility on Islam itself… Rigorous religious liberalism means capitulation to the idea that the Koran not just equivalent to the Bible, but on a higher plateau, and must be immune from criticism.
Christopher Hitchens, who doesn’t have many friends on this site, describes in God is not Great the process by which the Koran was actually cobbled together. The idiocy of it actually defies belief.
The fact remains that most everyday Muslims in Western countries do distance themselves from the unpalatable bits of it, just as neither you nor I have ever met a Christian who cut of his hand or poked out his eye as exhorted to in the Bible if either of these ‘offend’. If they took the Bible literally there would be hordes of men going about both handless and eyeless after a session on Pornhub.
“And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and
cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee
that one of thy members should perish, and not
that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
“And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,
and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for
thee that one of thy members should perish, and
not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
And that doesn’t even have the excuse of being in the Old Testament. But I guess it is at least your own eye you’ve to pluck out and your own hand you’ve to cut off if you’ve been thinking naughty thoughts about your friend’s missus.
Islam would probably prefer to blame the missus first.
cut *off*
Islam would beat the missus first. Sanctioned in the Koran.
Beating the missus was sanctioned in Western ‘Christian’ societies until relatively recently. Now it still goes on, though less pervasively (in all strata of society) but the evil b*****ds can at least be sent to jail.
Peter Hitchens, yes.
C H was a fat, drunken, hateful disgusting person.
Maybe someone could write a long [or short] book titled,
Chistopher Hitchens was not great.
followed by,
Hitchens is now in the missionary position, praise God.
I remember Christopher Hitchens as one of the few people to denounce Mother Theresa.
Christopher Hitchens called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud,” arguing that “even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed.
I have to chuckle at the audacity of the scamp. I wonder if he put kittens into blenders as a hangover remedy.
Don’t be silly. Everyone knows you have to microwave them first (just until they pop, not a second longer), THEN they go into the blender afterward. Mmm mmm good!
malthuss
“Maybe someone could write a long [or short] book titled,
Chistopher Hitchens was not great.”
I think you’d have found Mr Hitchens would have been happy to write a (short) book with that title. He did not seem to consider himself ‘great’. He considered himself a mere mortal with all the faults that come with that, of which he was entirely aware.
hmuller:
Mother Theresa was far from universally admired, although the church did its best to make her so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
“In 2013, in a comprehensive review covering 96% of the literature on Mother Teresa, a group of Université de Montréal academics reinforced the foregoing criticism [which you can read in the article], detailing, among other issues, the missionary’s practice of “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, … her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce”.
Questioning the Vatican’s motivations for ignoring the mass of criticism, the study concluded that Mother Teresa’s “hallowed image—which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign” engineered by the Catholic convert and anti-abortion BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.
People will make their own minds up, presumably, according to taste, if they don’t wish to look into it. The use, for her canonisation, of a patient claimed to have been cured by having a locket containing her picture, while the patient’s own doctor confirmed that the patient had been cured by traditional medical treatment, was quite shocking, but not surprising, given the context.
And she confided to Hitchens himself that she wasn’t doing her ‘work’ for the patients, as she wasn’t a ‘social worker’, but for the church.
He then noted that when she needed treatment for herself for a heart condition, she chose to avail herself of the best that modern medicine could offer. Nice.
Green Alba,
I don’t really care much about Mother Teresa one way or the other. But you have to recognize that if someone wanted to do a hatchet job – oh say ,on you – they could probably dig up much juicier material than they did on the old nun.
It’s not really fair to condemn her for “her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce”. She’s simply subscribing to the views of her church. Attack those fat guys with the big hats who set policy, not some simple believer.
As far as “mismanaging funds”, cite something concrete and specific, don’t just drop innuendos all over the place. Anybody catch her sneaking off to Swiss spas with pilfered money? Renting boy toys? Anything?
.
hmuller, according to this article, “doctors visiting many of the 517 ‘homes for the dying’ run by Mother Teresa observed unhygienic conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. Lack of funds were no explanation, since Mother Teresa’s order of the Missionaries of Charity had raised hundreds of millions in aid money“.
Presumably, those who donated the hundreds of millions had in mind that it would be used to care for the sick and dying. Since it apparently wasn’t, then what other use do you have in mind that amounts to proper management? I can’t think of one off the top of my head.
For what it’s worth, the actual study by the UM scholars is paywalled, but here’s a link to the abstract:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0008429812469894
“Christopher Hitchens… one of the few people to denounce Mother Theresa.”
Add Green Alba to the list. It’s a short list & she’s on it. She denounced MT right here in this comment section not long ago as I recall.
Thanks for your input, Elrond. But auditing the finances of a nun dead for 22 years is not how i want to spend my time.
517 homes for the dying – you say. How many people per home times 50 years. That’s a lot of people. I think there were also orphanages, soup kitchens, houses for the poor, all kinds of work going on.
If Mother Teresa was skimming money like a mafia casino mogul, what did she do with it? Play the ponies? Slip away to Macau for some fast table action? Collect rosaries like Imelda stockpiled shoes? Maybe she bought Indian politicians as part of her power games of intrigue.
Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if she had to grease some local palms in order to be allowed to operate. Ask any international charity about local pay outs to corrupt authorities.
I’m not surprised conditions in her facilities were shabby by Western standards. It was India.
“Mother” (fcker) Theresa was a hag who believed in the spirituality of suffering…other people’s suffering that is. Here own, not so much. When it came time for her dirt nap it was full steam ahead to get the best of everything she could to soften the transition.
hmuller
I don’t have that great an interest in the topic. I mentioned Christopher Hitchens in relation to the compilation of the Koran. In response you brought up his his alleged audacity in being one of the few people to denounce Mother Theresa, to which I responded that there were rather more than a few people who had cast aspersions on the integrity of her career.
India, by the way, has excellent hospitals for those who can access them. It’s a medical tourism destination – if you need a new hip and don’t want to pay a fortune for it, India is an excellent place to get it done.
“But you have to recognize that if someone wanted to do a hatchet job – oh say ,on you – they could probably dig up much juicier material than they did on the old nun.
If only, hm, if only… I’m afraid you’d be sadly disappointed with anything anyone could dig up on me. Even I’d be pleased to find something juicy 🙂 .
as though we might return to a 1962 heyday – JHK
==============
By chance I happened to have graduated college in 1962 when a semester’s tuition was about $400 and you could finish in 4 years, not 5, 6, or 7. I have always felt that I grew up in the sweet spot of American history.
And in some ways you have just never grown up :-).
compliment?
As nice as basking in a nostalgic sun can be, back then there were a lot of chances but were there any second chances? Thinking was in a box with a pretty tight lid on it.
Like catching a bus, if you did not get on when you were supposed to you were left behind. Finish in that four years or else. Wasn’t that the way it was?
Well the choo choo train may have stopped before it got up to full speed for this one and I have to say it’s pretty awesome :-)! It looks like Pete Buttigieg is being accused of sexual assault. Who will the morphed #metoo take down next? I assume we need no real evidence and must believe the accuser. So hopefully his campaign ends like now. Maybe the Russians are setting him up? Or the accuser could be a Deep State agent? The conspiracies are always fun to consider. OR…will he get a big fat pass like Uncle Joe? After all I thought Pete was supposed to be super real and genuinely affectionate too.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/04/democrat-darling-pete-buttigieg-accused-of-sexual-assault-by-21-year-old-from-michigan/
Another Kevin Spacey scenario, har-har. The #MeToo movement is no respecter of gender, Mayor Butt-itch-itch.
I’ll suspend judgement until Pucker hs posted 20 rhetorical questions about this gay episode.
Latest Chasten Buttigieg tweet:
“Bored on the flight so I started working on Buttijams: Pride Edition
Recommendations?”
19 to go…
“A Facebook user Hunter Kelly says that the sexual assault allegations levied against Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 presidential candidate, are a hoax perpetrated by conservative hoaxer Jacob Wohl”
That’s from the link YOU posted, SSL…did you not even READ it?
Look below Mama Yella. I said it was fake news after the story was updated hours later. Your constant gotchyas make me yawn by the way.
I am pretty sure this story has been debunked as FAKE NEWS so I wanted to throw that in since I was responsible for the original post. Hah see, I admit when I am wrong :-P!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SSL-
No, you don’t! You are wrong most of the time yet admit nothing!
What you meant to say – “I admit I am wrong when the proof is so overwhelmingly in plain sight I have no choice if I don’t want to appear to be an even bigger fool.”
According to Colin Flaherty, we’ve had eight mass shootings within the last 24 hours. Not one of them perped by a white man.
https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/969451619612667904
So wypipo have to give up our guns just because of the nogs’ poor impulse control & high time preferences? Sure it might go a long way to solving their problems but wouldn’t it exacerbate ours?
Evolution is both local & recent.
really? i saw a flatscreen today,
CNBC, if I recall,
Concern about White Supremacists, synagogue shooting
and
LA wanna be bomber arrested.
There’s a madness loose across the land, like in 1860 Kansas.
brh
I ignore much of it as I see too many odd connections. Sandyhook killers shrink was in NZ, as was J Podesta.
Michelle in France, etc..too odd for me.
For Fuck’s Sake!
“Sandyhook killers shrink was in NZ”.
Such bald, misleading & salacious statements are simply designed to conjure up connections in the fevered minds of the likes of SSL, who will then repeat such BS without even checking the FACTS.
“The former psychiatrist who treated the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, before moving to New Zealand has been arrested in his hometown in the United States.
Paul Fox, who was employed by the Waikato District Health Board in 2012, was arrested at his home in Peaks Island, Maine, on April 20 in relation to an alleged sexual relationship with a former patient.
US media have reported the woman, aged 18 or 19 at the time, claimed she’d had sex with him in his office, they’d gone out for dinner together and spent time on his boat.
It is the same allegation that led to him voluntarily surrendering his US psychiatry license and that later led to public scrutiny over his credibility in New Zealand.”
Nothing to do with Sandy Hook, or are you saying that the shrink is responsible for Lanza’s actions?
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11631987
Lol wow – a fevered mind eh? Well you know, I did hear that Michelle was happy and laughing as the cathedral burned. I also heard through the grapevine that Michelle and O’s daughters were rented. Joan Rivers messed up and said Michelle was Michael. Then she died a week later in strange circumstances….
Representatives of newly proclaimed Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) were not allowed to attend the Easter service in the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Well, they didn’t give them the badges, confirming that they can serve together with the rest of Orthodox priests.
Could just stand with the rest of the laity, listen. On the street. There is no harm from this.
They say the check was very thorough. The Patriarch of Jerusalem is a strict shepherd; he will never let any schismatics into the Temple.
And that the representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will try to take part in the service was known.
As it turned out, the omnipotent Tomos, granting autocephaly to UOC, acts only on the territory of Ukraine. And even then, frankly, not everywhere.
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/pavel_shipilin/51193823/1073124/1073124_original.jpg
I only recognize one of these clowns
Further evidence of the idiocy of religion.
Deceptive heathen!
The “Avengers: Endgame” is a 3 hour movie. I left during the third hour to get a cup of coffee, returning for the last 10 minutes. The popular preoccupation with cartoon hero movies may be a kind of societal psychosis? The Overton Window may be so narrow that people are fleeing Reality and quadrupling down on psychosis? James Howard Kunstler posits that society is now in a “liminal State” between a previous known condition moving towards something new which contours are not yet apparent. I suspect that the accelerating pace of technological change may mean a permanently unmoored social condition of perpetual rapid social and economic change such that society will go bonkers? Perpetual uncertainty and anxiety will create a mass neurosis. One can already see the ubiquitous angst in the society. Living around people going forward may become challenging because of the pervasive angst?
Could be, it’s already kind of like that. My take is a sort of low level, simmering angst at this point. Technology and terrorism. Mass shootings, work place and road rage shootings, etc. The unsettling political divide. The absence of honesty and truth.
So where are we going? Does the phrase “Per aspera ad astra” have any current relevance?
Auden is again appropriate here:
“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
“For the others, like me, there is only the flash
Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one
Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass
To meet one’s madness”
” I suspect that the accelerating pace of technological change may mean a permanently unmoored social condition of perpetual rapid social and economic change such that society will go bonkers? Perpetual uncertainty and anxiety will create a mass neurosis. One can already see the ubiquitous angst in the society. Living around people going forward may become challenging because of the pervasive angst?”
Puck,
…Uhh, Yeah….
Pucker, well said ( I think) but beware the asymptote.
HI Jim,
Hear! Hear! Yup, it sure does look weird to me too.
Interestingly, your ‘Lefts’ talk of diversity looks to me to be a discussion of sexual preferences and poses. I’m old fashioned and don’t much care who sleeps with whom, as long as I don’t have to hear about it.
Anyway, actual diversity of life choices is not something that your Left, or the Right for that matter, is willing to consider. There is loss of control and the ability to intermediate people should they move outside the accepted narrative – thus the pressure to lose oneself in the accepted narratives or opiates on offer such as all that free porn that people indulge in.
I live in a rural area and manage to produce a lot of the food that I consume (not to mention energy and water) using old school methods, but this one example is a life choice which is met by fear from the population at large – and difficulty with intermediation by you know who. What the people are reflecting is umbrage at eschewing the limited choices on offer, and such fear is really about the choices that they themselves have made.
Another one is being straight and choosing not to have kids. Try that choice for size if you want to experience societal pressure. What a nice bunch of people we all are.
What I’ve been coming around to considering lately is that all of the very recent acceptance of the Left’s diversity (as previously mentioned as a sexualised set of choices and poses) and approved narrative is perhaps an outcome of successful political movements such as the win for the Marriage Equality movement. It was a bi-partisan group that won that political round of football, they showed their strength, and now they’ve allowed themselves to become a captured constituency politically – or at least that is what your Left is aiming for. I dunno, if I were them I’d concern myself with more practical matters and concerns and try to offer a reason for people to vote for them. It might be too much to ask for though.
It sure will be a strange day when reality finally meets the synthetic and artificial reality. That would make for a truly interesting super hero movie.
Hope you are keeping well and that the soil in your garden is warming up in readiness for a bounteous harvest later in the season.
Chris
“That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, including the burdens of empire, onerous global debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change — things that hurt to think about.”
The business model of the big Private Equity Funds is to invest in “Disruptive Technologies”. All of the money will go into things that drive people crazy….
Malthus, to pick up an earlier thread …
Yes I was curious about LA, the vagrant camps, are they all over the city, or confined to certain neighborhoods? Are they hard to avoid, and what about the infectious diseases they are incubating? We know they’re in Venice Beach because of the article on Johnny Rotten. It seems almost apocalyptic.
How much further down do we have to go before lefties are satisfied their utopias are complete, and their work is done?
brh
I see more and more of those T shirts that simply state, “Stay Calm”.
So let’s chill and freefall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3phscjgc_A
Back in the day it was board games, hula hoops, slinkys and yo yos for distraction or escape. Hobbies. Sports too.
Now it’s the phone. Still a lot of people engaged with reality, however, then as now.
We’re not nuts yet!
“You end up in a virtual world of advertising and agit-prop where manipulation is the primary driver of human activity. That is, a world where the idea of personal liberty (including any act of free thought) becomes a philosophical sick joke, whether you believe in the possibility of free will or not. ”
And it is manifesting in our society at an exponential rate.
From manufactured rage in the form of BLM to tranny restrooms to me-too movements, to Russia-gate and to manufactured hype from Obama Nobels to Katelynne Jenners to formulaic and lowbrow entertainment (Game of Thrones and Marvel superheroes). Conform. Join or die.
And for the young people, the immature, the, naive, growing up all seems so one-sided as opinions all provided, the future pre-decided, detached and subdivided, in the mass-production zone, and nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone. Subdivisions in the high school halls, in the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out and any escape might help to smooth the unattractive truth that the suburbs have no charms to soothe
the restless dreams of youth
Hello Back Row. I live in Hollywood. Have all my life. I’m 57. Hollywood is turning into Manhattan. Entire blocks are being rebuilt as 10 story mixed use unaffordable housing blocks. It’s awful. You cannot even see the Hollywood Hills from Santa Monica Blvd. Skyscrapers are going up all along the major Hollywood corridors. Homelessness has tripled the past four years is my guess. There are tents and homeless people just about everywhere even the Westside. Under most freeway underpasses. Lots of mentally ill everywhere. And snotty 20-something New Yorkers trying to make it in the movie business. Traffic is getting worse and worse. Venice has the highest rents 3K for a one bedroom apt but Hollywood and West Hollywood have gotten just as expensive. A good portion of the new luxury apartments are being rented out illegally as AirBnB hotel units because few people can afford to rent the units as apartments. The entire city of L.A. seems to be under construction. Big monster things going up everywhere. Dear New Yorkers: Welcome to L.A. now please go home…./
Enough with the small talk. Who do you blame, the Left or the Right?
I blame the greedy real estate developers and finance pigs. I imagine a good number of them are Republican. I also blame the West Hollywood City Planners and housing commission for green lighting overdevelopment in WeHo. . I imagine many of them are Democrat but not all. West Hollywood is getting totally unaffordable. McMansions are popping up everywhere
>>> McMansions with WALLS. Imagine that. No “open borders” policy in that area!
I am a progressive person but when it comes to immigration and border control I am in Donald Trump’s corner. I find it amusing that Liberals and Progressives think it is totally fine to have an open border with Mexico because Latinx are anything but progressive. They are Catholic and generally conservative concerning social issues. They are anti gay and they are opposed to abortion. I hate to disparage an entire ethnic group but there is a lot of validity to what I am saying. The Catholic Church will have a lot of power in the U.S. if we don’t control immigration at the southern border. Be careful what you wish for Guys
Remember the never-Trump campaign?
Where did the entertainment people threaten to flee to?
Canada.
When Mexico would be an easy move, a reasonable commute, and shares the same climate.
Not in my neighborhood and certainly not in theirs
Bravo, Kev, on noticing the Supernatural Stupidity. They never notice the nature of the people they advocate for – as if doesn’t even matter. The Hispanics are just pawns in their War against Traditional America and Americans. Most of them don’t even know any real Hispanics, as in ones just in from down below.
Kevvia
I came across abortion figures recently purporting to show that by far the highest abortion rate is among blacks, with the next highest (and far higher than other groups) among Latinos.
Kevvia,
“The Catholic Church will have a lot of power in the U.S. if we don’t control immigration at the southern border.”
It already does. Six out of nine Supreme Court justices are Catholics. No Protestants. Passing strange…
You’re right Snacks.
Just too simple to blame ‘lefties’, who, after all, being in charge, have to deal with the situation the best that they can. As KK post shows there’s a lot going into creating the decaying situation in LA (and Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Portland and so on)
Excuse my lame attempt to be provocative.
brh
1965 immigration act.
R Reagan, first amnesty.
Population explosion outside USA.
USA destabilizing 3rd world, or some of it.
etc
Hollywood has been a veritable sh*thole for a very long time.
With auto part yards on the north side and seedy hotels all over.
Venice ran the gamut of middle-class to working class for most of its existence. Only in the late 90’s did gentrification really seep in.
Now it’s just yuppies.
Gone are the skaters, surfers, muscle heads and weirdos.
Well, houseless (it’s a choice after all)people are weirdos, but not in a charismatic way.
i do not disparage houseless people. I know many nice people who are one or two paychecks away from being houseless.
You’re lost.
Homeless people are in Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi.
Families that lost jobs.
And a home.
LA is the western terminus for the houseless set.
A lifestyle choice mostly involving substance abuse and the ensuing mental incapacitation in the sun and sand.
This is very clear to any bona fide Californian.
And yes, I disparage people for repeated poor lifestyle choices that become my problem.
Now there’s a bit of irony for you
The more ‘luxury’ apartments built, the worse the homeless crisis becomes.
Sounds like LA is headed for the dystopian future portrayed in ‘Soylent Green’. ‘The Golden State’ not so golden anymore.
brh
Right. High rises being built all across the globe, and they’re not being built for you and me. In American cities, the ME, the coasts of Uruguay, etc., etc.
The Jeddah Tower in SA is supposed to be over 3 thousand feet high. Will it be completed?
“Rambling out of the wild west
Leaving the towns I love best
Thought I’d seen some ups and down
‘Till I come into New York town
People going down to the ground
Building going up to the sky” Dylan
Which skyscraper will have the best view of the Apocalypse?
The buildings are called ‘stack and pack’–I blame immigration.
Why else are all the tiny apartments needed?
you tube–fullerton informer.
Same in San Diego.
Rent is out of control and the homeless population is exploding.
It’s all greed nothing more!
Joe Biden is trying to run as some clock-punching, lunch box, working class Dude…. During my high school summer jobs, I used to have punch a time clock every morning before work and in the afternoon before going home to jerk off.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=soGNIATFDvs
So.
Did you enjoy punching the clock because you would soon be home thinking pleasant thoughts as you rubbed one out. Or were you so eager to get home punching the time clock was an irritation, an obstacle, a barrier in your way?
Which is it. Is the time clock a pleasant memory for you or not?
Everybody had to punch the clock regardless of race, creed, or color, gender, or national origin. One Summer there were some “underprivileged” black teenagers who came to get an “opportunity”. They were a mixed bag. One skinny black kid got fired for stealing batteries and smoking weed in the Men’s Room. But another fat black kid named “Sampson” later got a job offer. Sampson was alright.
“Everybody had to punch the clock regardless of race, creed, or color
A pleasant memory then. And unlike some guys you are not a one trick pony. When some guys got home the women in their porn collections would have all have looked the same. The same kind of women these men lose their minds over. We have all met men like them. They only like their ‘type’. Poor bastards.
Not you, you like variety and I agree. The world is a far more interesting place with a variety of breeds.
“What if the dreaming part is actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is nearly impossible.”
What if they made coping very possible and very easy?
Cheap entertainment and easy narcotics?
Smartphone manufacturers pushed banks to offer loans so that people can buy the latest smart phone which serves as many people’s only computer, TV, and phone all rolled into one.
Just as many physicians pushed opioids to kill the pain.
You still need to supply the sofa, but then again, there’s Rent-a-center.
Comfy
Yeah, take a ‘Soma Holiday’. Why ‘gargle in the rat race choir’?
“Why ‘gargle in the rat race choir’?”
“…It’s all right, Ma, I’m only bleedin’….”
One of his greatest. Deserved the Nobel for this alone.
Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying
Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn that he not busy being born
Is busy dying
Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover that you’d just be
One more person crying
So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing
As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred
Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked
An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it
Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you
You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to
Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to
For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Do what they do just to be nothing more than something they invest in
While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him
While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in
But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony
While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes must get lonely
My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me
And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/restaurant-slammed-controversial-bumper-sticker-212634478.html
“If you can’t read this – some Arabic writing – thank a Marine”. Some chick noticed after going there for awhile and freaked out. Gross Burgers (!) told her to pound sand, they weren’t taking it down. It’s Marine operated and some fucking Marine asked if he could put it up, and by God it’s going to stay up.
I love Gross Burgers – even though I would hate the guys who worked there and they would hate me. I love them philosophically and from a distance. An Elitist attitude? Of course. I loved my dog and cats but I wouldn’t get down on all fours because of it. Now and then I would of course. After all, an adult can play with a child without becoming a child. I could probably go in there and have a burger once in awhile without indigestion or causing offense too.
Ali Hugh’s Snack Bar
the writing
Fuckin’ A, Semper Fi, Do or Die!
Feed Baghdadi Burgers to the Muzzies!
The pure Warrior type – fairly rare – were called Ksyatrias in Ancient India, and they are another story. They are a high caste and I would revere them. Most soldiers in modern times are blue collar or sudra types unfortunately. They follow orders and bite who they are told to bite and kill who they are told to kill. It is otherwise with real Warriors. There isn’t much place for Warriors in modern life. They don’t even rise up in the ranks in the Armed Forces anymore. Brenton Tarrant comes to mind, a man of immense idealism and capacity, and by thus utterly alienated from a corrupt society.
you and yr heros.
Hitler.
Krishna.
Rama.
the Sikhs [fighting the muslim hordes] etc.
So you don’t think heroes are necessary? Or is this just more of your bitter bullshit and resentment against me?
Your silly pop Christian morality is one of the factors leading to our destruction. You don’t even believe in Christ yet you believe what these hucksters say He said.
Can anyone please explain why it is currently all but MANDATORY, on meeting a military person or a vet, to say “Thank you for your service” ?
I mean, s/he probably joined up for the vocational training, the camaraderie and the money, and because it’s a dead-end world in Buttfuck, TX when you have no qualification aside from a highly devalued HS Diploma?
Then, after a couple of tours in the Middle East where there’s a good chance s/he will have a shitty/scary experience if not a severe wound or dismemberment and probably some level of PTSD, s/he comes ‘home’ and ends up unemployable, living in a tent, suffering mental illness effects because the cost of the anti-psychotic meds is obscene (even the co-pay at the VA).
And all s/he gets is ‘Thank you for your service’. Great deal.
In case you wanted to know, the Arabic writing says “Allahu Akbar” “God is Greater”, a phrase often repeated during Islamic worship, and regrettably by warring jihadi’s.
So I guess I can’t thank a Marine. I can thank the US Army for sending me to school for 47 weeks to study Arabic full time at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California many years ago.
“Know your enemy” is a better approach than celebrating ignorance. And we even had Marines at language school, so the Corps must think so, too.
“I can thank the US Army for sending me to school for 47 weeks to study Arabic full time at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California many years ago.”
Hmuller,
I am envious…. A question. Did the institute in Monterey also teach how to speak in an accent? Specifically a heavy Irish Brogue?
No, you would do better looking for a “dialect coach” in Hollywood if you life’s dream is to speak with a heavy Irish Brogue. I’m not sure of the joke behind the question? Did you want to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army?
“Did you want to infiltrate the Irish Republican Army?”
hmuller,
No, no joke. I had a friend who might have infiltrated, however. He was a Captain in the Army,…Army Intelligence. He attended the Monterrey School, learned Spanish, and was posted in Panama…dealt with Noriega, etc.
The Captain is dead now, possibly by his own hand. He used to phone me up late night, drunk and sometimes threatening suicide. Occasionally, he would call and affect the Brogue…”…I told you I was in the Army, but I didn’t say which army, now did I?” This affectation was so dead-on that it brought the hair up on the back of my neck. I should also mention that he had flaming red hair….
He said he was posted in Germany for several years, but I have my doubts that is where he worked. He would never admit to being involved in the Troubles.
Who was it that wrote about nationalism being nothing more than the desire for a fairy tale? The desire to live out a fantasy has become so entrenched in our culture that no one is sale from homicidal psychopaths, whether it be in the workplace, our educational institutions or even our houses of worship. JHK made a number or excellent points on the link between the worship of fakery and the desire for self-annihilation. I hope to hear more from you on this subject and the coming crisis in crypto currencies like Bitcoin that offer salvation in the virtual world.
Probably the same lowlife who said Patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. But only when it comes to Whites, right? Black Nationalism is sacred, right? Ditto Jewish, Muslim, Hispanic, etc.
Come back when you understand yourself.
The lowlife was Samuel Johnson, allegedly.
Edith Cavell, who said “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.” gets a pass over you, having been executed by a German firing squad for helping soldiers escape occupied Belgian territory, a feat which you have not yet equalled, to my admittedly restricted knowledge.
JHK himself, no less, has predicted that the US’s first cornpone dictator will come wrapped in a flag…Trump likes to be televised giving the flag a hicky.
And that would tatter your cosmopolitan sensibilities now wouldn’t it. I saw the vile post about how horrible America is. What a spectacular fail. Sure there are numerous and devastating problems we face. Could that be because of your treasured Marxists and Cuckservatives? Who knew you were gravitating to Fox News. Now I know they are a den of serpents too.
On Chasten Buttigieg’s Twitter site there’s a photo of young Millennial Pete Buttigieg supporters picking up trash for Pete on a San Diego beach. One bloke picking up empty beer bottles, cigarette and joint butts, and used condoms has on a Captain America T Shirt made in Honduras.
Is Beto the politician who’s proposing partial student loan debt forgiveness in exchange for forced labor “Community Service”?
Today’s offering was PACKED!
The sense of gathering crisis persists. It is systemic and existential.
It is difficult to develop a personal narrative when the frame work in which you live shifts beneath your paws.
It calls into question our ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is so hard for the public to process that a dismaying number of citizens opt for suicide.
If people would stay out of your way and let you carry on a “normal” life that would be one thing but no, lost sheep have a bad habit of blocking roads.
There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it.
That is the reality and so many different agendas are involved this ship will sink before anyone agrees to bail water.
Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they dominate the scene on every side.
That last one. Nature abhors a vacum. In the absents of good ideas there will be bad ideas.
“That is the reality and so many different agendas are involved this ship will sink before anyone agrees to bail water.”
Based on your site, you should know, it is worse than that…
… we have people so dumbed down that they are proposing, no actually drilling new holes in the hull so the water can drain out!
and calling it factual or scientific in the process.
… we have people so dumbed down that they are proposing, no actually drilling new holes in the hull so the water can drain out!
That is a bitter kibble, but true!
What if the dreaming part is actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is nearly impossible. What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens? – JHK
What if? Then the wheel turns and the stories of fall and destruction play out. But there is no what if! People like comfort too much to say no to it and the comfortable avoidance of all of life’s dirty truths by escape in daytime dreams is irresistible and endless childhood results.
In Homers tale wise Odysseus, ordered his crew to plug their ears with the wax of bees and to tie him firmly to their ship’s mast. Later he screamed and pleaded to be untied so to swim with the Siren and to be be one with their song. But his foresight saved him.
We have no mast, no rope, no beeswax and some of our crew already sings the Siren’s song. We have no chance.
Petticoat Junction is an extermination camp!!!!
Come ride the little train that is rolling down the tracks to the junction.
Forget about your cares, it is time to relax at the junction.
Lotsa curves, you bet
Even more, when you get
To the junction
(Petticoat Junction)
Imagine that show updated for 2019. Uncle Joe is a peeping Tom pervert on work release from the local prison. Aunt Kate is the Shady Rest’s Madam in residence and the three girls are her top earners. Hi-jinx ensue. Gradually, Lisa and Oliver from Green Acres cross over into the show. Lisa educates and liberates the girls, after which Oliver leads a ground-breaking investigation and prosecution uncovering the shady goings on at the hotel and exposing Uncle Joe, Sam Drucker, and Kate as the heads of a child prostitution ring run aboard the Hooterville Cannonball with the complicity of the two engineers Charley and Floyd, along with Green Acres regulars Mr Haney (who smuggles illegals across the border in his junk truck) and Ed (who is revealed to be a pornstar and hung like the proverbial horse). Ralph, the masculine female painter on Green Acres, is revealed to be one of it’s earliest victims, who has since embraced his/her trans status. Friday’s at 8:00 on your local CBS station!
You really know those shows! I remember watching them as a kid. I shudder to think of what the 2019 Beverly Hill Billies would be into. Let’s just say that ain’t possum Granny’s cooking up all day.
Oh the possibilities!
Mr Haney has the best Oxy.
Check out Chomsky chomping up Russia-gate.
https://youtu.be/llzoItQgLOQ?t=408
He explains how the Democrats have helped Trump. How they are totally divorced from reality and how they have probably handed Trump the next election.
With Biden as the Dem frontrunner now, it should make for a most entertaining slimefest. Trump will send Biden – who even the stupid-assed Dems know can’t win – to the showers in a first round knockout.
Lots of voters don’t read any news whatsoever. The only way they get info is via prime time TV. But once those attack ads of Creepy Biden’s groping hit the airwaves, looping over and over every evening, I just can’t imagine he’ll survive. Even a retired Dem who still thinks the party is about union labor is going to have a tough time accepting that.
If Biden is the best they can do ………………………………………!
Then we are all going to have to live like a refugee.
Oh I see what you did there. A Tom Petty reference!
That is clever :-).
Right on brother, a classic.
Free Bill Cosby!
I’ll bet Bill’s got some juicy prison stories to be told now. I wonder if the networks would be interested?
Think about all those years Bill Cosby was offering to the public – big, juicy, chocolate, phallic shaped, pudding pops. Was art imitating life in a fashion so hidden and surreal – Jung would be amazed.
There is a lot of stuff going on today around the world that is going to have repercussions to the world economy & geopolitics.
Guaido is making his move this morning in oil rich Venezuala, claiming military intervention to out Maduro. Guaido seems to me like a classic CIA installed actor. I don’t know.
Ukraine has a new anti-establishment, populist President in the form of Zelensky– as about an hour ago. He is a complete political novice, and the Ukraine/Russia 5 year war has the possibility of dragging in any number of regional powers.
PeteAtomic,
I’m not sure you really want to know where Juan “Guanito” (Little Shit) came from, but if you do…….
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/