JHK’s Three-Act Play
Clusterfuck Nation
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HG Wells concocted a marvelous trick ending to his classic tale The War of the Worlds (1897). Remember: the colossal Martian tripod “fighting machines” swarm all over the planet zapping cities with “heat rays”. . . it looks like all-is-lost . . . but finally the darn things just quit marching, stop zapping, and stand down . . . the alien protoplasms at the controls (surprise ending) turn up dead and rotting inside from the action of our tiny invisible allies: the earth’s one-celled, disease-causing bacteria, to which the Martian blob creatures have no immunity!
The Gaian overtones in that story resound today as we Earthlings devise ingenious new methods to wreck terrestrial life, including ourselves. The planet seems to have some teleological drive to save itself, a kind of immune system. Notice: in all the ongoing debates about the wonders and dangers of A-I, and Bitcoin, and suffocating surveillance, nobody ever talks about the sketchy condition of the electric grid that all these worrisome phenomena utterly rely on. In our chatter over Peak Oil, there’s little awareness of oil production’s utter dependence on steady capital flows. In all the guff about centralized control emitted by Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum, there’s no mention of the centrifugal forces driving human affairs to re-localization, dis-aggregation of large states, and down-scaling of many activities. In our zeal to become Gods, we miss a lot.
Imagine: Bitcoin shoots up to a million dollars. You’re a zillionaire! Uh Oh. . . somewhere outside Zaneseville, Ohio, a squirrel takes a final chaw through some old insulation on a wire coming out of a transformer. His head blows up in a blue arc flash, and in a few seconds all the electricity goes out from Chicago to Boston. It turns out that seventeen substations in ten states have blown relays, transformers, and switchgear. Some of those components were forty years old and are now manufactured twelve thousand miles away in a country that doesn’t like us anymore. The replacement parts get held up in a Chinese port. The power doesn’t come back on for weeks. Nobody who lives in the eastern USA can get to his Bitcoin wallet, which is just a virtual entity made of computer code residing in a digital “cloud,” i.e., nowhere real.
Of course, in an event that bad, a lot of other things would fail — really just about everything that comprises modern life — but for sure you could kiss your Bitcoin goodbye, perhaps forever, because by the time the juice comes back on (if it even does), nobody will ever again want to invest their wealth in digital “money” they can’t access, and Bitcoin will go back to whence it came: zero.
Likewise, the financial system we depend on is a gigantic apparatus grown extremely janky from over-elaboration and hyper-complexity — to the degree that all kinds of things denoted as having “moneyness” are simply hallucinations of the markets that trade them. How many quadrillions of dollars do “derivative” financial instruments represent on the landscape of “money” these days? Most of these things amount to little more than bets that some number — an interest rate, a currency, a revenue flow — will change either up or down. That is, they are figments.
Under Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the evolution of figments can theoretically go on forever. Derivatives can be ever more abstracted from what they purport to represent, until they fly up the system’s cloacal vent. MMT has become popular economic dogma, but its theory remains to be substantiated. Since the formula relies on the unlimited “printing” of money by central bank proxies for governments, you might bet that something will go wrong with such a system — and it kind of looks like something is about to go wrong in the system we’ve built for regulating and distributing capital. And do we need to state what “capital” is? (Real wealth, not figments, wishes, bets, and hallucinations. . . hard things like good land, ore pockets, installed machinery, railroad tracks, and so on. . . .)
Bitcoin has gone “hockey stick” the past month, meaning on a chart the move up looks nearly vertical. Do you know why it’s going up? I’ll tell you: it’s going up . . . because it’s going up. People and groups of people (wealth funds, banks) see the up-trend and deduce that Bitcoin is going “to the moon.” Meanwhile, they view the tea leaves of the currency scene and see a lot of brown, crumbly debris where there used to be “capital.” The money itself is losing its “moneyness” all over the place. The most vulnerable module of the system now is the bond market.
The bond market is based on the idea that borrowed money will be reliably paid back, the key word there being reliably. One crucial condition, though, is that money has to stay “money.” People have to regard it as possessing value. And now all kinds of money is visibly losing value. Approaching the $35-trillion mark in our national debt, there is reason to doubt that the USA can plausibly pay off its debt, or even service it anymore — that is, keep paying interest on it. The more money we “print” under MMT, the more value the money loses. The interest rate on the borrowed money has to go up to compensate for that loss of value, and all of a sudden you’re borrowing a shit-ton of money to pay the interest on the money you owe, the gross volume of which is only increasing . . . moving rapidly toward critical. . . . Uh-oh.
Many sentient beings viewing the scene warn us that the bond market is liable to blow, and with it most of the other modules in the current MMT-driven system. That will be the magic moment when a big theory gets disproven rather vividly and injuriously. The price of everything will vaporize in a mushroom cloud of malinvestment and when the dust settles — which might take a long time — everything will be priced differently, including many things to zero.
This is the kind of world we’re in now, and all this is why I don’t worry quite so much about the machinations of the various blobs that have self-assembled to defend their particular special interests while doing harm to many of us: the military-industrial blob, the censorship blob, the fake news blob, the intel blob, the corporate monopoly blob, the medical blob, the central banking blob. The systems we depend on to make all things blobish function are looking pretty ill, like they’re not going be working a whole lot longer.
The result will be a beneficial time-out from blobbery. I’ll venture to predict that it will be a rather long time-out. A lot of the scary things going on around us, tyrannizing us, stripping our assets and our freedom, will not find their footing easily in the aftermath, perhaps never again. We’ll have decades, maybe centuries, to think about the hubris that brought all of that on, and in the meantime, we’ll have to live the earthly life as the earth allows and abide with it. And maybe dote on some new dreams of what a perfect world would look like.
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I’m afraid that the blob is too big and too entrenched that even our favorite super heros — Trump or RFK Jr, you pick — can’t rid us of it. But it will be interesting to watch.
JHK makes an interesting point about the fragility of our infrastructure — all types, from the grid to our distribution system to our governance. Kaput.
I flicker of hope? Switzerland is considering a national vote to leave the WHO.
Something I saw from Scott Adams that touches on the points you make-
I saw this last night and it kinds of stayed with me.
Scott Adams
@ScottAdamsSays
This tracks with my view of the world.
3:25 PM · Mar 10, 2024
The post he is referring to is in answer to Brett Weinstein saying this:
Bret Weinstein
@BretWeinstein
·
Mar 9
“There is only one viable candidate left in the race for president, and somehow he’s a long shot.”
This is the response to Brett:
mpetrus
@mpetrus19
“Not really………….there is either a plan requiring multi players all over the world to take down the global parasites or not.
No one candidate can do it. It’s not possible. So we wait and we watch it play out.”
There’s a short video with that post.
That’s how I’ve been feeling, there could be people out there who will fix this, I know there are many individuals and groups trying, but I don’t know if there is somebody out there with a plan.
Don’t worry when people have nothing left to lose ……they lose!
Does Mari and her king thinking, “Well, let them eat cake.”
The will know who has the cake.
It! LOL!
“Don’t worry when people have nothing left to lose ……start taking out some Elites, and the police and soldiers realize who is really the ‘Good Guys’. (Except of course for the new recruits from God Knows Where, but that’s another story)
@Beryl Of Oyl
That’s only if we don’t end up in a major war first before they can do something about it. I want to be positive but I need to start seeing some real change happening. Not people just speculating and making false predictions. That’s why that White Dragon Society website pissed me off. The author of that site have a lot of articles there that come off as fictionalize BS.
Like the one about how Nethynal or whatever his name is was squealing on his bosses and some of the Corruption going on in Israel is being dealt with including the dismantling of their nuclear weapons. I felt like punching the guy on that site for making up all that tripe. What makes it worse, those articles were from 2018. Here we are in 2024 and Palestinians are still getting killed by the very person who “squealed” on his bosses.
I think they want a major war so nobody will be able to do anything about what they have done, and after world war three most people won’t remember.
@Beryl Of Oyl
All the more reason why they need to stop dicking around and arrest or execute them already. They can’t have a major war if they don’t do something to stop them. And people will remember unless they intend to kill off 99 percent of us on earth first. When WWI and WWII happened lots of people died, but everyone today is aware of WWI and WWII maybe not the full story of it, but we know enough. We know that we don’t need another war like it or much worse.
What concerns me is that the people who are in the the White Knight camp may be being lulled into complacency by the enemy.
“There could be people out there who will fix this,” you write. Very few have asked themselves what they can do to fix this. Nobody talks about self-responsibility at all. We’re the humans who let the Blob take over the world, and now we’re hoping someone else will fix it.
You can’t fix a problem with the same mentality used to create it.
giggle. Do not doubt the Blob!
“fJoe Biden today announced the National Emergency Electricity Mining Act Executive Order, . $590 billion is immediately allocated to His Fraudulency’s colleagues to define, detect, locate, and tap electricity wells and mines, PHASE TWO. Unlimited quantities of beneficiated and refined electricity will fill the Grid!
PHASE ONE will completely disassemble the current Grid, then rebuild to distribute PHASE TWO in an equitable, sustainable and renewable, recyclable and upscalable, environmentally responsible and compassionate manner.
Phase Zero is the National Emergency Responsible and Secure Electricity Distribution Act in which every prospective citizen electricity consumer must pass an annual Homeland Severity registration and background check…for a nominal fee.
Net cost will then be $zero.
@MiTurn
They need to all ditch Nato as well, but if they really want to save themselves. Stop being allies with a country that hates it’s own citizens, and want to do them harm.
You’re right, but the military-industrial complex might demur…
I’ve read that Eisenhower originally called it the congressional-military-industrial complex, or something to that effect.
Eisenhower’s farewell speech phrased it this way:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
So at that point, he (publically) viewed the government as being able to and obliged to resist it. Here’s the transcript:
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.
My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.
In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America’s leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
Throughout America’s adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle-with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war-as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years-I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
So-in this my last good night to you as your President-I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find somethings worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I-my fellow citizens-need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation’s great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America’s prayerful and continuing inspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
Nathan, I was referring to a preliminary draft of the above address that the Dwight had shared with his brother, I believe Milton. Milton said that the term was to awkward, so Dwight shortened it to the now famous “military-industrial complex.”
Too bad. The “congressional-military-industrial complex” is more compelling and accurate!
Switzerland also just voted to give their retirees a raise and not address their entitlement issues. Just like everywhere else.
I guess the answer is that you cannot overcome human nature. And as humans, we want something for nothing. It’s inbred in all animals.
So in your opinion, people who worked their entire lives should just die?
That sounds remarkably like what Bill Gates thinks.
Any relation? Or do you just channel the desires of your owners?
I’m sure the Swiss had a pension.
If that pension is analogous to Social Security, where will the money come from to pay for the raise? Is it running a surplus now or in the future, I doubt it.
“People who worked their entire lives should just die”.
No. They should have saved for their future. Most of them should have bought more modest houses or cars, and perhaps dabbled in rentals, or “invested” (in the big casino).
They even might have considered having 3 kids and raising them to become productive members of society. Before social security, in every society, from East to West, adult children were the social insurance. We believe in “modernity”. Now the chickens are coming home to roost….
The problem with what I just wrote, about saving more and consuming less, is that because of inflation and fiat money, it is very difficult to save for the future, unless one saves a LOT, or one has a relatively very high-paying income in relations to one’s standard of living.
Most working people don’t live RELATIVELY extravagantly in America. And in the Big PX, for better or worse, as society has devolved (crime) one is forced to live in a “decent” area, which drives a lot of costs. It’s not like Europe where one can live modestly with the working folks and be relatively safe from crime, or from “not keeping up with the Joneses”
There is no free lunch. Inflation and fiat currency give the illusion of more prosperity than there actually is and conceal the depth of REAL insolvency.
At this point, massive INFLATION is America’s only way out. All the government’s current and FUTURE obligations need to remain nominally close to what they are, with some superficial “cost of living” increase, say 5%, while the currency buys 20, 50, 100, 200% less in actuality, but tax revenues (inflated dollars) must rise. A lot. The government runs a surplus and pays the old debt with depreciated dollars.
That is the same as cutting those pensions a LOT. It is theft.
One way or another, things are not sustainable.
I liked today’s column. But I think JHK underestimates the nefarious powers in charge. They will use “lawfare”, obfuscate what I just described, and use fear of “collapse” to “solve” the problems with extremely controlling measures. And if the masses don’t buy it, martial law. There were brutal regimes before electricity–the Roman Empire, for one. How did the Christians fare?
So no, no pension increases. If I was dictator of America, I would actually CUT Social Security payouts 2% a year. I would cut military pensions for officers 10% a year, and for enlisted 3% a year.
I would cut electric car subsidies. I would cut defense spending. And I would terminate foreign aid, certainly to rich countries, and foreign aid to Israel would top my list.
I would simplify the tax code–4% on the first $30,000, 10% on the next $170,000, and 20% over $200,000 on wages. 20% on all dividends, cap gains, etc.
I’d have professional accountants streamline depreciation schedules and things of that nature that large businesses (even small ones) need to run.
I would raise taxes on motor fuels, and ALL the revenue would go toward maintaining existing Federal Roads, if any monies are left over, I’d give them to the states–for every X $ the state spends, I’d give them Federal gas tax money.
I’d raise taxes on “excess” electricity use.
These are all outlandish moves. They would never happen because they face entrenched lobbies.
But if they COULD happen, just for the sake of argument, they would be EXTREMELY painful and disruptive for some people (pensioners, accountants, the military industrial complex) going forward, and EXTREMELY painful in general for the first 1-3 years.
When one has cancer, and one gets chemo, they become sick and nauseous. Or they have invasive, risky surgery to cut out the cancer.
America has cancer, it’s getting worse by the day, and the best that the best politicians can do is put a band-aid and give motrin. OK then.
So, the system will have to collapse to be fixed. JHK thinks that will lead to rebirth. I think the patient will die and not be revived.
We will see.
But, back to the pensions. I say NO increase. Too bad. Tant pis, mes amis.
Just my 22 cents, lol
As I pointed out earlier, if you have a debt based currency, you have to have inflation or collapse.
As you point out, asking workers to save enough for retirement in a system in which the currency is constantly inflated is an impossible demand. It takes most workers all their paycheck to pay for today, but you want them to save part of their paycheck for the future, when the money they have saved will be pretty much worthless?
Social Security as originally set up was a pay-as-you-go system, in which current workers paid a stipend to former workers, with the security of knowing that when their time for retirement came, the future workers would do the same for them.
Clearly, the US is far past that country. There is no longer any respect for the accomplishments of past workers, the elderly are scorned, and most of the country hates each other enough to be happy to see people starve to death.
That is why we can’t have nice things.
It started under the Evil Reagan, who announced that Baby Boomers were a drain on society and would have to prepay their retirement, instead of continuing the pay-as-you-go system.
He then doubled the FICA tax, while giving the wealthy massive tax cuts.
The Baby Boomers are mostly retired now, but the gouging of workers goes on, just like the coddling of the super rich.
The majority of Americans alive today were born after 1980, so the whole “There aren’t enough to support the elderly” line is clearly bullshit.
More importantly, the majority of Americans never lived in a better country.
I remember my dad saying in the late 80s, “This is getting to be a mean, mean country.” He was brought up in a different time, when people cared about each other, and thought it was an outrage for citizens to go unemployed, hungry or homeless.
Those days are long gone.
First you have to return my $$ that Carly Fiorini & HO stole from Digital Equipment Corps’ pension fund.
Then you have to return the $$ stolen from me by U Maine when I went back to school for med lab tech based on outright lies re: employment & wages told by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U Maine, & the human resources manager at the state hospital.
I can’t get back the 4 years of my life stolen getting the useless degree & board certification, or I’d demand they be returned too.
Bottom line is my 35+ years of working paid for my father’s social security & I’m from the 1st generation who also had wages taken to partially fund my own ss. Back when Clinton/Gore said ss was a “lock box” just a couple years before Bush/Cheney raided that box to “pay for” their murderous pnac adventures in Iraq & Afghanistan.
You can do whatever you want with Medicaid. That’s unearned income stolen from us all.
HO should be HP, as in Hewlett Packard. Those rat bastards, along with Fidelity, also hosted the identity theft ring that stole a laptop with all our pension info on it.
God only knows how many times my identity has been sold to illegals
Yes, Mary, under the Evil Reagan vulture capitalists flourished.
Their specialty was buying a well-run corporation, stripping it, starting with the pension funds, and then running it into bankruptcy.
Seen any Toys-R-Us around lately? Or Sears?
No problem, they told us. Here’s a nice 401K fund that you can donate to for the next 40 years of your working life. It will invest “wisely”, and you will be rich when you retire.
You know, unless the stock market collapses. Then you’re screwed.
Shoulda had a bunch of kids. Oh, you did? They’re living in your basement because there are no jobs for them?
Too bad. A pension fund corporation is going to get the government to eminent domain your house, so that we can invest on the land. You know, for the future.
No house, no basement, no kid, no problem. (For us.)
Ain’t capitalism grand?
‘Retirees are an entitlement issue, and giving them a raise is addressing it’. What are you talking about? And as for ‘something for nothing’, are you suggesting it’s the retirees wanting that? Who put the money into the retirement accounts in the first bloody place ATM?!
@ATM, I frequently see the term “entitlement” applied to Social Security, a program into which people pay large sums of money throughout their entire working lives – supposedly, an investment to be collected after retirement. I don’t think that really qualifies as an entitlement, certainly not in the same way as – for example – food stamps.
The Market Ticker guy has been saying that SS isn’t the real problem anyway, partly because the large number of recipients in the “baby boom” are dying.
He says it’s the medical part (CMS, I think) that needs fixing and it can be fixed it’s just that no one will do it.
I guess SS is an entitlement in the sense that we are entitled to have money taken from our paychecks that we could have spent on something else, and then having it doled back to us until we die, at which time it isn’t our money even if we don’t live long enough to get back what we paid in.
The Market Ticker guy will not tolerate deviation from the official story of 9/11. I was banned from that site for referencing Larry Silverstein’s “we made the decision to pull it” video.
No loss. I can do without the gratuitous profanity.
@ Beryl of Oyl:
Thanks for noting this. I know of no one but the tickerguy who has pointed this out: It’s not Social Security that’s insolvent. It’s actually in good shape. It’s CMS (Medicare and Medicaid), and they are grossly insolvent. And the reason they’re grossly insolvent is because our medical establishment if grossly fraudulent, engaging in price-fixing and racketeering that has been illegal for (if I remember right) a hundred years–but is not prosecuted. The effect has been to jack up medical costs by 400%-500%, thus explaining the insolvency of CMS.
During the 1950s, health care costs were about 5% of the GDP. They are now about 20%. That’s where the CMS problem comes from.
@ Organist1022:
Karl’s adherence to the official story on 911 is mystifying. The guy’s not dumb; ergo, he has to know better.
I think there is probably more that one reason for this. Probably the PTB allows him a fairly long leash–subject to certain conditions–and staying away from 911 is one of them. Another possible reason is that 911 discussions could wind up consuming your whole blog–though in that case you could just refuse to allow it to be discussed on the grounds that comments would get a little discursive.
Karl does some other odd things. Have you ever noticed that it is usually impossible to tell what an article is about by the title? This makes it very difficult to search for information from an old article–and my experience is that the blog is not searchable. This is not because Karl doesn’t know his IT shit. Also, articles roll of after (I think) 60 days.
I guess I should mention that I was banned from Tickerform years ago. Karl was advocating prosecuting people based on their intent to break the law, and I felt that this would require psychic powers.
I also agree on the profanity/vulgarity problem. Karl’s…ahem…”uneven temperament” undermines his credibility–besides being undignified and a generally bad thing from a social standpoint. (Plus there’s some woman over there who seems to think she has to out-do the men in the vulgarity department.)
Plus the guy is alwasys urging others to commit acts of violence–mostly along the lines of shooting your pediatrician, if your kid is jab-injured. While I am not necessarily opposed to that, I think it’s a bad idea to be cheering for it, or worse, trying to shame people for not having recourse to violence. I’ll make that decision myself, thank you.
My Turn
Excellent rant, JHK.
So I’ll start with a sequel that is sure to raise your hackles.
Justice:
Justice is a missile, traveling at the speed of an extraterrestrial meteor. Invisible, cloaked in a burning cloud of plasma. It’s steel nose clone engraved with the names of the tens of thousands of women, babies, and old people exterminated in Gaza by the genocidal Zionists of your race. It’s target is the center of Tel Aviv that the world’s Israelis have failed cleanse from their illegitimate nation. Flight time from Iran: two minutes.
But the cost of justice will be even more severe than its lack.
The immediate response of Zionist/USA will be to send a hundred nuclear tipped ICBMs on a path toward Moscow and it’s satellite cities. In their worst dreams Russia has been expecting this from the West. They have built bomb shelters to house millions, and developed the Planet’s most advanced anti-missile defense system. But that is not enough— much of the Russian heartland will still be devastated. But not before the thousand nuclear weapons stored around Puget Sound and on Indian Island across the bay from my house are incinerated and the resulting 2,000 degree fire storm sweeps over the Cascades toward the Rocky Mountains, taking every living thing with it.
Jim, thanks for warning us abut the danger squirrels pose. Even dogs understand that and hate them. But I’d be more concerned about the dozen EMP air burst nuclear bombs triggered at 70,000 ft. all over North America. Within an eye blink every car and truck built within the past 20 years will cease to function, it’s computer brains fried. Water will not be pumped from wells or to buildings. No food will arrive at supermarket shelves. Airliners will fall from the sky. Within two days the lines of people streaming out of the cities in search of a drink of water or a fake hamburger will make the “migrant” caravans of recent memory seem like a Sunday stroll in the park. Within a few weeks Bill Gates depopulation dream will be realized as the 1-200,000 survivors exhaust their stores of ammunition fighting over the remaining canned goods.
Best to just sharpen your Official Believer skills developed during the Pandemic of Fear so you can go in peace.
Or, rush out to join the Great Deceiver in getting your seventh Beautiful Booster early so you can accelerate your Clot growth rate.
Quite a scenario you painted.
And to end it all with the word ‘peace’ takes something.
It’s plausible.
It could be some other scenario.
“The Samson Option” is Israel’s suicide option. Israel blackmails America with the plausible threat of ISRAEL attacking the USSR.
USSR holds USA responsible and BOOM.
Russia has replaced USSR.
World War 1 came about because of “miscalcuations” on both sides, according to conventional history. (I think it was precipitated by Britain and the “blob”, aka the City of London, the Rothscilds, etc, to degrade Germany, but we can set that aside)
As for EMP, any car with electronic ignition will be out. Cars with points and condenser will need a new condenser. If they have electric fuel pumps, they will be out.
But a Mercedes diesel built before 1985 might be fine. Or not.
Good reality check by @thorshammer.
Chlldren shouldnt’ play with matches. The elite should not be playing with Russia, or Palestinian lives.
This is exactly why I started mining for precious metals.
It’s why I started my 1st successful venture in 20 years. 3 Buckeye hens & a rooster to protect them. 16 months & aside from a couple scares, so far so good.
There is gold in them eggs and much easier to get at.
MM
Roosters are good for crowing— not so much for protecting the hens. (kind of like 21st Century Men) Get a donkey!
Roodolph watches over them while they forage.
I have heard him “crow” a warning & watched them all run into the barn to hide.
I couldn’t find them once. Low/slow flying eagle cruised by. Discovered them in the barn hiding behind a teepee of t-stakes in a corner behind the grain bin. He was covering them with his body & wings.
Decades ago, I farm-sat for an idiot who didn’t provide her chickens adequate shelter. Heard a ruckus in the early morning. At daybreak, headed out to find the hens hiding under various bushes. No sign of the roo. I eventually found a pile of feathers by the fence a ways down the road.
A good rooster will take on the predator & sacrifice himself for his flock.
Yep roosters are power houses for their sizes.
There is a video of one killing a hawk and I have seen one go after dogs three times his size and chase them off.
lost a lot of good little roos here doing just that. i mourned them and was akin with their sacrifice.
thanks granite, rudyroo, button, and dave. rip little guys.
@ ThorsHammer:
That depends on the rooster. Some are very aggressive and courageous and will stand up to a dog than’s ten times their size. I once had a rooster that was killed that way. I had two other roosters at the time, and they ran and hid with the hens. Neither one of them stepped up to the plate after my big mean rooster was killed, either.
“nobody ever talks about the sketchy condition of the electric grid that all these worrisome phenomena utterly rely on”
Not true! Maybe because I live in rural Maine, where week-long power outages are not uncommon, especially in ice storm season, plus I have all of roughly 2 sq feet of internet 4g phone coverage in my 1600’ft house, but I’ve doused doomers with the ice water of crappy power systems any number of times in the last couple years.
Not to mention the ability to use storm cover to trash 5g systems if & when they arrive…
” Notice: in all the ongoing debates about the wonders and dangers of A-I, and Bitcoin, and suffocating surveillance, nobody ever talks about the sketchy condition of the electric grid that all these worrisome phenomena utterly rely on. ”
Huh?
Plenty of people talk about that.
Even on this blog.
It is a central topic in most discussions of what the WEF-ers are up to, and why.
One of the aims of the WEF agenda seems to be to hog all of the diminishing resources for the lucky few—including the energy and grid resources.
At the same time, achieving this very agenda seems to rely heavily on exactly those resources—and would seem to be a colossal waste of them.
But since when has wasting resources to ensure resources stopped anyone?
Sometimes you just have to destroy the village to save it!!
Yup.
@mary.m, I too live in rural Maine so I’m preoccupied with these same matters. Most everything that “they” plan to do to us depends on a reliable electric grid. Inevitably, most of those plans will not come to fruition. We recently experienced flooding, roads washed away, bridges out, loss of power for a good while. I’ve never loved my neighbors more, or appreciated them more, than during that brief look at a world without power – cold and difficult, but full of the warmth of genuine community. There’s no better place in which to survive what is coming.
This is the responsibility of the Creator.
Man plans, The Creator laughs!
or cry, as the case may be. and the sun also rises.
” Gravitation,” Misner Thorne Wheeler (Freeman, 1973)
The Creator is an idiot. KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Is gravity not simple?
Der Mensch denkt.
Gott lenkt
Man thinks.
God steers.
Man proposes.
God disposes.
As part of the curse, which Southern Baptist president R. Albert Mohler so handily sums up as “Tsunamis, Tumors and Termites”, we see degeneration of the human condition, both physically and mentally.
Current thinking is that 5% of humans lack the hardware in their brain for empathy (and thus trust), making them textbook psychopaths. Reviewing the comments Trump made on the day of 9/11 when interviewed by local television station WWOR in a call hours after the attack, he is probably among them:
“40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually before the World Trade Center the tallest, and then when they built the World Trade Center it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest. And I just spoke to my people, and they said it’s the most unbelievable sight, it’s probably seven or eight blocks away from the World Trade Center,” Trump continued, “And yet Wall Street is littered with two feet of stone and brick and mortar and steel.”
Psychopaths run many of the big, complex things in this world, but they do it in the moment, for personal gain. They are incapable of trust, or of learning from their mistakes.
When we are in a smaller, more local world, protect your communities of 150-200 people from the infiltration of psychopaths. Identify them early, and do not give them the chance to tear things apart. Embrace these ideals:
Integrity, Responsibility, Forgiveness, Compassion. In this kind of community, psychopaths fail.
I read a while back that the US does not manufacture transformers. Why would we need to manufacture something that important?
New term for me identified: cloacal vent. That’s quite an image.
The US doesn’t manufacture many of the things needed for our current modern life. It’s a symptom of the dollars reign as reserve currency.
Robert Triffin (economist) described his Triffin Dilemma in the early 1960s. The reserve currency country will export currency and manufacturing will leave for cheaper countries.
While a country enjoys reserve status it can live a higher lifestyle than would otherwise be available because the currency, being in high demand, has outsized value. American’s can buy much more stuff than they otherwise would and run trade deficits ad infinitum, but only as long as reserve status lasts.
When the rest of the world moves on from the issuing countries currency, all those chits of paper will rush back to buy up everything and anything of real value.
Those quadrillions of financialized bets become the flood that will be the real inflation that is on the horizon. What we have seen so far is child’s play. Think Zimbabwe, Weimar Germany, Venezuela, 18th century France, China a number of times.
That’s going to be bad.
@ATM Thank you for that great comment!
By the way, I like cash. Clever handle you have also:)
ATM – reserve currency indeed. The USA would have been a shadow of itself following 2008 were it not the reserve currency of the globe. You couldn’t have just printed your way back into relevancy as you did.
I think these days are numbered regardless. Thanks to the stupidity of the western world backing Ukraine, the brics countries are are taking steps to move on from the days of acknowledging the USA as anything more than an arrogant global nuisance enjoying its last few days in some weakening sun. Working on developing trade arrangements that will render the US dollar obsolete. That will be a massive body-blow to the USA.
Jack, there are any manufacturers of large transformers in the USA.
Virginia Transformer being one.
vatransformer.com/product-range/
Saint,
Of course you are aware of this, but for those who ain;t’
we are talking about 100,000s of volts. And often they’ll be transforming from different input voltages to different output voltages, hence why they tend to be custom orders and not a “shelf” product.
Lead times for these custom made transformers are often 1 to 5 years, installation times, also may vary.
True indeed El, but we do make them.Custom made is always like that. Just moving those transformers around is a huge logistics undertaking.
I remember working in a transformer factory. Aydin Energy. Big ass transformers as big as a small bedroom. Full of nasty PCBs. We’d go in there with leaky face masks and gloves and not much else and wipe them down with rags. The rising vapors would burn your mucous membranes, I remember my balls burning after about five or ten minutes. They used to hire stoners to do that crappy work, the smart ones advanced to winding or wiring.
” I remember my balls burning after about five or ten minutes.”
Yeah…me too. I never worked on transformers, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn one night….
It’s just chicken and egg…
A particularly valuable post. Yes: all of the evil forces that have put a totalitarian state in place that’s not too noticeable, as long as you behave exactly as The Blob wants you to… all of them may become completely hamstrung at any moment by a collapse that has myriad possible causes.
I believe Mr. Putin’s preternatural steadfastness in the face of endless US provocation is a bet that he can outlast us: that collapse will take us down before he is forced to push the Big Red Button.
And I think his betting position is pretty sound.
Putin is sitting back and laughing at the west. All he has to do is nothing.
“Mr. Putin’s preternatural steadfastness…”
Eastern Europeans think long term, or at least have long cultural memories. I worked with a fellow from Croatia and he fought for Croatian independence when Yugoslavia broke up.
He hated Serbians. Hated! He once counted out with his fingers the reasons his hate was justified. He went back 500 years counting out the crimes of the Serbs against the Croats. Wow.
It’s as if time stood still behind the iron curtain.
My husband was in the army in the 70s and got a chance to visit east Berlin (yes, you could go there for a visit), and he said that when they had initially put up the wall that the windows of buildings facing it were bricked over from the inside and you could still see the curtains in the windows.
Remember Paula going on about how US policy broke up Yugoslavia?
She actually thought Yugoslavia was something real!
I served with many Filipinos in the Navy and to a man they hated the Japanese. If you don’t know why, read up on the Japanese occupation of the Phillipines during WWII. More than any red blooded American they wouldn’t even consider a Japanese car.
Interesting. Now read up on the American invasion and occupation of the Philippines of 1899.
It shows the power of propaganda just which atrocities people remember and which ones they don’t.
@MiTurn, In a strange way, his hatred seems almost admirable in that it was at least the result of his being firmly embedded within a culture and traditions with a long memory. The ability to retain one’s culture and memory of the past for so long – surely such a culture deserves to survive, even if hatred is one element of it.
Yes, as per Sir Arthur Keith’s Law of Amity and Enmity, the former for your own people and the latter for its enemies.
No enmity, no amity in all probability. Hate is an evolutionary attainment. If you can’t hate, how are you going to love?
@Jarek, I agree with Sir Arthur Keith, except that I don’t think we’re always hostile to the out group (“out group” not being necessarily the same as “enemy”). I think we’re often, maybe almost always, indifferent to them unless and until they do something that moves them from the category of out group to the category of enemy. If they live among us, as they do now, that’s a lot more likely to happen – their culture and customs being in so many ways antithetical to ours.
But I definitely agree that there is no love without the capacity for hatred. Who (other than liberals) would even want a world without hatred? It’s part of human nature, so it will never go away – though it can be diverted in particularly unpleasant ways, as I think we’re seeing now, especially in the unnatural enmity between men and women.
Yeah, well the Croats were eager Nazi sympathizers in WW2. I read in the 1990s in Encyclopedia Britannica that during WW2, the Croats sought to convert 1/3 of the Serbs (perhaps in Krajina, not ALL the Serbs, but who knows) to Catholicism, expel 1/3 and kill the remainder.
Nice.
From what I understand, these two slavic nations are very close.
The Croats adopted Catholicism (and write in Latin), the Serbs became Orthodox Christians (and write in Cyrillic).
So my sense is it’s a civil war of sorts–and civil war can be the worst kind!
I welcome other views on the Serbs vs Croats, I’m not adamant on what I wrote. But the little I know paints that picture to ME.
The Utashe was so vicious it was said to have shocked the Nazis.
And the priests supported the atrocities fully.
Same in Ukraine, with the Catholic west vs the Orthodox east, still ongoing.
Must be something they learn in catechism, I guess.
paula, that last line was a cheap shot. want to tar everyone by the behavior of a remote few?
i’ll say at least i see i need to learn a bit more on this.
it had not a damn thing to do with my or my family’s catechism.
@Zoltar
Again with the nuclear talk eh? That would imply he would have to kill Civilians if he does that. He didn’t even try to nuke Ukraine.
Seeker:
Why are you trying (unsuccessfully) to disagree with me?
I am giving credit to Putin for admirable forbearance, and guessing that he will win that bet.
He has made it clear that he will not ever use nukes as long as we don’t invade Russia. He has also made it clear that Russia will not be invaded again.
I believe him. And, while out “leaders:” are certifiably imbeciles, I don’t think they are actually suicidal. I think they understand that they would not live long enough to see any of our nukes hit Moscow.
There is plenty to worry about, but I think nuclear war talk is mostly scaremongering.
@Zoltar
I wasn’t even trying to turn this into some kind of fight with you if that’s what you are implying. But you don’t know anything about the people who run our country if you don’t believe they are suicidal. Besides Putin gets called a joke by some people I know. They say he’s also full of it or is a light weight compared to the likes of Stalin.
The truth is if America wants to invade Russia they will find some stupid way to do it because the powers that be also have nuclear weapons themselves, Putin can say what he wants but he talks like he’s the only person in existence with such weapons, he’s not.
You also say our leaders aren’t suicidal. Yes they are…. Why do you think some of them have underground bases now? The people who would suffer is us, the leaders most likely not unless they intend to live underground for the rest of their lives like a damn mole. Let’s also forget that Putin will not live forever.
Nuclear war is much closer than folks realize …The Globalist don’t seem to care much and have done everything possible to start one from my view . The Ukraine situation is the template on how to get the nukefest going ….
Having millions perish is a small price and in fact would thin the herd much quicker than starving and vaxxing you….remember these people are crazy and crazy people tend to do crazy things….
Who, Really, are the Elites?
m.youtube.com/watch?v=1ooRgZwbiGU&t=11s&pp=ygUHYXJjaGFpeA%3D%3D
start @about 1:40
the ones at the top of the system are sociopaths, whose behavior cannot be understood by those of our world.
ever heard of red rooms – children on video with wealthy monsters bidding on the next “gift” to be inflicted on them, for kicks. i have reports by a former door-kicker about this and consider his testimony reliable. as are the stories of the years of getting his head back on straight after seeing all this.
can anyone reliably predict the motivations or intent of such monsters?
and you’re wondering if they’re suicidal? that’s way too normal a word to describe these monsters.
Why would Putin nuke his own people?
This all started because the Ukrainian government was bombing Russians living in the region.
I was listening to Steve Kotkin last night on Lex Fridman’s YouTube interviews. He described Putin’s problems domestically as being intractable, BUT those problems were pretty much solved by NATO with the sanctions! Woo-Hoo! The West seems to specialize in shooting themselves in the foot. Now Putin is more secure than before.
From Putin’s recent Federal address:
“Look, the share in world GDP at purchasing power parity of the G7 in 1992 was 45.7 percent, and BRICS, even without taking into account expansion – in 1992 this organization did not exist, but the BRICS countries – only 16.5 (percent). By 2022, the G7 already have 30.3 percent, and BRICS have 31.5 percent. By 2028, the situation will change even more towards the BRICS: it will be 36.6 percent, for the “seven” the forecast for 2028 is 27.8. There is no escape from this, this is an objective reality, it will be so no matter what happens, including even in Ukraine.”
In light of that, the timing of Russia’s Special Military Operation in support of Donbass, makes crystal clear sense.
TRANSFORMER INSULATION BOARD
It’s made in the U.S.A:
Cottrell Paper Co
Rock City Falls, NY
Squirrel proof?
Breck
Nothing is rodent proof. I recently had a diesel pickup truck killed by a mouse.
…And I don’t mean damaged…I mean killed.
Ely, me too, I suspect. Caught fire.
@ elysianfield:
Yup. They’ll chew up the wiring. The cost to repair is huge.
A rat nested in the heater/AC blower of my car. The only damage was to stink up the car. But my daughter told me that it looks like some of the wiring has been chewed on and advised being very diligent about setting out traps for mice and rats.
I wonder if this kind of thing is more of a problem if the car/truck is rarely used. Seems like often driving it would discourage them. I never had this problem back when I was driving every day, several trips a day–before I retired. I don’t drive much now.
Crudge/Anthea
Wiring problems can be an issue. However, a mouse killed the engine in my diesel VW pickup. I cannot think of anything worse than what the mouse did, there is no other way to kill a diesel engine, as chewed wires cannot start an engine fire with diesel. What it did, was it entered the air cleaner of the engine. Usually this is not an issue, as any crap or nest built by the rodent will be filtered from entering the engine.
What this bastard did was eat a hole through the air cleaner, and then built a monster nest at the air intake. After a year sitting, I put a fresh battery in the rig and tried to start it…the engine aspirated god knows what detritus, and now I have to tear the head off to clear the valves.
The engine only had a few thousand miles on a fresh rebuild.
Donald Trump talked about how we need coal to make steel.
How did anyone not understand that a nation that does not manufacture anything for itself is not a secure nation.
Speaking of security, how long before we get some of those Haitian cannibals in this country, in search of a better life?
Then we’ll have a new group that gets hiring preference over Americans.
@Beryl Of Oyl
We already have Haitian’s living here.
Yes but they are plain old Haitians. Not cannibals.
Oh right. The “Plain Old Haitians”. Who would have thought that some Haitians were more equal than other Haitians? Wonders never cease.
@Beryl Of Oyl
Well, I don’t know if we’ll end up with people eating people, that seems a bit dramatic. But if it does come down to that, I probably won’t ever encounter such individuals. Even in the worse parts of Africa you don’t have people eating people, they generally just starve and die of famine.
We have people attacking women and hacking up their skulls because it’s their culture.
We have plenty of Haitian’s here in South Georgia. All of whom work for big farming interests, mostly harvesting, tending to fresh produce. They should mechanize or pay higher wages. After mechanization should come deportation.
To do those jobs Americans won’t do, doncha know.
Their first stop:
Chez Clinton.
I was planning on going over to Albany to JHK’s book signing extravaganza until the last storm dropped a nice sized tree on our car.
This time of year is almost impossible for us to schedule events outside the area. If the snow don’t get ya, then the mud will…
Or the trees?
Elon Musk posted a meme that says “Trying to help someone understand what’s going on right now is like going back into a burning building to pull someone out. Only to have them keep punching you in the face and demand evidence that the building is on fire. Even after they admit they can see the flames.”
I was once in a building where we had been smelling smoke for a while and then smoke started coming int through the vents and people were standing there waiting for permission to leave, that the supervisors weren’t giving.
Musk’s meme is an excellent description of cognitive dissonance.
I knew someone who was in one of the towers on 9/11. He told me they were all standing around waiting for the order to evacuate, but never came. He left on his own and survived, while others dithered and died.
China has been busy constructing a parallel universe that doesn’t include the US.
At some point, BRICS just switches off Swift entirely and goes about its business in that universe. I would say they will do this when they’ve achieved maximum disorder inside the West, maximum stretching of US military might across the world, and when the dollar loses value rapidly.
Somehow the Neocons are too stupid to realize their enemies are executing this rope a dope strategy to make spending escalate.
The closer we get to the point when the debt exceeds tax revenue is when she blows. You can do the math on current data to project the time frame. It’s not long.
This has been predicted for several years, now. I don’t think all of the neocons are stupid, though; I think more than a few of them have feathered their nests in anticipation of just such an event.
tuco22 – I was amused if a bit surprised to hear that serious efforts have been made by members of our [not-so-loyal] elite to quietly get on board with BRICS, but it makes eminent sense when you consider that their only enduring allegiance is to money.
@reggiezz
Looks like we are already past the point of bankruptcy when all federal tax revenue is entirely consumed by budget entitlements. That’s why just the interest on the debt is currently running at 1 Trillion funny bucks per month and increasing exponentially. And the best the doodahs can come up with is MMT!
Reg- Debt exceeded tax revenue a long time ago. At this point, the debt can only be repaid through inflation or repudiation, i.e. war.
Debt has exceeded tax revenue every year since 2004.
Another measure of solvency is the debt-to-gdp ratio. When it goes over 77% you are considered at risk of default. For the US this ratio has been exceeded since 2014, in 2022 it was 123%.
Hence the rise in interest rates, which will continue.
Some other countries:
Japan 264%
Venezuela 241%
Sudan 186%
Lebanon 151%
Italy 142%
See XXX://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/debt-to-gdp-ratio-by-country
“The closer we get to the point when the debt exceeds tax revenue”
I suspect you mean when *interest payments* exceed revenue.
Both metrics are correct. If your payable debt exceeds your income you are insolvent. This happens to mere mortals and companies all the time.
However if you own the printing press for your currency then other rules come into play. Like how much interest you will pay for suckers to buy your debt.
Until the suckers refuse to buy your debt no matter what interest rate you’re willing to pay because they finally realize payback ain’t gonna happen as your economy has been debased by inflation.
Also known as hyper-inflation.
nicely clarified.
Fixing the unfixable is what we seem to hope for but it’s sadly not going to happen
Munch was correct in Fargo..”The debt must be paid”…I think one way or another we’ll all pay for the economic and social ills upon us……the form of pain coming our way is looking very obvious with war and economic destruction starring us all in the face..
Trump might seem like a savior but he won’t be able to do much other than delay the pain, in a more controlled destruction …..Joe @company will just get it over much more quickly…..if you know what I mean
Yeah, Bitcoin and CBDC’s….right.
I’m rolling coins, pennies to be exact, last night and thinking about the material in the coins.
Everything around us is ephemeral, poor quality, and unstable. Our coins are made of “fake” material so even the “hard currency” of our fiat monetary system is worthless.
I trust you are rolling pre-1982 pennies (the ones with 95% copper). Yeah, “they” even couldn’t afford copper in our pennies anymore. First gold, then silver, and finally copper.
Copper arrowheads are cheap.
Pennies are made of zinc to the best of my knowledge.
Correct I believe, and cost 3 cents each to produce. Sounds about right.
Got Silver?
That seemed to be the supreme currency in Jame’s WMBH novels.
I took that advice and have been stacking ever since.
And the “supreme” currency in the United States of America once upon a time, and throughout history before that. Gold was just a condensed form of silver there for savings.
Sans,
And where on the silver does it say “Legal tender for all debts, public and private?”
The government…all governments enforce the hegemony of their currency through tax payments be made in that respective currency.
What would you do if you got a tax bill from Malawi?
…I would go to a map to find out where Malawi is….
Then what?
…Then ask myself a question…how many divisions does Malawi have? If their demand has no teeth, I would then suggest to them that they will get my money when I get the large payout from the Nigerian Prince that is coming my way. The check, whether in Dong or Baht, or whatever, is in the mail!
Trust me.
You don’t get what you don’t pay for.
We want more from government than they have and they want more than we can give.
One thing people don’t seem to realize is that when the power grid goes down, the refineries go down. A long grid outage means transportation would grind to a halt for lack of fuel. Not just your car, but trucks, trains, planes and ships. Our short sighted obsession with maximizing profit by minimizing inventories means there is very little reserve of anything. Grocery stores are now running at extreme limits of lean. We probably have enough small transformers to get by quite awhile, but not the big ones that power cities. They are so expensive that only a few sit in inventory, and they are all built in China. Copper is getting scarce and expensive due to the EV craze (fortunately now dying out). Growing crime and civil disorder will endanger the continued operation of the electric grid and communications. Truckers and maintenance workers are increasingly reluctant to enter cities to repair things due to the anarchy.
The gas pumps go down immediately also.
You don’t have to wait a long time until transportation stops.
Brother Job was “big on mules”.
Why does everybody think we don’t make big transformers in the US? It’s not true. My town just replaced a huge one with an even bigger one. We kept the old one as a back-up. They are made in Georgia.
vatransformer.com/about-us/our-locations/gtc-rincon-ga/
Yes, as much as I love jHK, there seems to be a lot of this information and histrionics in the comments. This thing about transformers is just one example. There have been numerous comments about the decrepit state of Americas infrastructure. While I won’t disagree with that in someways, I have to say my wife and I just put 3600 miles on our car driving to the Florida panhandle from New Hampshire and back. With the exception of a small section of I 95, the roads were invariably in excellent repair, well paved, well marked, With very little potholes or evidence of rust or underlying decrepitude. Just saying.
That’s great! I’m thinking of driving to Florida too–while I still can.
The condition of the pavement is a visible (and tactile–you feel it!) indicator.
But problems with electricity–we don’t see. For the uninformed (like me), it’s there, or it’s not.
I’m uninformed, but I see my utility skimping. I have more power outages NOW than 20 years ago.
JHK (and others) are right. If the grid fails for any extended period of time, it will be like a natural disaster. And if it fails in winter…double the disaster.
Rhys,
Sweet, sweet anarchy….
Blobs! Well put. Indistinct, interconnected, “too big to fail!”
Nothing is real in reality. We are making our own reality, and whatever we says is how it is.
Until, it isn’t.
No “one” is going to save us. You have to save yourself. Learn a trade. Get dirty. With real dirt. Easier to say than do, I admit. But, ultimately worthwhile.
Meet your neighbor. Know people. Go outside. Take off your VR goggles and say hello to the sunshine and the rain.
BINGO! re: the fate that awaits Bitcoin IF…..
I was just reflecting upon this very thing last night whilst my so-called mind ranged far and wide over the landscape of its world view.
Needless to say, it may have been some subconscious response of said mind to an article I had just read a few hours previously, having to do with the “halving” of Bitcoin due in April. And furthermore my musing whether or not I ought to “have” some Bitcoin in my portfolio?
Clever thing, that subconscious mind!
Gotta love that squirrel!
He’s got some real cojones there!
Lots to think about in this blog. But like the Internet, which was designed to operate with large chunks of it possibly blown away, the Bitcoin network is distributed over the entire planet. Just because the electricity goes out in one area doesn’t mean the whole network goes down. As long as a few routers, in the case of the Internet, or a few full nodes, in the case of Bitcoin, are left, the Internet and your your bitcoin is safe. When the power comes back on, you’re still a zillionaire. If the electricity stays off for good, then we’ve got problems. I still believe that sooner or later the Blob will realize that they have to turn off the Internet and maybe the electricity, or they will lose. Prepare accordingly on your rural farm with chickens and garden and well and solar panels. It might even be fun to live like a pioneer.
I would bet that regardless, those folks that held Bitcoin in those blacked-out eastern states will think long and hard about their investment if/when the electricity comes back on.
“It might even be fun to live like a pioneer”.
Take it from those who know, it ain’t. It’s hard work.
I seldom associate hard work with fun, but, well ‘it takes all kinds’…
Many it seems, divide their world into things that are fun and not fun. My wife is one. My days are always joyful, no matter what I’m doing. Many of her days – and others that make that distinction – are not fun.
“. It might even be fun to live like a pioneer.”
They were real pioneers – their home – a mere cabin (in) a great forest with not a tree amiss except a few trees cut to form their house.” The average life expectancy of a pioneer man, woman or child ranged from 30 to 40 years, if they were fortunate enough to survive childhood.
Party like it was 1840….
A lot of blood poisoning deaths in olden times.
Yes Beryl, and that was apparently why anyone planning a lengthy venture into the wilderness might consider going to a dentist to have each and every tooth yanked.
Blood poisoning from an infected tooth would be a grim way to go, way out yonder.
Look at the old pictures. They all had thousand yard stares. Of course they needed alcohol to “loosen up” and enjoy themselves. But God knows what that entailed for people so traumatized.
Hard work never killed anybody. Biggest lie ever told on its face. Depends what kind of work in what kind of conditions and what conditions the person lives in. Do the get enough to eat? To sleep? Days off?
Speaking of derivatives: read an interesting article that BlackRock is forging ahead with a plan to turn everything into Fungible Tokens.
Your wife, your kids, your house, your car, water, electric….with guess who in control?
Your kids are already Fungible Tokens – check their Birth Certificates. Let me guess, their names are spelled in all capital letters. Am I right? Why, you ask. Well, they are fictitious entities – strawmen (and strawwomen). Chattel of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA – the US Corporation.
Great shout out to Zanesville, Ohio this morning! If anyone ever gets that way, be sure to visit the historic “Y” Bridge. Read a good old fashioned Zane Grey novel – he was born near there. Take in some of the old-fashioned pottery manufacturers.
Like many smaller cities thorough the USA, Zanesville used to be a place where things of substance were actually made!!!
The thing about the GRID that people fail to understand: Its long term survival prospect is ZILCH without the nitwits in Government, allotting the funds to harden transformers etc. against an EMT attack or solar flare like the 19th Century Carrington Event. The chances of a solar flare NOT happening are slim to none. We just don’t know when. It would cost about 50 billion. Alas, that’s just too much money to prevent the collapse of civilization and the mass extinction event that will follow the meltdown of nukes etc.
They could just print more funny money and use that to pay for the needed upgrades. Don’t know why that would make any difference at this point. Upgrading and hardening the grid would be the second greatest job creator behind the MIC!
It would certainly be a better use of our funny money than building more Raytheon missiles to get used up and gone forever.
Other countries are already rejecting the US$. The more we print, the less each US$ is worth (Econ 101) and other countries, i.e. BRICS+ know it. The printing of money only matters if the printing country does not have much importation of goods (the US imports most of what we use). The massive printing of money creats hyperinflation, a la Weimar Germany in the 1920’s. Everything becomes super expensive relative to what people make as income.
So it’s best to be employed in a business that is providing a critical service like sewer repair and replacement, furnace repair, water distribution or food production / distribution. I went through this in the Carter Depression when building construction died so I went into food sales and distribution to feed my family of 6.
AI Trucking stops food distribution. Starvation is commonplace if not universal, and the “Wise Ones’ in their redoubts and stacks of silver & bullion in due time will understand New Testament book of James, where hoarding precious metals is mentioned: Their Gold & Silver shall chancre them, be to temporary avail at best. Pre 1965 silver coinage makes some sense for local exchange if food distribution is ongoing. Kitchen gardens saved thousands of rural families in the Stalin era collectives famine.
Railroads must be replaced at the branch line level, reaching into agricultural districts. A thousand billionaires in America? How many of the wealthy are people of circumspection, able to act with nerve & skill, identifying just 1 0r 2 farmland branch tail corridors from mid 20th century in their locale? Easiest rebuilds shall be remaining segments with rusty tracks still in place, replacing ties enroute needed to bring back to low speed cargo hauling. In cities, reconnect military base tracks and warehouse complexes still having service trackage in the pavement.
“POORS” Manuals of US Railroads and 1950’s City & County Thomas Bros maps include good representation of rails coming downtown, helping new generation planners lay out warehousing districts for produce terminals. For hundreds of rural RR branches grown over and otherwise indistinct, “Rails To Trails” network helps identify many segments. “Mike Walker Publishing” in UK has comprehensive Rail Map Atlas Volumes for US, Canadian & Mexican rail lines past & present. Many planning professionals are cognizant of our delicate situation; obtaining rail line maps of their sphere of interest is possible! That door closes when online book sales evaporate with a disabled grid.
This writer is an octogenarian Railway & Locomotive Society Historian with living experience of WWII period steam railroading, including rail matrix into farmlands all over the land. When America, flawed though she was, enjoyed status as “A Lending Not A Borrowing Nation”…
My father-in-law built the tracks for the Midland Valley Railroad. I always enjoy your posts
abandonedrails.com/midland-valley-railroad
Guys who build model railways seem pretty strange though. Look at their faces looking at the little trains go.
Right. That 50 billion must go to Ukraine.
“Bitcoin has gone “hockey stick” the past month, meaning on a chart the move up looks nearly vertical. Do you know why it’s going up? I’ll tell you: it’s going up . . . because it’s going up”.
Perfect sentence. You wait and then there it is! ‘Why is it going up?’ you wonder. And then you find out the obvious.
JHK: this was an excellent intro to MMT as a post Keynesian delusion. One note I might add that is relevant: The Federal Reserve, TODAY, is terminating their one year old Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) that involves loaning big money to failing banks. Last week, Powell (the fed head) said something like the following: “this will result in some banks failing, but it will mainly be only small and medium sized banks, so no worries.” Add that to the ~8Trillion$ in maturing Tbonds (requiring PAYMENT by the USCorp) in June and another 2-3Tril$ in July, and BANG. Hyperinflation to the moon.
” Hyperinflation to the moon”
…It ain’t brain surgery….
To the moon, Alice! To the moon!! – Ralph Kramden
ndoc: It’s all part of the plan. Bank failure is required in order to pressure people into accepting an “alternate” system. Problem Reaction Solution – Hegel strikes again
The way I understand MMT is that it is not “money printing”. It is issuing money instead of borrowing it, and it is issued to pay for societal goods and services.
Believing that you can stop inflation but simultaneously believing that bonds should be paid off, is not thinking it through.
Money borrowed at interest requires either an expanding money supply (to pay the interest not borrowed), or periodic crashes, which is what the US had for the first hundred years or so, and at some point will happen again.
Same with building things for profit. If you continuously build things, but can’t sell them, you either have to push credit (requiring more money in circulation), or export (to countries that may make their own), or go bankrupt.
I remember when my friend’s sister-in-law got laid off on a Friday. She worked at a boat factory. They were hoping that on Monday the factory would reopen and hire them back, even if they had to take a pay cut.
I said “Well, maybe”, but my friend pointed out “Everyone who wants a boat has bought a boat. They already have boats in stock they can’t sell.”
And I thought, he’s right. This is an irrational system. Why keep building when there is no need? Why have unemployed people when there is so much work that can be done? Why have homeless people and then celebrate “housing starts” as a sign of economic robustness?
The whole thing is nuts.
And the irrationality of people who live here and accept this as normal comes out when people are talking about the SMO in Ukraine.
You constantly hear people confidently proclaim that of course Ukraine will win, because the “west” has a combined GDP seven times greater than Russia.
Except that Russia produces what they need. The US produces profits for the MIC (and Big Pharma, etc.).
In a war, them that gots more missiles will probably win, because shooting credit derivatives at soldiers isn’t going to do much.
Plus, Russia produces housing to actually live in, and food for people to eat, and energy for people to use. But we are told that their GDP is lower than ours, so we live better. This is a bizarre thing to tell people who can see the people living on the street, huddling under cardboard boxes in the snow.
Just like producing credit derivatives here doesn’t fix crumbling infrastructure, or restore topsoil, or clean up waterways, or any number of other worthwhile projects that need to be done, but won’t be, because there is no profit in it.
The people who advocate MMT believe in issuing money to pay for the labor and materials needed to improve society.
I personally don’t think it will work, because we no longer have the resources, but I have to clear up the misconception that MMT is printing money to give to Wall Street.
No, that is what we have now, except that they expect we proles to pay it back.
Big difference.
It doesn’t matter where they spend the money they ‘print’. In the end it is baloney.
MMT is really super-charged Keynesianism. Somehow along the way, with the USD becoming the world currency, US Economists, followed by the rest of the world, camer to regard the US as the whole world. There ceased to be an ‘external account’
Current Account Deficits suddenly no longer mattered. So you really don’t need domestic production
Selling off your country’s infrastructure and critical industries to foreigners doesn’t matter
Western Central Banks regard selling off the nation’s resources, infrastructure and strategic companies to foreign interests as being the same as producing actual stuff and selling it in the export markets.
One has to wonder how far back this globalist BS started. This started back before I studied Economics in 1970!!! I doubt we can find a road back.
The result is the de-indusrialisation and dumbing down of USA.
MMT just expands this idea to thinking that as long as it is government that has the money to spread around rather then Banks then everything will be just peachy. I mean. what could possibly go wrong?
The fact is, that if you inject EXTRA money into an economy, it doesn’t matter who is doing the injecting. You are going to get one of two things – inflation or higher Current Account Deficits.
Pro MMT argument is basically based on the idea that money stops flowing when it reaches its first target.
So we throw money at, say, a badly needed bridge. The Tradies that do the formwork need tools – imported?. They probably need a new pickup/ute – imported? The shop he buys the pickup from needs a new Mercedes – imported. It pays wages and the wage earner needs a new TV – imported etc etc etc
So you get Current Account Deficits and Foreign Debt.
The ONLY way to do this right is to have savings so that either government or private industry do not create foreign debt.
When people save they don’t spend that money. So the portion that would have gone on importing goods does not get spent. Money that is then spent on investment, by government or private industry, does not create foreign debt. We are just spending what we have saved.
MMT is an over-simplified version of an economy based on false assumptions. It is, in fact, even more stupid than what is now in force.
That is why I said that MMT could not work in the US, the US depends on imports.
MMT means that you have to live within your means. This is beyond the ken of most Americans.
But your assumption that there would be two systems of money, one debt-based and one production based, is wrong.
The idea is to stop borrowing money into circulation, period.
It doesn’t seem like a “stupid” idea to me. Continual borrowing of money on which to live seems like a stupid idea to me.
It has nothing to do with Keynesian economics, which is trying to solve the profit problem by having government spending to try to solve the perpetual lack of enough profits to keep the capitalist system producing.
You are mixing up two different proposals.
I remember asking one of our liberal neighbors how the US was going to pay for Obamacare. The answer was “Just raise the taxes”.
See how simple that is?
Excellent piece. Just really captures the current vibe. Thank you.
Like many I just sort of feel we’re at the edges of “something” – a sense of shift.
So much of the Blob is revealing itself along with it’s inherent lack of smarts.
I just can’t keep up with all the stupid I see going on. I could list several local stories on mismanagement of funds, idiotic policies and general lack of ability to administer the basics of government. My favorite example is several large school districts are crying the blues and having to make large cuts because the Covid funds dried up. Apparently they based their budgets on this one-time windfall. The stupidity of these “educators” is not lost on the public because the other reasons for cuts is “unforeseen drop in enrollment”.
Gee, wonder why?
“So much of the Blob is revealing itself along with it’s inherent lack of smarts”. That’s just the window dressing for the masses. The actual core of the “blob” is quite smart. And evil. They are the ones we have to contend with. There is a lot going on inside at the core that we don’t see or know. We can make educated guesses, but…well…you know…the Thing.
Chicken Little always says the sky is falling, but the sky never falls. Respectfully saying the same exact thing week after week, month after month, year after year is not helpful. Again–and this not meant as an attack–People have been earnestly saying “we’re at the edge of “something” and it’s all about to break wide open, real soon for literal decades, and Nothing Ever Happens.
Yup, things are always gonna be the same. Always have been…
sillydilly – collapse is not an event (the sky falling) – as you seem to believe – collapse is a process.
Week after week, month after month, year after year, the process trundles along. Entropy ring a bell?
Consider everything Jim mentions, then ask yourself if each of those things are more precarious now than they were two, five or ten years ago.
There’s your answer.
And Blackrock? The hedge fund that everyone hates?
They get their money from 401Ks, the mutual funds that almost every worker pays into, with the promise that their “money will grow” and they will be rich someday.
How do you think money “grows”? It has to come from profits. Blackrock makes it’s profits in ways none of us like, like buying housing and raising rents to unaffordable rates.
But hey! You want to be a millionaire in 40 years, don’t you?
Move into your car, keep working, keep paying, and shut your mouth.
Blackrock has to keep growing, doncha know? Of course they are killing off a million Ukrainians, in order to take their land to grow GMO foods.
You want to be a millionaire in 40 years, don’t you?
Sure, they’re throwing small farmers off their land in Europe. Europeans don’t want GMO food, so they prefer to buy food produced in their own country.
They can’t be allowed to do that. Where’s the profit? You want to be a millionaire, don’t you?
Bottom line of today’s essay, “You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet.”
Sentient beings of the supposed ‘sapien’ ilk cannot seem to grasp this – still holding on to the fruit in the monkey jar trap, in which the monkey must trade a treat for freedom and opts for the treat every time….
Here we are navigating the 21st century with the neurological wiring of a primate who evolved in the savannahs, living on grubs and ‘roadkill’.
But, but, but…..”human ingenuity”! With enough ingenuity, we can power our society infinitely!
The only infinite thing about humans seems to be human stupidity.
My friend was pounding beer after beer while explaining to me that he had “tried everything” to deal with his diabetes but was going to take Ozempic because his doctor (sic) told him that all the bad press about Ozempic was nothing but “conspiracy theories”.
I foolishly suggested that he stop the consumption of alcohol and consider removing processed foods from his diet. After all, being overweight, drinking to excess, and smoking couldn’t be good for his diabetes. I also reminded him that having all of these problems at 35 predicted a very short and miserable life.
This guy sums up most people in the world to include our “elites”. You have to be completely delusional to believe that you’ve given it your all while drinking sugar and eating hot pockets.
He is about to discover what Ozempic does to a person and even that won’t be a wake-up call. Likewise, we are about to discover some things too and when that happens everyone will blame Capitalism and the greedy business owners.
I hope your friend will give the low carb/high fat diet a try if he hasn’t already.
It’s not a cure-all, but for some reason they naturally tell diabetics not to eat sugar and then they tell them not to eat fat and usually not to eat salt either, and are still often eating more carbohydrates than are good for them. and they end up feeling like they are never going to eat anything that tastes good again plus always be hungry, so they say the hell with it.
The health establishment has been deliberately giving people bad dietary advice for decades.
With lots of good vegetables and quality meats, it is a cure-all.
One diabetic friend changed from drinking beer to red wine in 2010 to reduce his carb, intake. He’s 76 and seems to eat reasonably healthily, plus he frequently walks or swims on Hampstead Heath. As far as I know, his HbA1C isn’t much above mine although he was fully diabetic at age 60.
The NHS advice to take a supplement of 400 IU per day is utterly wrong. Many adults seem to need about 3,000 IU/day. However, as pharma objects to the NHS telling people what they really need, Brits. who trust doctors will go on developing diabetes. What a sick system. The pun was accidental but seems fair enough.
400 iu of WHAT?
I’m going to guess that he’s talking about Vit D.
I could be wrong.
It doesn’t matter what your carb intake is if your pancreas is fried and is not producing insulin or enough insulin..
That is true. But your cells can use glucose without insulin if you are exercising.
That would work better for Type 2, of course.
And it involves a lot of exercise, so not practical for Americans.
Almost everyone I know who is roughly my age is diabetic. Two of them died within the past couple of months.
To me, it looks like most of them have no very clear idea about what a diabetic diet should look like. Some seem to know, but refuse to do much more than slightly limit their intake of fast carbs. They’ll order the sandwich with the “wrap” rather than the bun, for example, or (sometimes) buy “low carb” bread and tortillas, or sweeten their coffee with stevia, while having it with a slice of pie or cake. You also have the ones who insist that, “I eat what I want,” or say, “No one’s going to tell me what I can and can’t eat.” (Both the guys who often made these statements are now dead.)
I think some people think they can eat anything they want, as long as they take their medication or their insulin. I had an old friend who figured that it was okay to have a box of donuts and a two-liter of Coke for breakfast, and “Just take more insulin.” She’s dead.
I make a pretty strong effort to avoid fast carbs, and I do know exactly what is forbidden and what’s okay–but I still cheat sometimes, mainly on holidays or when eating out.
It’s not too difficult to decide to go carnivore or keto, or give up sweets–or gluten–for, say, a few months or a year. What’s hard is the realization that’s it’s not temporary: no more sweets, sandwiches, pasta, potatoes, cornbread, polenta, pancakes (with syrup), or breaded, deep-fried anything ever again. It also means no beer, and probably most other alcoholic beverages.
So I just do the best I can and try to limit the cheating.
My father died of renal failure brought on by a lifetime of bad eating that led to diabetes that he refused to treat with insulin injections. He died a miserable and unnecessary early death at the age of 75.
That was enough of a wake up call for me. I went back to Atkins and then later migrated to Carnivore in 2023. After 7 months I can say that the carnivore lifestyle works best for me. Nothing to measure. No calories to count. No carbs to count. Nothing to think about, for the most part. I simply eat meats, fish, eggs, butter, water and salt and in return I have no sugar cravings, excellent weight control, and good health.
Cheating has not really been much of an issue since going carnivore. I have far less desire to cheat on this diet so I rarely ever do. Usually, the only time I slightly diverge from it is if I find myself on the road and unable to cook for myself – in which case I usually try to find a steak house to eat at to avoid eating other types of restaurant foods. Otherwise, I’m fine.
Yesterday, I went to the supermarket. I spent $76 buying New York Strip steaks, Pork Chops, and a Chuck Roast. That’s it. Nothing else. The ladies in the checkout line with me all looked at what I was buying and simply said “We want to eat at YOUR house!” LOL. No criticism. No comments on the lack of other types of foods. Just envy that I get to eat steak all of the time. I kinda got a kick outta that.
“This is the kind of world we’re in now, and all this is why I don’t worry quite so much about the machinations of the various blobs that have self-assembled to defend their particular special interests while doing harm to many of us.”
I’ve attempted to refine my worry about their machinations, to separate those that are ephemeral from those that have more lasting consequences. I’m left with the medical/pharma blob, because they have done things to the bodies of vast numbers of people, the results of which we can’t foresee. It’s quite possible they have altered fundamental aspects of what it is to be human.
And then there is the trans industry, which makes lifelong patients out of hapless, confused children, robbing them of any possibility of a normal life. These particular activities of the blob will not just go up in smoke and then vanish. Some of us, especially the young, vigorous, and rural, might welcome the end of the grid and thrive in its absence. After the violence has ended, people who are smart, well prepared, and have real skills, may make a vastly better world than we’ve seen for some time. But the huge numbers of physically damaged people, some of whom have passed on their altered genes, is a problem that won’t readily disappear.
“I’m left with the medical/pharma blob, because they have done things to the bodies of vast numbers of people, the results of which we can’t foresee. It’s quite possible they have altered fundamental aspects of what it is to be human”.
BINGO Piglet! That’s the 800 pound gorilla in the room along with the White Elephant. I was watching a Tucker interview with Dr. Joseph Ladopo (Surg. Gen. of FL). He was telling about how the mRNA was designed to inject foreign DNA into the human DNA (genome).
This is real. My guess is that this is the primary way that the Blob is using to achieve its stated goal of reducing the human population on the planet from the current number to about 500,000,000. As many have said, Covid 19 was not the bioweapon – the mRNA injection is.
It’s far more significant if it sterilises people than if it increases the risk of death of middle-aged and elderly by 20-25%. Dr. Mike Yeadon (ex-Pfizer biochemist) has been warning people since 2020 that the bioweapon is designed to cause harm.
Apart from death and possibly sterility, it will also cause illnesses which doctors will treat by prescribing their patients expensive patented drugs. How nice for pharma boards of directors [sarc.]
“trans industry, which makes lifelong patients out of hapless, confused children”
Rowdy, it turns them into a sinister form of permanent cosplay and life-long medical patients. Think of the money to be made by the hospitals, surgeons, and psychologists.
@MITurn, This particular issue speaks to me. People often quote Whittier: “For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, ‘It might have been“. I’ve always disagreed. I think the saddest words are “what’s done is done”. These “treatments” deny the victims the possibility of outgrowing their delusions. We’ve all done stupid things when we were kids, and believed things we’d later repudiate, but these children will never be able to fix what has been done to them. No normal life will ever be possible for them and that is indeed, as you said, sinister.
With all the talk of the electric grid, one name is conspicuously absent and has not been mentioned once – Tesla, and I don’t mean the car. Ever wonder why TPTB overlook grid failure? It’s not an oversight, they know something we don’t (something kept from us).
“Meet Laura Kavanagh, the Fire Commander of the New York City Fire Department and the woman who started the investigation into firefighters who booed Letitia James and chanted for Trump. She was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams and has never been a firefighter herself.
She’s worked on many political campaigns for democrats and even oversaw the complete diversification of the FDNY. Her office has made it clear that anyone who was involved in booing James will be “educated” on proper conduct.
Why is a woman who’s never served as a firefighter serving as the Commander?”
– from a tweet by Travis in Flint.
There are some people who see the tide turning against “diversity” and ESG and the like but I’m not so sure myself.
Not to wipe this out is to fail to save America before you start.
I’m working on another rant about “diversity” but it doesn’t fit this topic today that well so I’ll save it for later, or not.
“Mayor Eric Adams and has never been a firefighter herself.”
This is true for many of our “leaders” and politicians. They’ve never really worked. All about connections. Case in point: AOC was a poor bartender. Now she’s a rich politician. Coincidence, of course.
AOC was a skank in the bar, now she’s a skank in the House.
Ditto Kamala, and now she’s Veep.
OK, CB81 – Jim may bounce me for this one, but here goes:
If you watched the SOTU closely, especially the entrance of “Second Gentleman” Doug Emhoff, before he sat down he was making some kind of overt hand signals to Kamala up on the podium.
I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the signs, but she was jumping up and down so wildly every 15 seconds, all I can think of was that he was telling her to take it easy with her new set of Ben Wa balls.
Laura can go gag on a dick down to the sack. Those fire fighters have a right to boo whoever they damn well please. Who the hell does she think she is to tell people who they can and can’t cheer/boo? F her.
Obviously you didn’t get the memo. Only Republicans/conservatives/white people can be booed – and should be booed, and harassed until they get up and leave the restaurant without finishing their meal (remember the advice of some leftist skank to her followers a few years ago?).
youtube.com/watch?v=7yYplnEkbqU&t=1s
That’s what I was talking about – in fact, even more than i was talking about.
All real Clusterfuckers should save this clip and play it for their leftist friends. It won’t convince them that “their side” is the real danger – but that may convince you to quit associating with them.
“… we Earthlings devise ingenious new methods to wreck terrestrial life, including ourselves.”
Serious psychology students could spend years unpacking that state of being. But the short version is this: Humanity always has a signficant sub-set of people within it that are self-hating. They hate themselves personally (if you look deep enough)… and They hate the life form and place that they we born in to. And so, They live lives of personal and collective destruction out of their burning inner hatred and unhappiness.
And when you combine species-hatred with rampant narcissism (which is the default personality type for those who assume positions of power)… you have one damn lethal and toxic and destructive force to bring havoc and destruction to our Planet and to our human family at large. And that is what we see playing out in all kinds of ways around us these days.
These ‘leaders’ are like deranged airline pilots who out of their own self-hatred and suicidal thoughts bring down innocent people in an aviation holocaust. They want to end it all for themselves and hurt others in an final dramatic act of self-negation. And many a Nation and society has likewise been brought down this way.
The good news (so far) is that our Planet has yet survived. But even this ray of light is dampened these days with the knowledge that our Planet and all life upon it could be extinguished in the blink of an eye by one of these ‘Suicidal Pilots’ with their fingers on the button.
“We’ll have decades, maybe centuries, to think about the hubris that brought all of that on, and in the meantime… maybe dote on some new dreams of what a perfect world would look like.”
That is what allows us all to get up in the morning. That hope that we wil live to see another day. And another week. And another year. And another generation.
And in all that… there still will exist that subset of humanity that is hell-bent on chaos and destruction. This is the eternal tug-of-war that goes on through Time between the insane pilots among us… and good and honest humans who were created in the image of the Divine. We fight over the controls of the Wheel of Life.
And that fight never stops for a moment. So, grab hold tight… hang on… and pray.
Great essay, Jim, (as per usual) but mentions of gold and silver were remiss.
Gold and silver have been real money since before recorded history.
Gold for wealth storage and silver for currency exchange. It has always been that way. These past 50 years are the anomaly.
OG, agree wholeheartedly. When people talk about digital currency replacing fiat currency, they think that gold and silver become problematic. Just the opposite. Digital currency = police state. Gold and Silver = real money. You’ll always find someone who’ll want to do business with you, and Uncle Sam doesn’t need to know.
All the gold in the world found up to now would fit in an Olympic sized swimming pool. Pure supply and demand. Value placed on a scarce commodity.
What would happen to the value of gold if an infinite source was found in some volcano somewhere? Or an asteroid?
Silver was found around gold sites but in larger amounts, hence the value difference.
I read someone on the blog saying that gold should be used for wealth accumulation and silver for commerce. Hmmmm?
BTW, the true value of wealth is labor.
So true. It would be great if people understood that.
Agreed. Only gold and silver are money. As a lifelong numismatist, I have been fascinated with the history of money and nothing I’ve read on the subject over the past 54 years has persuaded me that gold and silver are “barbarous relics” and no longer relevant as safe stores of economic value. Nearly 3,000 years of monetary history proves that only gold and silver are honest money and no sensible person disputes this.
But there are plenty of suckers out there who “invest in Bitcoin” because they are far too enamored with electronic gizmos and computer tech and they truly believe that Bitcoin is “the new gold.” I hoot out loud with derisive laughter every time I hear some under-40 idiot mouth this nonsense.
I’m no Luddite, but I’ve been around since before PC’s and the Internet were a “thing” and so I have a rational point of reference in my knowledge of the world that existed before all of these gee-whiz gadgets arrived. I feel sorry for the young folks who cannot even remember a time before “smart phones” existed. They really have far too much faith in this electronic mousetrap we’ve built for ourselves and they are going to be so damned shocked when the whole “digital economy” thing crashes and burns.
But when it does, the smart crowd who knows their history will be sitting on gold and silver coin stacks and they will be the ones buying up all the valuable real assets when the digital wunderkinder are reduced to peonage as their bank accounts go kaput!
JHK shows light on a salient point. It is this: Starting not long after the formation of the United States, ingenuity, capital, and labor began a long process of industrializing of the country. Some of the first benefits of that were the technological advancements in agriculture and transportation. It was then easier to produce and transport food, while reducing the amount of labor necessary to do both. That released both labor and capital necessary to industrialize all other nature of things, not minor of which was the production of energy. Fossil fuels came to the forefront as energy could now be transported to where it would be consumed. When electricity came along–specifically alternating current power, largely the brainchild of one Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse–the mobility of energy from source to user was revolutionized.
All of that allowed American cities to rapidly grow and prosper–and to produce nearly endless supplies of every imaginable product. Free market capitalism flourished. It all worked, not perfectly, but pretty darned well–and America become the most prosperous country on the planet.
But then, what we now know as Fascist/Socialism and, later, Communist Socialism began to gnaw into the fabric of American economic productivity. It started when some capitalists, tired by the rigors of actually having to compete in a capitalist system, figured out that they could curry special treatment and government favoritism by co-opting willing politicians will money, power, and lobbying in exchange for favorable government treatment.
Labor Socialists were happy to jump onto the “politician-buying” bandwagon–they could not offer the money to politicians that corporatists could, but they could deliver large blocks of votes.
And so America began a century-plus long march to an evermore Socialist economy–where actual economically efficient and innovative free-market capitalism increasingly took a back seat to government economic interventionism and central planning.
Communist/Socialists, of course, wanted to scrap the entirety of private property ownership and embrace full government ownership of all property and full government operation of the economy. Hitler, correctly, recognized that this model would never fly in Germany, as the corporatist elites would never stand for allowing their accumulated wealth and power to be totally expropriated by the government, so Hitler’s Fascist/Socialism would allow private corporatists to exist and prosper, so long as the corporatists pledged their total allegiance to the regime and agreed to abide the government’s central planning of the economy. The largely unremarked truth is that Hitler’s flavor of Fascist/Socialism didn’t economically work for shit in Nazi Germany any better than Communist/Socialism worked where it was implemented. But that didn’t stop Great Britain and most of Western Europe from adopting what was essentially Hitler’s version of Fascist/Socialism, beginning not long after World War II, with just the racist and bigoted Nazi ideology peeled off. That Socialism hasn’t worked for shit, either. Yet, Fascist/Socialist economic policy is what the Democrat Party has been trying to enact in the U.S. since the 1960’s. And it’s not working for shit here, either.
One of the very damaging aspects of a Fascist/Socialist economic model, is that, because the activity and productivity of the economy is increasingly influenced through government interventionism and not by free market efficiency, capital itself becomes increasingly divorced from economic reality. With the power to print money, create government debt, with essentially no economic discipline, only (largely non-existent) political restraint, the divorce of capital from reality becomes nearly complete. We are there. The whole economic charade can only continue as long as most of the public believes the fraud. Of course, the larger the fraud becomes, the less believable it becomes. Usually quite suddenly, the greater public recognizes the fraud, and the whole scam comes crashing down. We’re likely not far from that.
Well done! Thank you.
The only way our system functions at all is by making key industries serve the nation. Did Hitler see it first? I question that. It was well known in the United States by the late 19th century.
“The largely unremarked truth is that Hitler’s flavor of Fascist socialism didn’t economically work for shit in Nazi Germany…”
I would argue, to the contrary, that the Third Reich shifted more resources in peacetime into military uses than any other capitalist regime in history. And this advantage in terms of domestic resources continued to hold throughout the ensuing world war.
By 1934, military spending already accounted for 50% of government expenditures and by 1935, the military’s share rose to 73% (see “Deficit Spending in the Nazi Recovery 1933-1938: A critical reassessment” 2000).
What would be your ideas on how to restructure our present monetary/credit system in order to allow for the flowering of a more de-centralized capitalism?
“I would argue, to the contrary, that the Third Reich shifted more resources in peacetime into military uses than any other capitalist regime in history. And this advantage in terms of domestic resources continued to hold throughout the ensuing world war.”
And yet, the Nazis just couldn’t get the tanks out of the factories at anything like the speed the Americans did, which, among other things, lost them the war.
Even James T Kirk recognized that.
And they still didn’t have enough once attacked from both the East and West.
The Bankers had to attack before the Nazi economic miracle spread to other nations. Their secret: You don’t need the Banker parasites. In fact you must drive them out before they kill their host, the nation.
Poor little Nazis, being forced into all that lebensraum stuff. A big boy made me do it and ran away.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Or in this case, mad and EVIL Eugenics was a globalist perversion. The Nazi scum chose to follow it and bring it to its natural, uber-evil conclusion. And they’re still there, having been Paperclipped to the US where they were invited to embed themselves. They’re still doing that lebensraum stuff as we speak.
By the way, you mis-used the term ‘man’ in a previous post to me. You claimed I owed something to ‘men’ who were willing to burn women, children and non-combattants alive in barns and churches. People who do that are not ‘men’, they are pseudo-human filth and I owe them nothing. Fortunately, God has already dealt with them, as He will deal with you for praising them. Perhaps a few of them repented before they died. Perhaps you will too.
The modern British are despicable fools who will end up as dhimmis if they are lucky. A dhimmi cannot raise a hand to a Muslim, say to defend himself, but he has the right to beg for mercy.
Anglo-Americans who end up in Black run areas will have rights whatsoever.
You see, Satan is Rex Mundi, the King of this world. You forgot that or never knew it. Thus only those who are willing to use his methods will prosper or even survive. The Church, in its wisdom, came to an arrangement with some of Germanic tribes to enforce their will upon the rest. Thus the Franks slaughtered the Saxons and later the Normans slaughtered the Irish and bad, pagan Norseman – even though the Normans themselves had just converted.
Do you value your Western heritage? It’s because of people like this that we aren’t speaking Arabic or Berber or Turkish or Mongolian. That’s what I meant.
correction: no rights whatsoever
I know what you meant. And I am perfectly aware of Satan as Rex Mundi. And as the father of lies – lies which you happily repeat on his behalf. Satan being Rex Mundi doesn’t mean that I can walk into a shop and steal what I want, or that everything soldiers do is OK (or inquisitors, for that matter).
I repeat: I owe nothing to the kind of filth that puts women, children and other non-combatants into a barn or church and burns them alive. The Nazi scum are yours – you keep them. And make your excuses to your Maker for promoting them, when the time comes.
As Hitler said, the British Empire was a repository of the finest Aryan blood on Earth. The best killers from Saxony, Denmark, Normandy, and from the Celtic lands of Scotland and Wales.
Of course they conquered much of the Earth. Of course! They dropped the Church and went to work for the Bankers who changed Christianity into “peace and love” hippy crap, the kind that appeals to women (like you) and male eunuchs.
Now they kill for Peace (and to make money). The Old ones killed honestly at least and sometimes even for a higher cause.
I have no interest in ‘hippy crap’ – don’t tell me what I think, you demon. Being a Christian involves being prepared to be tortured and murdered by the enemies of Christ. Not for some sick totalitarian ideology such as you espouse.
winterchristian.substack.com/p/dont-expect-a-reasonable-genocide
Have you read this?
amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1945774258/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2
Your demented pagan role-models were sick last century and they continue to pave the road to Hell this century – all they did was move their headquarters.
But they lose in the end. Even you know that.
Consider the massacre in the Katyn forest. The elite of Poland were massacred by the Soviets and then their Western running dogs lackeys ran cover for them and blamed it on the Nazis. People like you.
You all have much to repent of. But you prefer to go on the attack to avoid doing the much needed inner work.
Robert Bryce frequently discusses our ailing grid.
“Likewise, the financial system we depend on is a gigantic apparatus grown extremely junky from over elaboration and hyper-complexity.”
JHK, you can say that again–no matter what one’s particular theoretical bias about how money/credit actually operates in that apparatus.
JHK also added that “Many sentient beings viewing the scene warn us that this bond market is liable to blow, and with it most of the other modules in the current MMT driven system.”
Some of our most sophisticated financial and economic elites (see writings of Adam Tooze) are also quite aware that this entire money apparatus/edifice has been socially, legally, economically, and politically constructed by them and their associate blobetts and they continue to worry about its stability and vulnerability to collapse.
For example, the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank for central bankers) in its latest Quarterly Review (just published) notes that Prime brokers (like Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan) who provide margin loans and derivative advice/lending for up to 1000 hedge funds each (like Citadel), control assets of which more than 38% cannot be fully or independently valued. At the end of 2022, U.S. registered hedge funds held over $4.5 trillion of global assets.
This means, that if prices in whatever markets (theTreasury market for sure) and in whatever instruments begin to spasmodically fluctuate, an amplification of these fluctuations is quite possible because private financial entities/Prime Brokers like JP Morgan could find themselves confronted with opaque hedge fund asset values causing a hesitation to provide the necessary liquidity to provide a stabilization of prices (think of the Lehman Bros. collapse and its repo holdings in 2008).
Bonds and stocks. Preferred and Common.
Bonds used to be a guarantee of payment in bankruptcy, they were a loan from bond holders to the company and as they were a debt, bondholders were paid first.
Stocks are ownership, IOW, you are participating in ownership of the company along with its risks. Preferred and common status determines payback. With liquidation. bonds are usually paid back, stocks not so much.
Works great with companies?
How about countries, bonds I mean. Are treasuries bullet-proof? The politicos play their games like they are. Are they ownership of a country, like stocks, IOW, do we all go down when the country liquidates? Are their guarantees, like company bonds, of payment first?
Nope, no guarantees. Are they really bonds? Or just paper, like the federal reserve notes?
Here we go again. It is “Twilight of the Blobs” and the markets are about to crash, the dollar’s going to rapidly fail, and the whole house of cards is about to come down, real soon, fer sure this time. . . give me a break. Factually, “The Blob” was around long before today, and it will be around long afterward. The Blob was rocked on its heels by what it saw as a shock election of Trump, but it never went away, and grew and schemed to undermine Trump and everything he was trying to do. It held him back at every turn, shut our country down with the COVID virus cooked up in China, and ensured that he was a one-term president. The Blob will continue to evolve, grow, and stymie Trump and his supporters. It might feel good to pretend it’s all about to collapse, week in and week out, month after month, year after year. . .Chicken Little always says the sky is falling, but the sky never falls.
This guy is calling someone else repetitive.
Oh, snap, Bob.
Normies are gonna “norm.” As NPC’s they simply can’t help themselves. It’s fundamental to their programming….much of which came from the BLOB’s.
If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
– Herb Stein
MMT is just that…a theory.
EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested) is an immutable law of science. The closer it gets to 1:1, the further up Schitt Ck. we go. Herb Stein (and OG) are correct…if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
@dilbert113
I’m sure the skeptics in Moscow in the 1970s and 80s, or in London in the 1920s, or in Berlin in 1940, tried to warn people in charge the sky is falling, and that somethings might have to change.
In London, they could not change from “Imperial Sclerosis”
In Berlin, the had to keep their voices low as the Fuhrer overran Eastern Europe and invaded the USSR, writing checks the Third Reich could not cash (though the Germans killed millions of innocent people in the process and war devastated Eastern Europe, and ultimately Germany itself).
Our example is more like Berlin right now. A declining USA shot its wad in the Ukraine, then (at best) got suckered into a losing, expensive deal to exterminate the Palestinians. What will the US government try next, a nuclear war with Russia? We will see…
In Moscow, eventually Gorbachev tried, but it was too little, too late–or the situation was too overwhelming. The USSR imploded, and people of the USSR were plunged into a lost decade that was probably much harder than the Great Depression in the US.
But the Russians survived, and are now doing nicely. Will Americans do as well?
It is falling, one chunk at a time, a head at a time.
Just the chunk with your name on it hasn’t hit your head…yet.
I’ve been chunked many times and was always able to get back up.
But the last one was… it.
Ditto
In the past the dollar was pegged to Gold and backed by GOLD so it had some form of intrinsic value beyond the paper it was printed on as well as what people believed it was worth.
Then It was pegged to oil since there is still more oil than gold.
The house of Saud said they will take other currencies besides the dollar so Dollar diplomacy is now off the table and is no longer the world default currency and the BRICS are actively trying to use currency other than the dollar.
N o more digitally printing money to cover real world assets which means the dollar has to be pegged to something of value besides the human resources of the US.
Trillions of dollars being held in other countries is now on the table for coming back to the US as the perceived value of it is lower than it was.
Now we have Joe Biden doubling down on the budget causing even more inflation.
WASHINGTON ? President Joe Biden released a federal budget Monday that carves out new social programs for housing, health care and child care and reduces the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
Biden’s $7.3 trillion budget for the 2025 fiscal year ? a 4.7% increase over the current budget ? seeks to boost defense spending by 1% and non-defense discretionary spending by 2.4%.
I love that part that talks about reducing the deficit as they spend us into oblivion and the source of this new windfall is to tax the rich till they are no longer rich.
As if these people won’t just move there money somewhere else and hide it.
These people are so stupid they could tax the rich 100% and it won’t cover what they are spending right now.
Weimar Republic American style coming soon.
They also failed to mention this imbecile and his handlers will be raising the tax rate to its highest level on business in American history.
Next up 90% tax burden on private citizens.
It has happened before why not again?
Benr
80% of the population have no idea what you are talking about. The Deep State understands this and utilizes it to its fullest.
@ dilber113:
Well, actually, it’s happned over and over again–probably hundreds of times–and is a pretty regular thing.
Biden hot mic: Bibi and I are going to have a come to Jesus moment. So offensive!
Biden also called Laken Riley’s killer an illegal. What a honky.
Last two presidents, both charming old honkeys, in their own ways.
He also called Laken Riley “Lincoln Riley” (head coach of the USC Trojans).
The Big Guy corrected himself for calling the vibrant, skull-crushing newcomer “illegal”. He said, “I shouldn’t have used ‘illegal’ it’s ‘undocumented'”.
So, if I drive off the car lot in a shiny new Mustang I haven’t paid for, I’m just an “undocumented customer”, right?
And apparently half the voters in this country intend to vote for this guy…
Right Bird – as Jim says, they like to use “undocumented”, as if they’re here due to some clerical error.
Ron
Think about this.
Illegal, present tense meaning they have broken the law by crossing the border and thus can be prosecuted.
Undocumented, they have no green card but can come across at will as it is not illegal, they are just missing papers. Remember that case here in Arizona when the sheriff was stopped checking immigrants papers? So they are just allowed to co-exist with no official designation.
Oh no, not the end of the story. When the Deep State Uniparty finally gets their way with “comprehensive” immigration, ie, making all the illegal crossers legal, it will be much easier to allow “undocumented” lexicon plow the way than “illegal”.
Words matter.
This, from MSN of all places:
Senate Rejects GOP Proposal to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants From Census Counts for House Districts, Electoral College
Of course MSN painted it as, “a Trump-era policy attempt…”, “that it was both illegal and driven by partisan objectives”.
But sneaking across the border into our country is not “illegal”. Hiring them is not “illegal”. Providing them with money, housing, employment – paid for by our despised citizens – is not “illegal”.
Pretty soon calling them “illegal” will be illegal.
It all seems undocumented to me?
Uh-huh.
Biden’s Bibi comment was staged. PURE THEATER.
He and the Democrats are worried about Arab-American voters.
Biden’s campaign thinks that between this cheap stunt, and the perception (perhaps true, perhaps not) they will cultivate that Trump would be even harder on the Palestinians will persuade Arab-Americans to take a deep breath and vote for Biden.
That’s all that was. Just like the “humanitarian aid from the sea”
Pure bull$hit.
“Humanitarian aid from the sea” also used as a subterfuge to locate military assets where needed.
Same as the two US Navy Seals that “went overboard” off the coast of Somalia – oops, better send in the 7th Fleet for search & rescue – complete bullshit.
You can bet Putin’s (capable) tacticians are watching every move (and story) – the game board is being set for a wider war.
Actually I suspect the two Seals really did go overboard they don’t like to admit to losing people.
@Ron Ansel
I’m not always the quickest kid in the room.
Yes, I spotted the “humanitarian aid from the sea” for the BS that it is.
BUT, that’s because I took it at face value.
Now THIS is more plausible–a port to facilitate the removal (aka “voluntary evacuation”) of Gazans to Europe or other “third countries”
That will make Israel happy:)
thecradle.co/articles/us-building-gaza-port-to-facilitate-mass-voluntary-migration-anadolu-agency
Mr. K has it right about the $35T national dent figure. What’s not mentioned is the $100T plus inm unfunded mandates. Social Security, government pensions, VA bennies and so forth are promises backed only by the government ability to tax future producers, and by their willingness to pay rather than flee, cheat or establish a new order. How much Sympathy younger workers, many immigrants, will have for Gringo Boomers is an open question.
We were warned as far back asGoldwater’s ‘The Coming Breakpoint’ in 1976. We didn’t listen.
Apparently Trump plans to cut Social Security and Medicaid if given a second chance. So there’s hope!
I’ll believe it when I see it.
Hey–wait–I’m looking to get Social Security in the next decade, lol.
@Blackbird
How the hell is that a good thing?
Woosh!
Did that part your hair as it passed over your head? (Hint: If I say something that sounds stupid, I’m probably being sarcastic.)
We won’t need it. We’re all going to become rich businessmen like the smart guys. You have to understand how deeply normal people hate themselves for not being rich.
I don’t see how eliminating Social security is going to make anyone “rich.” And yes some people do need it. That’s what my grandmother lives off of, she use to wash and clean floors even in her 80s and they let her go because of her age. She doesn’t live in California because she’s afraid to travel. So she just stayed in Mississippi.
John Az will teach you about the evils of crony capitalism. As Adam Smith said, there’s an invisible hand that smooths out all the wrinkles. So what if people are destroyed? That’s evolution. The Market will rebalance. And that’s all that matters.
Is the Dialectic the same thing as the Invisible Hand? Like “Thing” in the Adams Family? They sure sound a lot alike, especially in their brutality.
Truthseeker
It is worse than you think. Stats put out yesterday say that 40% of social security recipients live 100% on SSA. That does not include the huge % that live mostly on SSA.
That is why any sort of major reduction of payments out to the senior classes will result in a calamity to the economy.
Catch 22
Support SSA and you get spending power in the 65+ crowd. Cut SSA and you get a yuge decline in that spending power which hits everyone. It is a no win scenario.
Remember too that the SS trust fund is just a subset of the National Debt, there is no real money in the national government.
A sign of bankruptcy, borrowing money to pay the interest payments on money already borrowed. Mosaic law even talks about this as it balances the books every seven years erasing debt for everyone. Debt is not allowed to build upon itself.
“…spending power in the 65+ crowd… is a no win scenario”?
Yes, we need to follow the wisdom of one of our most enlightened commenters: “Buy low, sell high!”, “Profit off the misery of others!”, “I’ll be eating chocolate cake covered in gold leaf when you are all in the soup line!”
As the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of the Good Book says, “
The love ofmoney isthe root ofallevil.”“The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Man….talk about a bigoted slam against numismatists. I’ve been loving on money for 54 years and it hasn’t rendered me evil yet. I don’t think my collection of uncirculated Lincoln Cents ever harmed a soul…
Social Security is fine as long as the political class stops dipping into the fund for things that have nothing to do with the original intent of making people save for retirement.
No one should be able to withdraw from it without having put into it and like a bank account it should expire when what you put into it runs dry.
SSA is fine as long as the Congress cannot break into its lock box trust fund to spend on welfare. SSA works well if the taxes for Medicare and SSA, multiplied by the increase in value of the fund equals the payout. It is unfortunately treated like the general fund, spend spend spend. Buy those votes.
Remember too that the only reason for SSA is that very stupid people that never set anything aside for their elder years would starve if it did not exist. The political impact of SSA being reduced is too expensive to allow it to be ever cut.
BTW, think of the similarity of what is going on with immigration. More people by the millions being given welfare payments with no paid in taxation to offset the increase in spending. There is no lockbox, a joke anyway, no trust fund for those folks. The Dem government does not care. Votes, Ya know.
Welfare is the BIG,BIG problem in this country. It is the Deep State’s answer on how to re-elected every two years. Promise the gimme class freebies and they will vote for you.
I believe – and I may be wrong – but the Feds have already raided SS funds by replacing them with government IOUs. On paper, they look solid because the Feds “backed” them, but in reality they’re just based on worthless paper. When the SHTF, people will realize they’ve been scammed, and the authorities will be attacked by hordes of 80+ year-olds screaming for their money. Those old motherfuckers are pretty tough, and it won’t be a pretty sight
Bill Yes, that is what I mean when I say that the Trust Fund is just part of the 24 trillion dollar debt.
All pension plans, private and public are based on US Treasuries.
When the SHTF, in your words, the government will respond like it always does when strapped, turn on the presses. They will just transfer the money as they always do. The difference will be $10 or more for a quart of milk or a loaf of bread.
That is the consequence of the Libs end resolve.
“…very stupid people that never set anything aside for their elder years…”
Right, everyone can have a high paying job, enabling them to save a lot of money for retirement, as well as regular vacations to far off places and a nice house while they are working. The economy is – and always has been – BOOMING!, and totally fair. Those who didn’t are lazy gimme losers and should live in a cardboard box (that they paid for!) under a bridge.
Right Blackbird, hence SSA to force a savings plan for them.
Simple concepts.
Sadly, not so simple to maintain. That Parliament of Whores on Capitol Hill will always find reasons to touch funds that their grubby little hands should not be fondling.
Last year I saw a warning on You Tube about the international gold bullion markets, the place where countries buy and sell gold to each other and where they store it. The story said that those bullion banks were allowing IOUs for gold backed by US Treasuries. Boy, does that give you the heebie Jeebies. A percentage of the gold value of the world is actually US Treasury IOUs.
Bottom line for the BRICS++ crowd, take out the dollar and your IMF goes down, big time. Nice!!!
But gold is still desirable to own. The true value of it is ultimately based on reality, whatever the markets may say.
The point is, the value of gold in those depositories is being watered down by the Treasury IOUs. You set the price, the value of gold, by how much of it exists. We have no real idea of what that is. Hedging bets on the value of a Bullion bank may be a fiasco.
Trade in their own currencies and remove the motive of greed should make things work out just fine.
Trump talking about cutting social security and medicare. These are things only Democrats care about! As John Az says, Big Government.
Trump reverses himself on tic tok. He’s for it now after talking to a big investor in it. He admits they met but denies they talked about it. His defense of tic tok? A lot of girls really love it.
I guess we get the savior we deserve.
@Jarek
Democrats are dickheads and simply abused it. To be fair, nations definitely need a REAL safety net and it shouldn’t be used to manipulate or con people into voting for your sorry corrupt ass. But Democrats use these systems to sucker people into voting for them.
Thats a real easy fix just cut off the packets for Tic Toc going across the pond no more chinese spying with tic toc.
Or build a better platform.
Tik Tok, like Facebook et al has weaseled its way into our daily communications, our way of doing social business.
Gee, do you think the CCP doesn’t know this?
Gold and Silver
Gold and silver have never been money. Gold and silver coinage has.(as well as copper, zinc, and pucca shells)* Gold and silver are popular hedges against inflation, and things that go “bump” in the night. Gold and silver are just two commodities, albeit ones that have better liquidity than most others. All commodities have been and are currently traded, and their values can be found on the commodity markets, and like gold and silver, change daily in value.
Gold and silver, lead and copper are recognized by the general public and would find liquidity more easily than pork bellies, iron and aluminum billets. All commodities in recognizable form would be bartered for, some more sought after than others.
Suppose I had a dozen eggs, and you had a small gold planchet. I want one dollar (equivalent) for each egg. You tell me that your gold planchet is worth $100 (equivalent) and you want my eggs, and you want change. We would enter into a negotiation (Your gold…how pure is it? What is the actual weight? Is it really gold, or plated? I will have to test it with nitric acid…and it tests at about 19k? Let’s talk.
A small silver bar would work the same way. It’s proofed? OK, let me show you a set of proofing dies that I have in the back…still need to test it.
The old pawnbroker has been there, and done that. Wedding bands are generally 10k and 14k marked they are still tested, and fakes are still found.
The advantage of gold and silver is relative liquidity and relative acceptance. They cannot be spent, only traded. Old silver coinage is the best for this purpose.
*Maybe…who knows?
Apparently, wood bark chips used to be used for barter, along with all kinds of weird (and creative) options. Better than destroying water tables and wasting oil in excavation, and all for the hope of a few minus EROEI gold flakes.
I always thought that gold leaves could be used. Limited time, so it preserves one of the fundamentals for trade — scarcity. Also environmentally friendly. Also no problems with adulteration. Prospecting would be fun if you could get by the armed gangs protecting or commandeering catalpas.
Of course, you wouldn’t want to be left holding the vegetation once it shifts to rigor mortis and crinkles like rice paper. Still good news. Hoarding gangs can’t fight seasonal supply.
Imagine the dowry on a honeymoon: gold fig leaf slowly pulled away on the nuptial bed.
” gold fig leaf slowly pulled away on the nuptial bed.”
SF,
Your example provides for another commodity, always in demand by a significant percentage of the population. Actually better than gold or silver.
Reminds me of an old saw;
You got it, you sell it, and you still got it! Such a deal!
E – are you talking about Bubba’s Cellie?
Uhhh…yeah….
My grandmother mined for gold back in the Depression. She had a little bottle of gold flakes she passed down.
My dad took it to a “We Buy Gold” place, and they wanted nothing to do with it.
I highly doubt that he could have traded it for eggs, either.
Should have taken it to a scrap gold dealer. I run into them at coin shows from time to time. If it’s gold in any form whatsoever, they’ll buy it. They have electronic testing machines that can determine weight and purity in seconds. They pay in cash too!
“…armed gangs protecting or commandeering catalpas”?
So the cartels have moved into catalpas now have they? I remember my Philly cousins turning my brother and I on to catalpa beans. Pick them off the tree when they are ripe. Let them dry a bit. Then you can pull the inside out and are left with the smokable husk. Burns nice and slow, with an almost asparagus-like aroma.
Those damned cartels… Is nothing sacred?
Why do women care so much if only an expert or a machine can tell the difference in these matters? Surely real people wear fake furs a la Thorstein’s Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption.
If women stopped caring, then we could stop. And the whole thing could collapse for the most part. Silver had industrial uses I believe, so it would retain some value.
Plus a nice silver platter all shined up and real silverware is a sight to behold.
And anti-bacterial properties. The Elite know these things….
Jarek
When God gave Moses the plans for building the Tabernacle, God’s “motel” on earth, he made the entire inside of it from cedar and Gold, both anti-bacterial substances.
Hmmm, does that give the idea that God is a Being that cannot stand up to earth’s microbiology?
The Temple, when it was built, included the same requirements for the Holy of Holies inner sanctum. When the Romans sacked the Temple, they were after the riches of the inner sanctum. Fun fact, the sacked riches were used to build the Colosseum.
@EF:
My wife had accumulated some gold doodads over the years, nothing beautiful or apparently valuable. We bought them to a jeweler. He stated they were all gold. We sold them to him for $13,000. That was an unexpected bonus.
He said that it was a good thing we didn’t go a notorious, well-known West Coast ex-pawnbroker because we would have been either given about $300 or nothing at all because he would say the items were fake gold. You wouldn’t know who that person is, would you (lol)?
Ahhh, Jewlers.
Funny story. A Jeweler will sell an engagement ring with a 1/4ct diamond, for $1200+. A week later he will invariably refuse to repurchase the ring at any price, usually stating that “they were not buying right now…sorry”
I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I heard that hundreds of times from returning customers. What small diamond rings are, is considered consumer jewelry, with markups well over 800% Jewelers want nothing to do with them, as they would have to tell their customers that they screwed them earlier. They usually sold to me after all other efforts failed. I had many hundreds of rings for sale.
Most pawnbrokers are reasonably honest…some no better than thieves. I have little respect for Jewelers.
Well, ladies and germs;
Remember the shooting in Philly last week where there were 8 wounded? Well, they caught the shooters.
The suspects, identified as Jamaal Tucker and Ahnile Buggs…
Of course, they did not mention the race of the ferals involved.
They could be Canadian anarchists….
Who knows?
Anglin says the new politically correct term is “brutes”.
Jarek,
Did you know that Ahnile had a nickname?
His friends called him “Eatze”
Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself. Other races feel like subjects of Western power long after colonialism, imperialism, and slavery have disappeared. The charge of racism puzzles whites who feel not hostility, but only baffled good will, because they don’t grasp what it really means: humiliation. The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy. Destroying white civilization is the inmost desire of the league of designated victims we call “minorities.”
— Joseph Sobran
This message really resonates right now in the current season and just has so many levels of meaning. I think there is an immune system with tangible physical properties but its almost like a karmic debt as well. The Earth is constantly giving but what does she receive in return? A devastated aura? And its all the same in the world of men. Debts will be paid back one way or another. The arrival of Spring is really the beginning of the new year. So this is a perfect dream time to imagine what the world could be. Imagine a world untethered from the chains of the Archons. That’s really what it sounds like you wish for.
Some good news from Ireland for a change.
youtube.com/watch?v=xxA5_J-cSiE
The Irish people told the globalists where to go with their constitutional ‘reforms’.
lol Ireland
There’s no voting their way out of this. The Irish government will just ban any nationalist party that begins to win and garner wide support. Just as Beligum did to Vlams Blok and Greece to the Golden Dawn. If the Irish want to remain free or remain at all, it’s up to Captain Midnight. Rioting and burning down empty buildings slated for migrants is a good start but only a start. Satan is Rex Mundi, as Christ himself taught.
Holy cow, Jarek. It sounds like you are saying that government is evil, a social order that is easily corruptible. We definitely want them to make our economic decisions for us, Right?
The Irish Government is ruled by unelected officials of the EU – a consortium controlled by the International Banking community. Plutocracy.
You are so utterly confused. The answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The answer to bad government is good government.
Okay, can you point out one “good” government? Government, by its nature , and who inhabits it, is evil.
That is the fallacy of your argument, government is never, the absolute intended, “good”.
The founding fathers knew this and wrote it into the Constitution. They were afraid of an imperial executive and that fear has been substantiated a few times. We are in one of those times right now.
The Constitution, a government document.
El Salvador is a shining example of governmental triumph over the forces of gang evil.
The governments of the Southern states before The War to Destroy the Republic were pretty good. The state governments of Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, etc. were pretty good between the end of reconstruction and the Marxist revolutions of the late 50’s/60’s. They really represented the best interests of the actual citizens.
Well, that is one, maybe? I believe that not long ago, El Salvador was under control of the Sandinistas, another bloodthirsty group.
Zazz, where are you? Come over here and shake hands with JAZ – our newest anarchist!
JAZ, the Sandinistas were in control in Nicaragua.
The FMLN, a coalition of guerrilla groups, took control of El Salvador after a 12-year civil war from a military junta supported and financed by the US (the one famous for managing the death squads that murdered priests and nuns – and ordinary citizens too).
Mea Culpa Blackbird, Sandinista in Nicaragua, my point still stands, El Salvador with FLMN, Contras spilling over, the US promoting one, Cuba another. El Salvador was/is not a “good government”.
Good, benevolent and government are oxymorons.
I wonder if the Boeing whistleblower was arkancided?
He was just sad because Boeing is building bad planes.
Walls are suddenly in style again! Zelensky is preparing to build a wall along the frontlines in Ukraine. I bet the official Biden regime position will be to build that wall! Just not in the Rio Grande valley of course. A wall there is inherently racist. Racism is clearly a geo spatial phenomenon.
Z wants to build a wall to protect Ukraine? Does he realize that the reverse is true also, the wall will protect the Russians.
Just what Putin wants?
Oh yeah? How is that, John?
Walls have two sides. SSL. Put militaries on both sides and voila, impasse. Z is reacting to the loss of support he is seeing from NATO and the USA. Build the wall!!! Keep the Russkies out. Keep the Ukes in. The reverse is also true. Putin wants a barrier in the Ukraine area to protect his oil fields. A wall would be great for that.
That’s true I didn’t think about the other side of the wall. But it seems like a wall would also be negative for Putin maybe because it seems like he was wanting to take more territory from Ukraine since Ukraine was not seeking peace talks etc.
SSL Agree, but I do not believe that Putin wants to take Ukraine, just the Russian part of it as a barrier against NATO.
Everyone here wants to believe that Putin wants East Europe back again as the Russian empire.
Why would he want that? They bankrupted the USSR trying to maintain that alignment.
NATO has signed up many countries under its umbrella, how many has Russia signed up? Who is the aggressor? Who can be trusted?
Ukraine is the invasion pathway from Europe into Russia, used by Napoleon and Hitler. Putin has blatantly stated that it will not happen again. The wall will help him with that declaration.
Gotchya that makes sense. I would think it would also sort of seal in the eastern lands that he has incorporated into Russia into the Russian realm for good.
Yup, those promised German missiles will never make it over the wall.
Ukies with guns can’t hold the frontline, but Ukies with concrete blocks and trowels will? Somebody’s dreaming.
The DOJ says Joe Biden does have dementia. It seems like the blob or blob collective is extirpating Joe?
And hyping Big Mike.
I slept with Obsidian last night. I really appreciated all of its properties lol.
State these properties. What can it do for you that quartz cannot?
Well obsidian is a truth enhancing stone. So it sorta forces you to go within yourself to understand what you are keeping away from your conscious mind. So things you may be repressing to your subconscious. So for example if you find yourself sabotaging your relationships and you don’t understand what’s happening you can work with obsidian to open those doors of understanding. So it clears up your mind and spirit and help you to just uncover what’s really going on within yourself.
Quartz can do that too but quartz, well I’m thinking clear quarts right now is the stone of amplification. So it helps you amplify your intentions and it does clarify things but that can be both inward and outward. Quartz is also a memory stone and a healing stone. So quartz is also great too. I actually have a beautiful clear quartz tower that I gravitate to a lot. So they are both great stones honestly lol.
Also important to keep in mind too is the obsidian is volcanic glass basically. So I should also add that obsidian is very grounding because it pulls you back to the Earth. So if you feel disconnected and like kinda “out there” then it can help bring you back and ground you.
Dreamy, always the teacher…<3
lol hey Ron!!
I think one should be careful of falling for New Age/Aquarian stuff, TBH. It’s part of the deception.
Obsidian knife blades are 50-100 times sharper than a steel blade.
Oh yeah that is true. My obsidian is a polished palm stone so its super safe.
Define sharp. Were the Aztecs more advanced than us? Choosing obsidian blades for their sacrifices over dull steel?
I’m pretty sure the Aztecs didn’t have steel.
The didn’t even have bronze. Still in the stone age.
Obsidian? Is that the poster who used to go by “Thwack”?
No lol it was an actual piece of obsidian. Its actually quite common for people to keep gems close by or on their person for various reasons.
Kathy Hochul forbids the National Guard from carrying long rifles in NYC. This is gold. Women are natural Kafkaesque statists. Emasculate and defund the police so that the National Guard need to be called in – a permanent emergency. Then immediately emasculate them in turn. Women are the ace in the Satanist hole.
They follow the strongest. Once we are strong, they will ignorantly chant our slogans. So what’s the difference you cry? Our slogans are true….
Oh, you respond – with a subdued, confused look on your face. Sad little Americans think that Communism is the same as Fascism since they both use force. Every system uses force or the threat of it. But why, they cry? Because man is a fallen being. And Satan is Rex Mundi, the King of this world.
Well I kinda think of it as a natural force like gravity which I realize we’ve discussed before. So for example, nobody really blames the Earth for orbiting the Sun. It just kinda is the way it is.
Yes, Man is the Sun and Woman is the Earth and must orbit Him.
But being sentient beings, (and not just unconscious natural forces), we can and do rebel against the “natural” order, both Supernatural and natural.
Janos – very good, you’ve been doing your homework. A true statement, but cordial. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Very good. Keep up the good work.
What if an Earth rebelled and gravitated toward a Black Sun?
Good point. Some say that is why women rebelled en masse during modern times – because men had lost their way. Of course part of their way is keeping women in line, but that is dependent of them having the mandate of heaven in the first place.
It’s hard to hear these truths from a man I’m sure. I may have found you a guide. She’s a blonde like you are, maybe even a real one like Joy Reid. I know that yours is real, assuming that the whole thing wasn’t a psy-op from the get go.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HsPEgh-jKd4
In any case, she shows that when men hit the lottery bigly, they are 40% more likely to not get divorced. When women hit the lottery bigly, they are twice as likely to get divorced. She comes to the correct conclusion on this data.
The correct conclusion being that men have no character or personal qualities to recommend them to women.
In the Anthea-verse, gold diggers have the moral high ground.
She reveals much about herself as usual.
Howdy there, SSL. I always enjoy reading your posts, though I will confess that I must sometimes re-read them several times to devine your meaning.
I especially get a kick out of your New Age vibe. While I’m not a disciple of New Age thinking, I was a child of the 1960’s and ‘70’s so I remember all the New Age books that came out during that era – a number of which I read out of youthful curiosity.
For a time, my youthful and gullible brain absorbed and believed there was something to all of it, (pyramid power, tarot cards, crystals, magic, etc.), but then I finally became a teenager and came to understand that all the New Age stuff was just a re-invented packaging of Old World mysticism and superstition.
In the end, I concluded that it’s mostly harmless, so long as one does not take it too seriously, and most New Age afficionados you meet are also pretty harmless, but a few here and there are quite disruptive to society.
I think you are of the harmless variety and I like your posts. They take me back to the innocence and wonder of my childhood.
The key to solving the social problems
of our time is to abolish the White race.
If you are a White male, you don’t deserve
to live. You are a cancer. You should
kill yourself. It’s the right thing to do.
– Noel Ignatiev (Jewish Marxist / Harvard PhD)
Where were the donors when Ignaz was teaching this filth? Probably quietly cheering and writing him thank you notes and checks.
@Jarek
What I don’t understand is where do some of these Jewish people get all this Kill the whites attitude from anyway? Yet it is white people who are always kissing their ass, defending them, and calling people “Antisemitic” for not worshiping them. Add on top of the fact they are guilty as hell of using blacks as a weapons against the very people who worship and support them so much.
You’ll never catch me supporting someone who hates me that much that they want to wreck my country, destroy my people, label me as the enemy, use other races against me, use and manipulate me to fight their BS banker wars, build up their nation so they grow stronger while my own declines and become weaker. I wish they would just get it over with, reveal their true intent and tell everyone what they intend to do when whites are no longer the dominant group anymore. Just come out and say it “We intend to reign over the n*ggers as our slaves now that they helped up get rid of the white people.”
And yes I did use the harsher version of the N word. Despite being partially mixed. So many years of violent conflicts I’ve had with them … Trust me, if you’ve lived in neighborhoods where they outflank everyone else you’ll know they are the worse people to live around. And since they would have no problem calling me harsh names, I have no issue returning the favor.
Back in Jr highschool I got picked on a whole lot by them, in High school one use to threaten me every day for money. Then he eventually ended up shooting a guy in his face and went to prison for 24 years. Another one I knew got a life sentence for a similar offense. It’s always been hell between me and these people. Once white people are no longer a majority for them to bitch about oppressing them anymore. They’ll just turn their attention toward the Hispanics next.
You are part Spanish and part Black – like George Zimmerman of whom the world is not worthy?
Every group eschewed him because he wasn’t pure enough. He was mostly Hispanic but they didn’t want him. The Jews didn’t want him because descent goes through the mother. The Blacks didn’t identify with him either. Only Conservative Whites embraced this great man.
His older brother is as handsome as a god and speaks like a statesman. But the mantle of greatness fell on poor, roly-poly George – and he was magnificent.
The N-word describes a political slant not a skin color, IMHO. Included in that word’s description, Biden, Myorkas, most of the Biden Mob, racist blacks, racist whites against whites (yes, they do exist).
N***** = Wokester?
It’s so silly to say/hear/read “the N-word”. The word is “nigger”. The most (ridiculously) inflammatory word in the known universe. No other word holds so much power. And it has that power because we (collectively) give it that power, not because of any inherent value in itself. Hmmm, sound familiar?
Sadly, white people have even culturally appropriated the word “nigger” from blacks. Based on what I’ve seen the past 8 years or so, a large number – maybe even a majority now – of niggers are white.
I like to examine the end goal of folks. When they say the end justifies the means, what exactly is their aim point?
Take the Libs and their tax and spend policies. They have no concept of budget, that expenditures have to be constrained by revenue. They are political animals, knowing that buying votes is legitimate. They have no concept of an End, fiscally. As long as they have control of the printing press, they will spend money, hand out favors, supply the always increasing welfare state, create more homelessness, more needy folks in the pursuit of population’s dependence on the government.
Their end is population control by the government, dictatorship by academia, and fiscal distribution by the government, AKA UBI.
Up to now, both sides of the aisle, meaning the cowardly GOP RINOS, have been signing up to the same program, the Libs program of population control.
Who or what can stop them? BTW, this is Marxist Communism.
@JohnAZ
I don’t know, but every day I can’t help but feel that these people have won and will get exactly what they want. I mean we have millions of people in America, a majority of them are living in poverty. So now they’ve gotten to the point where they are obessed with ruling over people, playing GOD. No one is standing up to anything they are doing. What happens when people live in fear of their own government and do nothing to stop them? They lose…
Think about this for a moment, look how long North Koreans have been living in the conditions they are in.. Nobody there is ballsey enough to rise up against Kim.. A lot of the people there are starving, but they also live in extreme levels of fear of their own government. He’s not worried about ever being assassinated either because his soldiers are 100% loyal to him.
Now, imagine the U.S. ending up in the same position as these dictator ran nations where the people will never EVER do anything to fight back even when starving to death and desperate. It would be different in America because people will just run around killing other people in a food crises situation. But in NK case, the people are well contained and will never rise up against their own. The Germans didn’t rise up against Hitler either..
That’s why I feel that we are no different from any other empire. No one in America is going to stop the left or the Rhinos, Republicans, etc… For some people who are between 80 to 90+ years old. They’ll probably be long gone before everything gets painfully harder and worse. If they want population control, all they would have to do is just outright kill us.
It’s not like anyone was arrested for the vaccine situation. What’s stopping them from sending out planes to bomb cities, or giving the illegals the right to go from door to door shooting people. It’s all dramatic, but the point is. We have a corrupt Government and no one trying to put an end to it. I have reason to believe that if I live long enough. I’m going to live to see America turn into another North Korea.
AZ
I hope you are wrong, but the writing is on the wall. We no longer have unity in this Country.
We keep hearing the threat of false flag operations. It will hurt us but not the leaders. The leaders will continue to have power and control via their agencies that they pay well to protect them. We are in a lose-lose situation.
Maybe China will take us over and hang those who thought they were the Untouchables!
It would serve them right!
In my 77-year-old mind I can’t even imagine what this Country will look like by the beginning of 2025. GOD BLESS AMERICA!
2025?
Hard to imagine what it, or the world, will look like next month!.
May we not live in interesting times.
Yes, at my age I’ve seen some tough times to include two wars as a military member, health issues, 9/11, death of family and good friends, but what we have in store for us maybe worse.
I am fearful of turning on the news in the morning. I’m thankful to have electricity and heat on a daily basis. The world can change in a minute.
What about next month?
In my more black-pilled moments of political despair I tend to agree with that sentiment. But then I get a bit red-pilled and go back into Alamo mode.
I’m 61 and in good health. Fixin’ to retire in a few more years. I’d like to be left alone to enjoy that retirement well up into my 80’s and 90’s before the Grim Reaper finally comes to harvest me. For this reason I support Trump and all other “disrupters” who might set-back the timetable for communist domination of our country by a few more decades. My hope is to expire a decade or more before the North Korea level of tyranny arrives. Since I have no children, my only concern is for my own Liberty, really, although I do mourn for the sad fate of America on a philosophical level and I feel badly for my sister’s children who will likely be enslaved.
If worse comes to worse, and the totalitarian level of tyranny arrives before I expire….well….that’s what the investment in the AR-15 and gear was all about. Better to die on your feet than to be a slave on your knees.
Big scandal unfolding with Macron’s wife over here in Euroland.
Looks like she may be a tranny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v81g1tldi4c
Ardern, Michelle Obama, and now the Macaroon’s wife.
Ofc, Macron is gay like Obama, and Vradkar and many others are also homos.
Interesting how the New Normal crowd is seems to be largely gay and trans.
Just a coincidence, surely.
😀
Paula claimed falsely that Macron was not a granny fucker. She then corrected herself or was corrected, can’t remember. She thought the his wife was around the same age as him.
In any case, this is a godsend. The little man has lost his mind and is beating the drum of war. He was reasonable before, but alas, perhaps he was pressured to do this.
No basis for this. Tabloid level bs.
There’s already the perversity of the age diff to mock. No need to make shit up.
Macron denied it strenuously, thus affirming it. The universe is not just stranger than we understand, it is stranger than we can understand.
You must open yourself to the eldritch and the inane. Become a laughing philosopher like Zarathustra.
Much love for symbolic thinking but I won’t get lost in it. You’ll find me at the temple of what is.
Okay, wait. Maybe/probably.true. Maybe hat eating time for me, apologies. Hopefully true—funny as hell.
I don’t pay attention to this stuff. It seems trivial. But it isn’t trivial. It’s a symptom of how fucked up things are.
TS1986,
Anything is possible. With all the hearings going on, a coverup is searching for prime time!
There are many variables out there. It could be a market crash, an assassination attempt, a large-scale power outage, a hack of our financial system, a dirty bomb, a trucker’s strike, an oil embargo, an act of war in the middle east or Europe, etc.
As I said, it scares me to think of what’s next!
Yes, it could be next week, or next month.
Hang on my friend!
@Bullitt
This sort of stuff don’t even phase my grandmother. She’s in her 90s, her biggest fear is lighting storms. She’s more worried about those than any of the stuff you listed. And that’s probably because she doesn’t look into it much or know anything about it…. I don’t know Bullitt….It’s strange but I’ve had some very dark thoughts lately. I think when or if it does get to a certain point….I’ll probably just OD on sleeping pills and get this shit over with…I don’t know about you but I’m just way too frustrated to live to be your age…
I’d love to see the people causing all this panic and fear to be dealt with and never ever allowed to have the type of power they currently have EVER AGAIN….I understand your concerns, because I’m worried too. I worry constantly, that’s the whole reason why I just come off as angry than most people who comment or post here…. It’s the frustration that’s making me feel like this on top of other issues I have. It’s hard maintaining all of that rage and fury. And exercising, praying to some being I don’t even believe in anymore isn’t going to help.
Don’t kill yourself Truth, wait until somebody else is trying to kill you – and then kill them! That way you’ve done some good for humanity, even if you die while attempting self-defense – which you probably will if you don’t get a gun and learn to use it.
A legal, short-barreled shotgun if you’re doing your death dance at home. A small, easily concealed, extended magazine hand gun for when you go out looking for trouble.
Exercising is good, keep doing it. And eat right, no factory food, keep it primitive. And raise some chickens dammit! Good for your body and your mind.
@Blackbird
To be fair I’m already quite sick, I feel as though I have cancer half of the time. Believe me, when things get so damn bad that I can’t deal with it anymore. I won’t have the will nor the desire to fight other people. There’s a reason why at the end of Hitler’s reign his people started taking their own lives in droves…
People who don’t have to worry about such encounters generally do not live anywhere near such situations where they happen so commonly. And even a lot of gun owners seem quite petrified to use their arms out of fear of being prosecuted. I mean they’ve done nothing with them all of this time. Shooting at a home invader every once in awhile is nothing compared to the Elites who have done a whole lot worse than someone invading your home.
The right to bare arms was intended for putting down corrupt POS governments… It’s like the military, they swore an oath to defend the nation against all threats both domestic and foreign. But what do they do? They stand down and continue to serve and fight for corrupt interest even when that corrupt interest is willing to use them against their own citizens if need be.
People make excuses all the time when it comes down to their Second amendment rights, “But but, they got M-16’s, and they got this and they got that.” Yeah okay just admit that you are scared and afraid of being imprisoned for trying to overthrow the government. Admit that you are afraid of getting the death penalty. We saw what happened with those J6 protestors, and why they were held captive for so long. It was to send a message, the same thing with all this Trump nonsense, it’s them sending a message to the people. “If we can take down this guy, we can get and take down anyone we hate.”
And besides, they would never let me get license to carry anyway. They’ll look at my medical records and see a lot of the stuff I’m diagnosed with when I was going in for therapy and psychiatry. When I stayed with my grandmother she kept the knives hidden from me.
Remember, you are part of the Universe, and the Universe is a part of you. Get to a dark sky site, see the majesty of the heavens. Get to the forest, get back to nature as much as you can. There is much more to this world than the corruption of politics.
It’s not all gone. Beauty and good still abound. Seek it out, shouldn’t be hard to find.
Valid plan of action there, blackbird. I eat a Carnivore diet and stay heavily armed in good Second Amendment fashion. Nobody bothers me. It pays to be the Wolf – not the sheep.
“There are many variables out there.”
Lookers are airborne.
httpX://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass
https://rumble.com/v4hwbnl-ceo-douglas-macgregor-state-of-the-union-response.html
The most comprehensive of the SOTU’s. More than one now, have you noticed?
The Colonel is a fine Fascist with fine ideas and a heart aflame with patriotism. If Trump was smart, he’d ask him to be his VP. Then the Colonel and his new party would be poised to take power. Trump could serve America by serving a man better than himself.
I think of former marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller calling out his superiors
for their failure in Afghanistan.
Trump must win and establish close ties to colonels and generals throughout the military. Macgregor could help him choose and cultivate the patriots.
We’ll need the same with police liaison. No easy task.
We need an iron fist protecting this country, squeezing, crushing the life out of the Left.
Some of you seem to forget that the Left and Right are all part of the same gang. Plus, it’s too late. The Left has done far too much damage. But they also had help getting it done.
It’s a really strange season. Like, what is really effing happening right now
infowars.com/posts/police-find-mysterious-note-next-to-deceased-boeing-whistleblower-as-lawyers-assert-client-was-not-suicidal/
The MIC has always been a murderous going concern – just like the Mafia. Ask JFK if you doubt me on this.
It is no great shock that Boeing chose to put out a “hit” on this whistleblower. Billions of dollars at stake there. Those with the billions didn’t get that way by being pushover pussies. They “deal with” those who fuck with their grift.
I was thinking more about the black sun. The black sun symbolism goes way back in time at least to Old Egypt. The origins likely go farther back into deep time when our earliest ancestors marveled at total solar eclipses. I’ve never seen it other than in pictures. But it is amazing to see the sun completely blotted out in blackness with only the spectacular rays of the corona shining in the blackened sky. In Egypt the black sun represented judgement and the netherworld and this seems to be the case in other ancient cultures. The black sun is the sin eater. The moment when the gate between this world and the other realms are opened. A liminal mystic space. Most people don’t know this because of the black sun’s more recent associations.
You must see Baily’s Beads and the ‘diamond ring’!
Wow very beautiful! Thank you for pointing that out.
Here is a very rare double diamond ring. Simply amazing and gorgeous!!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baily%27s_beads#/media/File:BailysBeads-DoubleDiamondRingEclipse-20190702.jpg
What need of diamonds when you have every star in the sky? If you want something shiny to wear on your finger, get something from the gumball machine.
Are you gonna take me to McDonald’s for our first date? :0)
No, Burger King. You deserve a golden (colored) crown.
Awww you’re so sweet
Just don’t eat too much or order any of the expensive items on the menu, ok?
Ok, you’ll have to help me navigate through the menu lol
Yes, the Nazis worshiped it too. Just as they did the ancient symbol of the swastika. They are your people, not these half dead capitalist goons.
Another instance of if it saves just one life it’s worth it.
Illegal Immigrant Charged After Wrong-Way Car Crash Kills 12-Year-Old Missouri Boy
A 12-year-old adolescent recently passed away in the hospital after an illegal immigrant from Venezuela was speeding while driving on the wrong side of the road in Missouri, crashing into the boy’s family’s vehicle.
The illegal immigrant is now being charged with manslaughter.
According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in December, 33-year-old Edina Bracho was reportedly driving the wrong way in Hazelwood, Missouri, going 75 mph in a 40 mph zone, when her minivan collided with a Jeep transporting Travis Wolfe and his parents, Timothy and Stephanie.
After being taken to St. Louis Children’s Hospital, 12-year-old Travis was put on life support. However, he sadly died last week from severe injuries.
According to Fox 2, Travis’ parents were receiving treatment at Mercy Hospital for several broken bones, while Bracho’s two children were admitted to the same hospital with critical injuries as well.
The Venezuelan immigrant was charged with first-degree involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree assault, two counts of first-degree endangering a child, and one count of operating a motor vehicle without a valid license. Her bond of $500,000 is cash only.
A hearing is scheduled for April 8th.
Forget stealing everyone’s guns close the border!
100s 1000s of such tragedies. the real gov wants this.
Reading The Gateway Pundit this morning. There’s an article about the new FBI buildings being built by Chinese companies. Now what could go wrong?
Also, RFK Jr. is talking about selecting football hero. Aaron Rodgers or Jesse The Body Ventura as his running mate.
We are scraping the bottom folks!
We are on a six-lane highway named Road to Disaster! Be prepared.
All that means is that the Chinese own half of America. For them to be able to even have their own branch of the FBI in this country tells me that America is no longer America. It’s unbelievable how Biden sold out the country like that, and isn’t being tried for treason or anything.
I mean didn’t Lincoln get popped in the skull for betraying America? I don’t know the full story as to who killed Lincoln and why. But I’ve read several comments here that called him a POS and saying he deserved it. Throughout history all I’ve heard is how Lincoln was a “good man.” And a good president. Being on this site, it’s the first time I’ve actually read something negative about him or people calling him out because he screwed over America.
Lincoln divided the Nation. We have people in charge now who have done more to divide us than ever.
We may not recover from our current government.
Some people are very happy with our Commander in Chief. Others are potential skull poppers.
Ask the whistle blower at Boeing….
Our Country is now a rerun of Gunsmoke and The Untouchables!
@Bullitt
I don’t believe they are happy with him, unless these are people who aren’t suffering from his bullshit policies right now. In which case I avoid leftist and liberal social platforms. A lot of the crap that comes out of their mouths is just bullshit anyway. And some people are just better than others at hiding how they really feel.
It reminds me of the liberals that vote for garbage leadership, then once their neighborhoods become too violent they pack up and run off even after all that horsecrap virtue signaling.
Truthseeker
Lincoln was assassinated by a Southern zealot named Booth as just part of a conspiracy to kill the top 4 people of the government, the VP, Sec of State and war. Seward, SOS, was wounded, the other two escaped.
Lincoln ran for office on a platform of Union first. Then elimination of slavery. He has said that he would give up the abolition cause to save the Union. needless to say, the South did not believe him. He is reviled by some today for not being 100% behind the abolitionists and not the total father figure to the Blacks.
I would suggest watching Daniel Day Lewis’ edition of Lincoln, a movie concerning the passage of the 13th amendment. You will see what a politician he was, his primary success. His steadfastness at quelling the revolt was his primary success, his handling of mediocre military officers was his biggest fault. The war should have been over almost before it started but for the incompetence of the Union generals.
One more, Lincoln was responsible for the generation of the Emancipation Proclamation that became effective Jan.1, 1863, I believe. That document was generated to put heart into the Northern Cause, to give them something to fight for. With the defeat of the South, slavery was done.
One more comment, Lincoln had to put up with the same level of biased bullshit from the population and his edition of the Deep State as Trump has. As Robert Mitchum’s character in Anzio basically said, People love to hate people. They love to kill people as it gives them a rush like nothing else.
Pretty disgusting.
Truthseeker
You are going through a bad time, used to be called a mid-life crisis, or the mid-life maturation adjustment. Your belief systems are under assault by the behavior of all these asshats in the world.
I remember thinking about your age, there is no one in control here. The USA is run in a state of chaos where if the FF got it, no one is in control. How does it work? It lurches from one disaster to the next, that is how. Idiots like the Biden Mob think they have control for a period of time, but they do not. The threat hanging over DC, always, is the threat of revolution, also known as elections.
We will see if the Mob can manipulate their way into another four years, if they do, with the incompetence of the Mob, it will be proof that the population has been corrupted into a gimme state. In that case, your feelings of powerlessness will be justified.
Chin up, it is not over yet, but it could be soon. Keep on bitching and remembering what the difference between good and evil is in this country.
I think it is very ironic that Trump is identified as the populist candidate and the Mob is a “royalist” group. The “Royalist” part of the GOP is being eliminated right now, the RINOS. They are a gnat on Trump’s ass as they transit to being what they are, Elitists. Trump is rapidly becoming the voice of the middle class and the enemy of the Elite.
@JohnAZ
DC is fearing something that will never happen, and that’s a REAL revolution. I think they took care of that with January 6 already. As we have seen no one was willing to help the prisoners not even protest against their imprisonment. Not a single Republican tried to bail them out either…. But when the left was cutting up and causing mayhem the ones who did get arrested they got help and were free to go…
In a sense it honestly makes the other side look like they don’t give much of a shit about their own like the left does. I’m not saying that the other side should burn down businesses and go out causing mayhem like the left does, but they practically made little to no effort to help those protestors. Leftist get arrested you have celebrities who are even paying to get them out of jail.
I also don'[t consider elections a real revolution. Not an effective one anyway if people can cheat their way into winning or their are powerful lobbyist who have the power over the people to pick and choose who THEY want to run the U.S. Biden was chosen because of how easy he was to manipulate, and he was all in 100 percent. That’s why it didn’t bother him about selling out the U.S. The saying “We can’t vote our way out of this.” Is very true. If Trump really was a threat to the Elites then why don’t they just get it over with and JFK him. It’s not like anyone is going to prosecute or throw them in jail for the shit they do. They’ll get away with it.
Truth, Lincoln was a plutocrat – the same type of politician we have looting this country now. Lincoln destroyed the union of sovereign states and instituted a large, centralized government, a government owned by the corporations. He set us on the course that led us to where we are now.
But but but… “He freed the slaves!” According to Lincoln, if he could “save the union” by freeing all the slaves, he would do it. If he could “save the union” by freeing none of the slaves, he would do it. In my opinion, he freed the slaves in part hoping for a Haiti-like insurrection in the south, another – but larger – Nat Turner rebellion.
Everybody knows Lincoln was born in a log cabin, but hardly anyone knows that as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois he had the biggest mansion in town, bigger than the governor’s mansion – which was right across the street. He was in the pocket of the railroads. He paved the way for the government boondoggle known as the “Transcontinental Railroad”, a railroad which benefitted no one but the railroads – they went broke because the TransCon served no one, but seeing that would be the outcome, the railroads formed construction companies which benefitted greatly from feeding at the government trough.
But forget what I said – I’m just a hater. Remember what you were taught in school (“Boys can be girls and girls can be boys!”), what the movies show you (“They made a movie about it so it’s gotta be true!”), and what the corporate media tells you (“They wouldn’t lie to us!”)…
Lincoln also put people on prison barges with zero due process and suspended the Constitution.
Some would say he was a tyrant of the worst sort.
Chattle slavery would have withered on the vine like it did everywhere else without a massive war just from the sheer awful optics of keeping people in chains, whipping them, starving them and raping the women.
This form of slavery existed all over the new world.
Wonder why no one discusses indentured servitude another form of slavery the only difference was eventually they were released if they survived.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude
Brutal simply brutal.
On the plus side of the ledger, he issued debt free bills. Maybe that’s why he got popped.
TruthSeeker, there literally exists a MOUNTAIN of writings out there about the inherently corrupt Stinkin’ Abe Lincoln. You just have to do a bit of digging since your schoolteachers and college professors will never alert you to these scholarly works.
Many fine Southern authors dissected old Abe the Ape during and immediately after the War to Prevent Southern Independence. More recently, modern-day Southern nationalists have written updated books on this very subject over the past 30 years. One that quickly comes to mind is “The Real Lincoln” by Thomas J. Dilorenzo. Enjoy!
Anybody seen Zaz?
The Situational Awareness, this AM, reports;
(4) ANARCHISTS CUT POWER TO BUTCHER SHOP, BURN MACHINERY: Anonymous anarchists over the weekend claimed to have cut the power to a Portland, Oregon-based butcher shop in order to make the meat “unsellable.”
The anarchists claim to have also shut off the power to two additional retail stores “because it was fun.”
The missive encourages other anarchists to “think outside the box” because “you can do things other then [sic] smash windows.”
In a separate post, other Portland-based anarchists claim to have burned three pieces of machinery belonging to the Oregon Department of Transportation in opposition to a plan to widen a highway.
Why It Matters: “Be Gay, Do Crime” has been a popular meme among Far Left groups to encourage criminal mischief against the state. – M.S.
Our wacky local anarchist may be…gay, and doing crime…
Sting like a butterfly, fly like a Loon….
Zazelle wouldn’t do that, EF. He’s busy building my little shop right now lol.
Zaz strong-armed the butcher to get you a prime storefront location SSL. His tactics are brutal!
Well it’s a nice little storefront so whatever works lol. Just don’t tell me about.
it
its funny cuz I get this message sometimes telling me that I am posting too quickly and need to slow down
” that I am posting too quickly and need to slow down”
SSL,
Think of baseball scores….
Trust me.
Anarchist of the past liked blowing things up.
Not a fan of them.
Think we need to go back to the hippy movement.
Another summer of rage is coming.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/11/business/elon-musk-rips-boeing-they-prioritized-dei-over-safety/
Bonuses were given for reaching climate or DEI goals not safety or sales.
In one plant they were testing seals with hotel cards and soap.
More Bidenomics!
Rumors of stores closing all over and layoffs coming everywhere.
Folks we are going into a major recession if not worse.
Either its can’t get enough workers or people willing to actually work.
It’s can’t get the products to stock the shelves or the shelves are being picked clean by thieves and now its rodent infested warehouses and once again I would lay money down for tainted products from China.
oann.com/newsroom/dollar-tree-and-family-dollar-announces-closure-of-nearly-1000-stores/
The retail store Dollar Tree has announced that they are closing almost 1,000 stores across the United States between its namesake general discount stores and subsidiary chain, Family Dollar.
The company said on Wednesday that Family Dollar will close 600 locations in the first half of 2024 and 370 stores over the next few years as store leases expire.
Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar for $8.5 billion in 2015.
“Our biggest problem right now is getting enough merchandise into the stores fast enough so the consumer can respond,” said CEO Rick Dreiling, adding that Family Dollar was continuing to be hurt by macroeconomic uncertainties.
The company said that it would record a $950 million impairment against the trade name Family Dollar, on top of a $1.07 billion goodwill charge. Family Dollar will reportedly spend more than $594 million closing or rebranding stores, which will erase profits from the holiday season.
“This dramatic cull is the coup de grâce in the rather botched acquisition of the Family Dollar chain, which has caused Dollar Tree nothing but hassle since it was completed back in 2015,” wrote Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. “Basically, almost ten years on, Dollar Tree is still sifting through the mess it inherited and has not been able to completely turn around,” Saunders said.
With the latest announcement, shares of Dollar Tree fell 14% in the stock market.
Dollar Tree claims that the retail giant has not been able to lure new customers due to “high costs and surging prices.”
The company also expects 2024 sales to rake in between $31 billion and $32 billion, which could fall below the estimate of $31.65 billion, according to LSEG data.
Family Dollar has also had safety issues, which included when the Food and Drug Administration revealed that the company was selling cinnamon that was contaminated with high levels of lead and other carcinogenic heavy metals.
Weeks prior, Family Dollar also pleaded guilty to selling products across 400 stores that came from a “rodent-infested warehouse,” which resulted in a record 41.7 million in fines.
@Benr
You just listed one store, Target isn’t going anywhere, neither is Walmart. As for people willing to work…I thought that’s why we had all these useless POS illegals flooding over here was for…
But its a dollar store that is the point.
Is Macy’s shutting down in 2024?
The company is closing 150 underperforming stores — 50 by the end of 2024 and the other 100 over the next few years. By 2026, it will have just 350 Macy’s stores, the company announced.
Customers’ prescriptions will transfer to other CVS pharmacies. Last year, CVS said that it would cut costs and 5,000 jobs as it remakes its business as a health care service company. It has also said that it would close around 900 stores, or about 10% of its U.S. locations, between 2022 and 2024.
In June, Walgreens announced the closure of 450 of its nationwide locations by August 2024, while a bankruptcy filing by Rite Aid includes plans to close nearly 200 stores.
Walmart will close three more US locations, bringing the total to six in 2024 so far.
The company cited financial underperformance as the reason for the decisions.
The company closed at least 22 locations across 14 states last year.
Lowe’s closing 51 stores in US, Canada
Lowe’s Companies says it plans to close these stores by Feb. 1:
Kelly-Moore Paints shuts down all stores
Iconic paint retailer Kelly-Moore Paints has shut down all 157 of its retail locations and furloughed about 700 employees, as it plans an orderly, out-of-court wind-down of all of its business operations.
Big Lots
After closing more than 50 locations already in 2023, Big Lots recently announced that it will be shuttering stores in New York, North Carolina, and Illinois by early 2024, according to The U.S. Sun.
Staples and Office Depot (both owned by Sycamore Partners) have been cutting down on brick-and-mortar stores since 2020, closing 200 and more than 260 stores, respectively.
Bath & Body Works had approximately 1,802 storefronts in malls and independent storefronts, per a presentation given during an earnings call. But they soon announced that they were planning to close approximately 50 mall stores.
In 2019, Banana Republic and the Gap, both owned by Gap Inc., had 1,216 stores across North America. Since then, however, they’ve been losing stores, dropping to 1,027 locations in 2020 and 912 in 2022. That number will be down to about 866 by the end of 2023, according to a slideshow prepared for an earnings call on March 9.
50,000 U.S. Stores Could Close By 2027 Because Of Spending Shifts And Tight Credit, UBS Forecasts
I just bought a drywasher from a major mining company provider and they are struggeling to keep the doors open.
Their major complaint the materials needed to produce their goods are either hard to get or have tripled in price in the last two or three years if they can even get them.
I went through three different providers before I gave up and went straight to the manufacturer.
Target
Target blamed organized retail crime in a September announcement of nine store closures in the New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, areas. Previously, Target closed four stores with declining foot traffic — one each in Philadelphia and its hometown of Minneapolis and two in Washington, D.C.
Bidenomics!
Banana Republic and its parent company, Gap, said about 350 stores would close in 2023 and that it would end the year with about 866 stores.
Foot Locker said it would shutter 545 stores nationwide, including 125 of its Champs Sports locations by 2026, as part of a “reset” that includes opening about 300 “new concept” stores, according to Business Insider.
The discount home goods retailer Tuesday Morning Corp. filed for bankruptcy in February and announced it would close 31 of its 37 California stores in February.
In the Feb. 14 bankruptcy filing, Chief Executive Andrew Berger cited “exceedingly burdensome debt.” In a statement, Tuesday Morning said it had secured a $51.5 million debtor-in-possession commitment from Invictus Global Management to support operations during the bankruptcy proceedings.
Home goods and design retailer Z Gallerie offered store-closing sales in October following its parent company, DirectBuy Home Improvement, Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Z Gallerie had a total of five stores in California including Sherman Oaks, Costa Mesa, Encinitas, Corona and Roseville near Sacramento.
A last-ditch effort to save Buy Buy Baby fell apart, and the company announced it would close all its stores in California and across the U.S. as part of its bankrupt parent company’s ongoing liquidation.
CNBC reported that the owner of children’s apparel company Janie and Jack was “eager” to buy the Bed Bath & Beyond chain and keep it running, but could not reach a deal on its value.
The 15 remaining stores in California were scheduled to close as of July, according to the retailer.
Weight loss and management business Jenny Craig announced it would close its doors in May “due to its inability to secure additional funding,” according to internal documents obtained by NBC News.
Jenny Craig had roughly 500 company-owned and franchised locations across the country, including 68 locations in California.
Party City filed for bankruptcy at the beginning of 2023, prompting the go-to party goods retailer to close almost 40 stores nationwide. California is home to the largest number of Party City store locations in the country, and four of its 108 stores in the state are closing.
Downey: 7171 Firestone Blvd.
Lodi: Southwest Plaza, 2350 W. Kettleman Lane
Marina: The Dune on Monterey Bay, 125 General Stillwell Drive
Palmdale: Amargosa Commons, 39451 10 St. W.
“As we take this important step to put our business on stronger financial footing for the future, we are as committed as ever to inspiring joy by making it easy for our customers to create unforgettable memories,” Party City CEO Brad Weston said.
Not to beat a dead horse, but remember Jimbo wrote about demise of the big boxes and shopping malls in general back in the early 90’s in “Geography of Nowhere”. Now, more than 30 years later, many suburban shopping malls look like glorified indoor flea markets. The big box/shopping mall as a business model is rapidly dying.
@Benr
Well I don’t know what any of these places are going to do when or if they all disappear. I truly wish the country wasn’t declining so horribly bad. Life use to be so much more cheery back in the day, good commercials, great movies, now it’s all going away. I haven’t been inside a store in years. I was sad when K-Mart closed, mainly due to all the good memories I had going there as a kid to buy toys, video games, or even clothes for school and school supplies.
Ah the K-Mart with the smell of cherry slurpies, popcorn and desperation while the blue plate special dings in the background.
Towards the end they also looked like dollar stores in Elesianfields youtube video.
K-mart was so bad they actually helped take out SEARS a store I actually did like and shop in who also had one of the hardest credit cards to get.
Ben,
You might enjoy this;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM
Yes that was really good and sad but probably all true.
Which is why I was pointing out if the dollar stores are failing we are in a world of hurt.
With all that said I have only ever been in one and never went back.
https://www.amren.com/news/2024/03/the-north-face-is-offering-customers-20-off-if-they-take-a-racial-inclusion-course/
Are you ready to become an ally? Cuz your racism is keeping Blacks off the trails. Plus your cheery hellos is hilarious if not offensive to those that dare to hike.
Seriously though, Blacks hate the outdoors. Too many snakes and Whites. Too much effort. Thus the trails are safe. Our Hispanics don’t seem very interested either. They do like to barbecue in parks.
South American Hispanics are a different story. Turning trails near the cities into crime scenes. So they will make up the deficit. At last our trails will be integrated! This is what matters most to the Sierra Club type ladies.
wear black face to the north face shindig.
@Jarek
It’s like the only thing they got now. Makes me wonder what they intend to do once white people do finally step aside and just let the Blacks, etc have full control over the United States. Hell maybe even Europe too. Because I’m so damn sick of all the Diversity and Inclusion shit. I know a Spanish guy who lives in Spain that said when he wanted to work for a U.S. company that threw that Diversity BS in his face, and once they did that he left and said he was sick of it.
Sorry meant to say he tried to get a job in Spain to work online for a U.S. company. But they had him take some Diversity & Inclusion training. So it pissed him off and instead he just chose to find a Spanish owned company to work for because he was sick of Western politics infecting every aspect of life and being pushed, promoted abroad in other people’s countries as well.
“Seriously though, Blacks hate the outdoors. Too many snakes and Whites.”
hahaha
Let’s not even talk about the fear of water.
LOL!
They have heavier bones and aren’t good swimmers, so their fear may be rational.
“heavier bones.” That’s what she said. I wouldn’t know about that.
You didn’t define sharp yet. And how did they make their obsidian blades so sharp? Did they sharpen them or would that have ruined the natural sharpness of a break?
True observations there, Jarek. I have been an avid hiker in state and national parks for the past 25 years and it’s truly one of the last “whitetopia” recreations left in America. From my observations, I’d have to say that 95% of all hikers I encounter are white and most of the remaining 5% who are non-white are tourists from abroad.
Paula
There is nowhere r e in any MMT theory that mentions “living within your means”. It is quite the opposite of what it’s protagonists promote.
For one thing for MMT, Current Account Deficits don’t matter. In fact, they think they are great and regard it as getting stuff for nothing. So, there is no limit on imports and no limit on excess consumption.in turn, foreign debts don’t matter, so national sovereignty doesn’t matter.
I have fought with the academics of MMT on this topic for more than a decade. At first, for them, there wS no external account. The , after weight of what’s damned obvious they begrudgingly began to admit that there is such a matter but argued, wit b out any reason, that it doesn’t matter anyway.
MMT is plain BS and is not applicable to ANY country.
You don’t want debt with any money spent by any entity? You got to save it first.
‘Your vampire ball is over’ – Putin to Western elites
The president stated that over the past few centuries, the so-called “golden billion” has grown accustomed to being able to “fill their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money” as they have been “parasitizing” other peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
”But they must understand that the vampire ball is ending,” Putin said.
Vlad may peace be upon him.
Russia has been at war with the Khazarian Mafia for a thousand years. He’s apparently getting closer to a bigger reveal? I note a distinction within the rhetoric that narrows the focus. Vampires don’t fill their bellies with human flesh. But perhaps they enjoy seeing their human cattle eating human flesh without realizing it. The real market is in the blood products. So the use of the term vampire is and isn’t what it may seem on the face of it. Wow!!
They’ve honestly been around for that long? Damn….
Yeah, they were actually around before the Khazarian Khaganate. They change identities like nobodies business so. They at least go back to ancient Babylon. Some people think they are the descendants of Cain. If untrue it is at least a testament to how far back into history they go.
We don’t need any fancy restaurants like McDonalds. We’ll just sit on the grass, eating peanuts, and wait for the UFO to pick us up.
We’ll be the Adam and Eve of a new world. Leave the apples alone this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DxnCdqt3mw
Avoid forbidden fruits. And snakes!! I’m writing it on my palm so I don’t forget!
It is well.
@Edpell
Well, what does he mean by any of his? And what do he plan to do about them?
This*
Something really big could indeed be coming soon. I am hearing more and more about this upcoming solar eclipse on April 8. It will occur in the sign of Aries. A total solar eclipse in Aries usually is an indication of a very significant turning point. It is also a sign that there will be a lot of divine masculine energy flowing through our space time. I don’t really do divination or prophecy but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some major geopolitical move or moves with particular aspects of boldness and expressions of independence which remove comfort zones and discomfit safe spaces.
….I don’t see how it’s going to be any different from any other solar Eclipse we’ve had. Except I read that Texas is urging schools to close, and some areas will be hit by total darkness. Still I don’t expect anything bad or serious to happen on that day unless some dooms day prick is planning to stage some prophecy nonsense that will throw people into a world wide panic when it does occur. Other than that, I see nothing special about April 8th.
Everyday you get out of bed and live is a special day.
To many people forget life is wonderful and don’t live it.
Find something you like to do and that makes you happy and go do it.
@ benr:
“Find something you like to do and that makes you happy and go do it.” Great advice!
Also: “Stuff people say” is just that and should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
I used to get very caught up–and sometimes pretty upset–by stuff I’d read on various websites. Some few dire prognostications came true, but I can’t think of any that affected me. The 2008 housing crash/financial crisis was one of these, and the net effect for me was that the nest of crooks at our little town’s city hall and landowners’ association lost their asses and retired from public life, when their dreams of getting rich by screwing their neighbors were dashed. There was rejoicing among the rest of the townfolk.
Even events that seem like they might be great evils can turn out just fine. And eventually you figure out that no one knows the future, and most scary headlines are for clicks.
Yeah i’m not sure if anything will occur either but I do find it really weird that there is a lot of chatter about it (more than I remember for others) and they are issuing public safety notices about it etc. I don’t remember any of that occurring for the eclipse we had back in October last year.
We’ll see, people these days are doing everything in their power to manipulate people’s fears. They abused the hell out of it in 2020 with covoid, this year it’s nuclear war this, nuclear war that…It just never ends.
I just wish someone would covoid it out of existence. Heh!
SSL, a total eclipse is a big deal. If you were to stay in one location on the Earth a total eclipse would pass over you on average every 245 years. Most people will never see one in their lifetime. I have only witnessed one in my life and I drove 1500 miles to see it. It is quite a show. This one in April will be almost twice as long as the one in 2017. I’m thinking of taking a road trip to Texas. The weather is the thing.
I was too, but the area there is declaring emergency conditions because of the crowds, the chance of non-cloudy skies is only 50% and it only lasts 4 minutes. It did not make sense to me. If you try to book something now, good luck.
I’ll be in my truck. I’m mobile. I lived in the truck for months. No big deal.
Maybe AR. or OH. or NY. or TX. I love a good road trip.
Solar eclipses are actually fairly common. I did a search on that, and it said that most years have two eclipses. Of course they are visible only in a localized area of the earth.
The last time we had one in Missouri–I think a near-total eclipse–a few years ago, I noticed I felt “out of sorts” and had a headache. I read later that eclipses affect many people that way.
Anthea, yes a total eclipse is common. Have you ever seen one? Our host is almost on the center line. but not quite. Almost doesn’t cut it. Weather in the NE is terrible in April.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a total eclipse–or, if it was total, I didn’t see it from a location where the eclipse was total–but I have seen two eclipses where it got pretty dark. One was just a few years ago, and the other was in 1979, in Kansas City.
With future geo-strategic foreign policy uncertainties accelerating, such as the much delayed blob realization that the war in Ukraine is now lost, one can expect the capricious/unthinking nature of both foreign policy and domestic policy decisions to accelerate.
Case in point, domestically, is the recent bipartisan support in the House to ban the social media app Tik Tok, by a vote of 352 to 65.
Our politicians from both parties claim that Tik Tok is a “Chinese” entity when some 60% of the group is actually owned by American international investors like Hedge Funds Sequoia Capital, Susquehanna (where its billionaire co-founder Jeff Yas recently met with Donald Trump) as well as General Atlantic, along with more mainstream investment funds like Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, and BlackRock.
Billions of their dollars in paper profits are now collectively at risk, so it will be fun to see how the U.S. Senate votes on this issue.
Unfathomable political and financial risks, both domestically and internationally, now regularly haunts the U.S. and therefore it may not be surprising that both gold and bitcoin continue to rally.
It certainly seems like things now are rapidly spinning out of control.
@ jim:
Ed Dowd says he doesn’t think the PTB can hold the economy/financial system together till the election. He thinks things will go south between May and August.
In what way? I think we can count of serious inflation. Bank failures are definitely in the cards. A stock-market crash? (Kind of looks like it.) Ed Dowd also says he expects deflation further down the road; the tickerguy says he’s talking his book.
@Jim
They are worried that Tik Tok is a Chinese entity but had no damn problem what so ever with letting in a lot of Chinese people, most of them war age men. And from what some poster claimed here recently, they are building their own FBI branch here too? What a joke this country is.
Okay, I do not understand something here.
Tik Tok is just another Facebook or X, right, where folks communicate with each other. I understand that free access to social media can cause censorship, kid proofing and other problems but-
As far as the Chinese situation, number one, why is it so popular, are the Chinese companies that much better? If characterizing Americans is the security issue, why can’t China just monitor Facebook, Instagrams or X. They say that it makes electioneering easier for foreign governments. So? If the DC idiots think that China, Russia or Iran cannot get their two cents worth in about either Biden or Trump, they are fools.
Last and most, our worst enemies are not the Chinese or the Russians, it is our own government trying to destroy our freedom in favor of their totalitarian “democracy”.
@JohnAZ
Correct, it is our own Government. It also makes no sense why the military refuse to overthrow them. But they would have zero problem fighting another BS war on the behalf of this same shitstain government of ours. All they have to do is push hard enough and they’ll get another 9/11 situation where soldiers will blindly march on given order. They could become real heroes if they just got rid of the people who are running things right now.
@backrowheckler @stelmos:
I’ve gotten a stomach flu, just at the wrong time. I tried driving yesterday, but I just about threw up. I have to cancel my trip. I won’t be driving to Albany and I won’t meet up with you guys. Shit!
I don’t give up that easily, so what I’m going to do is wait until the snow season is definitely over and the weather is warmer. Then I’ll go meet you somewhere. Sorry.
Sorry to hear that Bill. There is a stomach thing going around the paper tells me. If you can believe them. Take care. BRH and myself will keep in touch.
Thanks. I’
I’ll be ok.
Jarek et al
I saw a post on the third part of the Fatima prophecy.
Mary appeared to three kids in Fatima, Portugal and gave three prophecies, one of which forecast WW2.
The third is so scary supposedly that the Vatican wants no part of it out.
However, some of it has leaked and the one I thought was bad news was that at the end times the final Pope was going to be the Anti-Christ as the RCC was going to turn against God.
Nice!!!
Bill, if you’re rolling down the Mass. Pike, destination Foxwoods, exit 45 to Riverdale Rd (Rte 15) Cosco parking lot good place to meet up. Plenty of places to eat or get coffee. Me & Stelmo can be there, look for two reprobates. Its W Springfield, not out of your way, on I-91 S into Hartford and Rte 2 to Foxwoods. Let me know about what time you’ll be coming thru. Say hello to Jim at the book signing.
SSL, you mentioned the ‘Black Sun’ upstream.
Look into Harry Crosby, Lost Generation Poet of the Black Sun, and publisher of the Black Sun Press.
Bill I just saw your post above.
Hope you’re feeling Bill. Some other time.
Take care of yourself.
Edit: hope you’re feeling better.
Meanwhile, Palestinians & other Islamists have stormed Parliament in Iceland. Iceland for Krissake! Apparently, EU orgs are bringing them in. What, you thought they’d be satisfied taking down just Israel, Sweden, the UK & Germany? Not so my friends, these locusts want it all, the whole enchilada.
What’s the latest in Haiti? Pay attention because its coming your way this summer.
Well who’s fault is that Row? Who is the one funding for all these people to flood into these countries? See the pattern? All these nations are white countries, are Asians currently dealing with these invasions? What about Latin America are they being invaded?
White people have gotten painfully soft, weak, and pathetic especially the liberal ones who they need to just get rid of ASAP because their weakness is dragging down their entire population. It amazes me how they are willing to go to war and fight their own brothers but they can’t even gear up and fight the invading assholes who are black or brown raping their women, grooming their kids, slitting their throats, cutting off their heads if they offend their GOD. All they do is just stand there making excuses “But but! We’ll go to jail if we fight back!”
Israel should have made the damn peace deal with them so they can have their own place. The have the money they could have made it work, but no they didn’t want to. They were selfish and want the whole damn Middle East all to themselves. Then you have America, the endless wars and destroying 80% of all these countries around the world leaving a bunch of people without a country of their own. Then those people end up here in our country, angry, mad, they want revenge just like the negros are acting. The problem is they are exacting their revenge on the wrong damn people, when it should be directed at the assholes in DC. It’s not like one of them is going to strap a bomb to themselves and try to approach the Capitol and blow it up. They rather go to a Stadium and attack a bunch of unarmed citizens to prove their point.
TS, Israel is a little strip of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, about the size of the State of New Jersey. It is also the furthest outpost of Western Civilization, surrounded by 800 million hostiles. Their fight is our fight. We owe the Israelis a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Did you learn of the chinese american female billionaire who died in her tesla. She drove into a pond or pool.
“TS, Israel is a little strip of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, about the size of the State of New Jersey. It is also the furthest outpost of Western Civilization, surrounded by 800 million hostiles. Their fight is our fight. We owe the Israelis a tremendous debt of gratitude.”
I agree completely. Why not support Jewish Nationalism in Israel since it might help ween American jews from left progressivism? The American rightwing, especially anyone at Unz is swimming in stupid antisemitism..
I keep trying to figure why the Blob looks the other way on the current invasion of our Country.
It can’t be good for the middle class. So, what is the long-range plan? We continue to move our manufacturing jobs out of America. AI will eliminate a lot of high-tech jobs. Our education system is creating a number of graduates who have no skills. The hordes of illegals are low IQ.
The average IQ in this Country will continue to fall as the mongrels breed with the whites or within their groups. I ten years we ill have a Country of imbecile’s dependent on the government.
Why is the likes of the Chinese, Bill Gates, Black Rock etc. buying up farmland? Have you ever heard of plantations and slaves? This way of life was well suited for the blacks coming from Africa. The Breadbasket of the World is the new America. History tends to repeat itself. The Chinese need food!
The new 15 minute cities will be a short bus ride to the farm. Think about it!
Can you support indentured servitude! To put the mish-mash on it more of now, but, with time limits. Now if you mismanage personal resources, or just have poor karma you are in the street. With IS you get three hits and a cot for your labor [ military with oath ] and a goal
Anyone getting bombarded by measles outbreak stories and get the vax get the vax?
They are also fear porning the hell out of a TB outbreak.
Let in half the third world and get turd world problems.
With a few more retirements in the House of Representatives, the Democrats will control everything! Can you imagine the number of bills they can push through before Trump takes over? Can you imagine the monetary offers that are floating around D.C. to rid Congress of the RINO members of the house?
Just think, impeachment goes away, more open borders. and some great deals for the Chinese!
That concern has been going through my mind rather frequently of late. The final stab in the back to America may well occur between now and November as the RINO’s being shown the door by the MAGA forces take their revenge by throwing in with the Dems to take back control of the House of Representatives before the end of 2024.
The Myth of Progress is still very much alive and well despite all the indications in dispute of it today. It is so utterly embedded in the mass-produced grey matter of our assemblyline brains that the idea is as real to us as our own flesh.
I am constantly amazed how folks rely more and more utterly on what’s stored in some electronica. Oblivious lemmings.
“The systems we depend on to make all things blobish function are looking pretty ill, like they’re not going be working a whole lot longer.” Including the blobs that are ourselves. Has there ever been such a civilization of utter slobs as we have chosen to be today? Sharecroppers and tenant farmers had more outward class in 1930 than the not-quite-as-comfy-as-not-long-ago middle classes do today, slopping their guts and asses about in their sneakers, formless jeans and ubiquitous shitty t-shirts. Their blob-ness will become impossible too, soon enough i suppose. I mean, they’ll still dress like they’re perennially seven years old but they’ll be able to fit their whole families inside what passes for a shirt.