JHK’s Three-Act Play
Clusterfuck Nation
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When I wrote The Long Emergency nearly twenty years ago, I never thought that, once it got going, our government would work so hard to make it worse. My theory then was just that government would become increasingly bloated, ineffectual, impotent, and uncomprehending of the forces converging to undermine our advanced techno-industrial societies. What I didn’t imagine was that government would bring such ostentatious stupidity to all that.
Obviously, there was some recognition that ominous changes are coming down. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have heard so much chatter about alt energy, “sustainable growth,” “green” this-and-that. But the chatter was more symptomatic of wishful thinking for at least a couple of reasons: 1) mostly it ignored the laws of physics, despite the fact that so many people involved in enterprises such as wind and solar energy were science-and-tech mavens; and 2) there was a dumb assumption that the general shape and scale of daily life would remain as it had been — in other words, that we could still run suburbia, the giant cities, Disney World, WalMart, the US military, and the Interstate highway system just the way they were already set-up, only by other means than oil and gas.
Now, we’re finding out the hard way how much daily life must change, and is changing, and how disorderly that process is in every way from the imperative personal adjustments to our spiritual attitudes about them. As with so many things in history, this disorder expresses itself strangely, even prankishly, as if God were a practical joker. Who would’ve imagined that our politics would become so deranged? That there would be battles over teaching oral sex in the fifth-grade? That the CDC would keep pushing vaccines that obviously don’t work (and that so many people would still take them)? That stealing stuff under a thousand dollars in value wouldn’t merit prosecution? That riots featuring arson and looting are “mostly peaceful?” That we’d send $50-billion halfway around the world to defend the borders of another country while ignoring the defense of our own borders? That financially beset Americans would spend their dwindling spare cash on… tattoos?
Notice that all of these strange behaviors have really nothing to do with making practical adjustments to the way we live. The collective psychology of all this is bizarre. Of course, mass formation psychosis accounts for a lot of it. Groups of people under duress, suffering from loneliness, purposelessness, helplessness, and anxiety will fall into coordinated thought-and-action if presented with some object or someone to fixate their ill feelings upon.
Donald Trump was such an object. He galvanized about half the country into an intoxicated fury aimed at destroying him. It actually managed to drive him off the scene via a fraud-laced election which many in-power (local officials, judges) deemed a means justifying the desired end. That success reinforced their mass formation psychosis. Alas, having succeeded against Mr. Trump, they were left without a galvanizing object to focus on. So, they adopted one of the devices of Trump-riddance, Covid-19, as the next object of all their distress and anxiety, adopting the mRNA vaccinations as their next savior du jour.
Unfortunately, the vaccination scheme has gone very much awry, and now millions face a future with damaged immune systems. The horror of that is too awful to comprehend, especially by government, which caused the problem in the first place and can’t possibly admit it without demolishing its legitimacy… so it presses on stupidly and heinously with the vaccine program. Already all-causes deaths are substantially up, and in time the recognition of how-and-why this happened will reach a point of criticality.
It will be too obvious to ignore. But by that time (probably not far away), the economy will be so wrecked, the people of America so deranged, and our circumstances so desperate, that the government will resort to a supremely stupid act of national suicide, say, starting a nuclear war. The government under “Joe Biden” seems perfectly disposed to that possible outcome. Which brings us to the spiritual part of the story: those unused to consorting with alleged “higher powers” might consider getting used to prayer.
Lately, a new derangement is overtaking Western Civ, for the excellent reason that Western Civ gave birth to techno industrial societies and is now first to undergo the alarming demise of that system. I speak of the World Economic Forum (under one Klaus Schwab) and its stated ambition to Build Back Better — based on its unstated premise that the current system must be nudged to its death sooner rather than later, and on-purpose. All the governments of Western Civ nations seem coordinated on this.
But it’s not going to happen as Mr. Schwab and his followers hoped, for at least a couple of reasons. First, as already stated, God is a prankster and likes to throw knuckleballs at the human race. Anyway, the “better” that Mr. Schwab expects is an ultra-techno-industrial “trans-human” scheme that is unlikely to come about if the support system of the older techno-industrial system is no longer available to support it. As currently conceived, BBB depends on electric power, and that is one of the major sub-systems of our system that already looks like it’s going janky.
You get the idea, I’m sure, so I’ll cut to the chase for now. About a year ago I had my French easel set up on a country road nearby and was busy painting a motif at-hand when along came a horse-drawn wagon filled with four men in severe black-and-white clothing, wearing beards. They were apparently a bit surprised by the strange sight of me painting a picture and they stopped to chat. They were Amish and had lately moved to the county from down in Pennsylvania, which was running out of farmland for their fruitful people. Not a half-hour later a second horse-drawn wagon passed by. I admit, the incident gave me a thrill — not just the sensory pleasure of the horses’ ripe animal smell, and the gentle rhythm of their clip-clopping along. But since I had lately been writing a bunch of novels about life in a post-economic collapse town like my own (the World Made by Hand series), I enjoyed the strange delight of being transported briefly into a scene of my own imagining — the prequel of my own books.
Many more Amish are landing in the county these days. I hear they go around to the failing or inactive farms with bundles of cash and make an offer, just like that. Evidently the method works. It’s given me a business idea: to start an Amish skills school, buy a few acres with a barn and hire some Amish men to teach all us non-Amish how to do a few things that might be good to know in the years ahead, like how to harness horses to a cart or a mule to a plow. (The Amish like to make a bit of cash-money when they can.) That’s my idea of how to build back better. What do you think?
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Covid-19 Made in the USA Covid-19 The CIA U.S. Government and Ralph Baric Part 2 https://americanyellowvest.wpcomstaging.com/2022/05/23/covid-19-the-cia-u-s-government-and-ralph-baric-part-2/
That monkey pox looks suspiciously EXACTLY like the rash many people get from the covid vaxx. Probably due to the fact that the rash IS monkey pox.
That’s how you know the shot is working, it gives you monkey pox.
I’ve also read that what they are caling monkeypox is shingles, which the vaxx is also known to cause. In any case, I don’t know how they think they are going to be able to gin up suffricient panic about “monkeypox” in time to save their collective asses in the coming election. I think they might find the populace has become a bit jaded and weary of things like those convenient lockdowns. They might have compliance issues, particularly among the young.
Whatever it is, a damn mask isn’t going to stop it. Locking down over an STD 9which is what real monkey pox is) is nuts.
We only have the word of the same people who have been lying all along, that there are suddenly all these sick people in all these different countries.
I hope you’re right because my wife and I have been faithful to each other, so if it is an STD, I shouldn’t have to be too concerned.
A map that I saw showed only a very few in each country.
Looked to me like an attempt to do a replay of the covid numbers panic and obsession with supposedly scarly maps. But the actual numbers were totally underwhelming.
Like, in one country, 2.
In another, 13 (OMG OMG).
The damage is already been done.
If you have taken the shots, the stuff is in you, and the more boosters you take, the quicker the consequences will appear, seems to be the consensus of the learned ones. The learned ones that oppose the Vax.
Secondly, do anyone believe that ‘Powers that be’ will stop now? They have the time window now to execute their agenda. Sooner or later the sleeping populace will wake up and revolt. Then it’s game over for them, and they know it. Their time is short, and they are on ferocious quest to subdue the planet. They won’t stop until someone stop them. Will you…
I had shingles (herpes zoster) once, about 3 or 4 years ago. It was near my eye and I was concerned about it getting into the eye and ruining it, but it didn’t happen. Anyway, the shingles I had didn’t look anything like the pictures I’ve seen of monkeypox.
It’s possible some people get shingles from the vaxx, and some get the monkey pox.
Notice the renewed emphasis on AIDS testing in the MSM?
I got shingles on my roof. Still there.
Better than wild monkeys on the roof cursing a pox upon thine house.
Don’t know where that last bit came from. 🙂
As somebody said (here?)
Is it MonkeyPox already?
I’ve still got my Ukraine Decorations up!
Ha ha ha!!
Seems to affect almost only those who practice sodomy. That’s something, of course, that the MSM will never say.
Since they are sodomites???
We all know what went on at Sodom. I wonder what went on at Gomorrah. Something so bad it must remain forever unspoken? At least I’ve never heard of anyone who got “gomorrized”. But I’m sure if it happened to you it would not soon be forgotten.
They were probably anally raping young children, killing them then drinking their blood. Sort of like what happens on any Saturday night in the DC suburbs.
I heard that was code for missionary position.
I think you could catch Gomorrarea.
Yep. Reminds me of when they had all the phony photos of bodies in NYC and Bergamo as well as the video reels of people in Wuhan just dying in the street.
I still encourage people to go back and watch the Wuhan reels. Utter comedy. Many have also been removed from the web. Understandably.
Deflect much? Homosexual sex (anal sex) is the reason, no probably about it…
I think it’s a good idea… gee, this is the second time in a row
I’ve had to reset my password
Jim,
You keep bringing up serious points aimed at what needs to be done to shape our future as a consequence of trusting incompetent self-serving leaders. Your audience seems incapable of constructive discussion on those topics. They prefer to trade jokes and bitches about the current state of affairs with cute phrases to impress each other.
I farmed with, and raised draft horses for many years. Profit was never even part of my motive. Farming with horses taught me a few things that should be considered by anyone venturing into that activity. horses require much more care every day than tractors. They also require much more manual labor and common sense than most people today can muster. For those that do venture into horse powered farming many will find it a life style filled with quiet satisfaction. You have a timely idea that needs serious consideration. I think Amish teachers are the best way to introduce new farmers to a lower cost means of producing crops. My first draft horse in 1972 cost me $500. My new tractor this year cost $60,000.
In a phone call from a friend that I just had it was noted that we certainly must be near the end when Jim Kunstler starts talking about God and spirituality which I had not considered when I read today’s post. Oh boy, here we go.
Jim’s comment on tattoos as the choice de jour of the tribe members today really struck home for me as I watch my teenage daughter come home with a new one every once and a while, a habit I cannot stop what with Mommy’s full approval (not that my wife has any or we would not have gotten together twenty some odd years ago).
Thank you, James, for shining the light on Herr Cockroach Schwab, the resurrected Adolph Hitler who is apparently working a global genocide plan rather than the puny effort that Dolph put out there. Let us hope that he is ferreted out by someone who cares, or we may have to wait until Jesus Himself returns to clean up the mess.
One item I would like to add to today’s post is that of the Tiger at our back door, the tiger that is clearly working with the Bear at the front door…China. I see that Dopey Joe has professed to be committed to sending US troops to defend Taiwan, a slick move by that demented, dementia riddled old bastard. Start a real, two front war with the biggest, baddest motherfuckers you can find and then forget that you did it so your conscience is clean. Not that Dopey Joe HAS a conscious. Besides anger and stupidity, Dopey Joe got nuthin’. Let us hope that he sends the real fighting troops to that battle so that the pregnant pilots and transgender super soldiers can remain home to protect the homeland, har, har, har.
That brings up an interesting point, you know how Germany had the Fatherland and the Russians call theirs Mother Russia? How come we call America the Homeland? Seems a bit outdated, maybe we should consider adopting the title of SheHeITland, or SHIT for short. Dopey Joe should like that since he is the biggest turd on the block. .
One of the best posts ever here, Walter
i 2nd that on Walter–my little fantasy is the interstates go empty except for trucks in convoys traveling the right lane escorted by military driving maybe 45 mph–us who dare will have the rest of the road to ourselves–When the first lock down in LA happened the freeways were very empty–my thought was to lock it down even more-they said 30/40 percent of all traffic was going nowhere,just driving around because they got laid off from work–gas at 20 bucks a gallon would be great–the roads will be empty..20 percent or so of al truckers have quit in the last 2 years–another 50 percent will be awesome–sorry jim,my family has two big cattle ranches with unlimited water and a mostly secure area–but we still wonder if we can defend them when the wheels come off–lots of family,friends so we will try–i bought a MRAP vehicle just for the hell of it–it is fun and causes a lot of attention
Motherland, Fatherland. What gender is a country? Maybe there are many possibilities and we’ve chosen to be some kind of trannyland. I just remember that when I was in fifth grade they taught oral hygiene, not oral sex.
But I do believe we can benefit from the Amish and learning their ways. And they might benefit from some protection when things get dicey.
Yes, indeed and thank you for reminding me to give our host a Big Thumbs Up for his idea. Go for it Jim, I might even make a trip up to check out the place if you do it and the shooting hasn’t started yet. Well done my friend.
I’m a Farrier, here in California and have rebuilt many Farms and Barns. Now there falling apart and no one uses them. The land is too expensive to flip or develop. It’s all empty, upside down in debt and frozen like a statue. They can’t even run a McDonanlds in these areas now because they turn into crime zones. McGangsta is the default setting and no one else can afford to do business.
Nancy Pelosi, Grandma Gangsta of the Brothers has Proven her Anarchy in Politics for decades.
Granny Magic!
Lou
I’m in Cali too have barns use them and keep them maintained. Not cheap.
But you’re right. Barns come down due to lack of use, and no purpose. Only wealthy,interested preservationists, and back to the land types(with $$$) are buying these properties. If the Amish and Mennonites can afford these properties then they should own them and restore their glory.
The “Tiger” was made in USA, but the US elites.
The “Bear” was not, and is not, a threat to the US.
But the US is a threat to the Bear. Hence the Bear has been pushed to look to the Tiger for support.
As for JHK’s comments, regardless of how intelligent, garbage in/garbage out, most Americans in 2022 are generally ignorant.
They lack knowledge of where food comes from (“the supermarket”), how things are made, and basic history. So many are easily duped. Not most, perhaps, but enough.
So the elite/Deep State/etc who are masters at obfuscation are basically “mind-f–king” the dazed public. To prevent the public from eventually figuring out we are being played by one “crisis”, just conjure, or create another.
How long can this continue? We will find out.
Don’t be a transphobe, Walter B. Everyone knows the correct term is now “Personland”.
Zombieland more likely. U assure you that I have no fear of any of these movements, nor will I give any of them any grief for their choice for clearly that are suffering enough already. Recruiting young children for sexual purposes is a vile, demonic pursuit, but how can I fight it when so many Americans embrace the concept? And of course, those who profit from sexual trafficking gather so much money and power that they are mostly untouchable. Jeffrey Epstein ring any bells? Or any of those who are suicided once they are outed? Nope America is on a one way ride to hell and we are one stop away from the final destination. .
They/ThemLand.
Maybe Ze-land, but the kiwis have already taken that one.
The Germans used “homeland,” too. Plenty of old propaganda posters with Heimat plastered all over them.
Does Heimat refer to the whole country?
I think of Heimat as referring to one’s own region.
The family of a friend of mine in Bavaria came from the Sudetenland, and they had photos around labeled “die geliebte Heimat.”
Another friend here, who was born in Ostpreussen, south of Koenigsberg, also has books (I think Merian) celebrating HIS geliebte Heimat.
Wouldn’t the whole country (which is of course of fairly recent and bumpy origin) be das Vaterland?
Heimatland and Vaterland refer to the country (though Vaterland isn’t used anymore). Heimat can be a region, city or country, it’s more of an emotional expression of where you feel your home is.
“Die deutsche Heimat.” Like many words, its meaning can also vary by context.
“Heimisch” is a related adjective that, for example, can refer to things that are local or to the country in general. “Heimische Früchte”
Schwab is definitely NOT Hitler…the polar opposite, in fact.
Please explain the variations of fascism
I’ll judge Schwab by his fruits. If his plans come to fruition, he’ll make Hitler seem like Mother Teresa.
Yep, that “homeland security” name for an executive department is just jarring. I suspect that it came from`the Mossad operatives who were so influential during the Jug-eared Wonder’s first term.
I had never hear an American use the word “homeland” before that department was created.
“I had never hear an American use the word “homeland” before that department was created.”
Me, neither, and it sure freaked me out.
A great example of preprogramming people in a general sense of anxiety with the introduction and repetition of a new, creepy word.
The word immediately conjures up an image of “defending the Homeland.”
From what???
The Shrub used Tom Ridge to sell a word to name an executive branch department no one had ever used here in the US in such a manner.
Jim’s post today is right on target – who would have ever thought the government response to overshoot would be as abysmal as this? I can say looking over the job postings for “climate change”, most are concerned with the grift of securing funding. It’s difficult to stay positive.
As for the Amish skills school, I think it has some merit. I’ll know we’ve turned the corner in backing away from the cliff when the government comes out with a “family farm” program to help more of us return to an enjoyable, lower carbon footprint way of living – though it involves more sweat, and no social media.
Schwab gets excited in opening address at Davos 2022:
“Also be clear. Ze future is not just happening. Ze future is built by us!”
He’s probably got the tune of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” (Cabaret, 1972) stuck in his head.
To our host,
Great idea!
Can I come live on the new farm and be “the nurse”? I still have my New York license!
Abbybwood
You could be “the Hot Lips of the Hudson”. Sorry, just remembering MASH.
The mask is off. Our government is made up of serial grifters who also happen to be sexually perverted (and often pedophile) pathological narcissists who have figured out we’re running out of energy and with it food and the only way to survive is to kill a lot of us. We’re in the middle of the existential struggle of our times. I wish my neighbors would fucking wake up. Then again, maybe not.
You are assuming all those neighbors are folks you want to deal with. The American people have been converted to the deviated gimme folks you abhor by the powers in DC. They are very close to having their policies locked in with the vote.
I always knew there was corruption, stupidity, and perversion in government, but it seems to me now that it’s the rule rather than the exception.
Not only the rule Beryl, but an accepted method of governance by a general public dumbed down and distracted to the point of uselessness. And what do you do with something once it has become useless? Yup, you get rid of it, clearly the plan being implemented right now.
@ Beryl:
That’s what government is FOR.
Luckily, Liz, history shows that only a relatively small number of people need to be awoke to sort things out.
Sorry – “awake”
Unfortunately, it’s also true that only a relatively small number of people need to be woke in order to ruin everything – which I believe is what we’ve seen all too clearly recently. I recall in the remote past watching one of those Alastair Cooke introductions to Masterpiece Theatre. It was a series about the suffragettes, and he remarked that they had almost no support at all when they were agitating for the vote. Nevertheless, their shenanigans and disruptions won the day.
Not saying that women shouldn’t have the vote, merely that lawlessness by a small number of people with an idea that’s anathema to the average person tends to overcome due to the inertia of that same average person. People who abide by the law and don’t wreck things when they don’t get their way also tend to put up with a lot before they get riled up enough to do something about it, by which time it’s too late.
Liz, more accurately, they have figured out that they need to create shortages of food, fuel and energy. Shortages and supply chain problems are being created by government psychopaths as a means of taking over everything that they can.
I really liked this, from above:
“Notice that that all of these strange behaviors have really nothing to with making practical adjustments to the way we live. The collective psychology of all this is bizarre. Of course, mass formation psychosis accounts for a lot of it. Groups under duress, suffering from loneliness, purposelessness, helplessness, and anxiety will fall into coordinated thought-and-action if presented with some object or someone to fixate their ill feelings upon.”
This article reminds me of something I read about the Millerites, and how they dealt with the end of the world not happening as scheduled thru several different predictions. Then, the cognitive dissonance study done in the late 50’s on the UFO cult, when the Midwest did not flood, and the aliens cameth not. Those groups did not make practical adjustments.
I think something akin to that will happen just like in the article above, and there will be a failure to get REAL by our leaders. Meanwhile, down here in Flyover Country, there is already a stirring of fear.
“getting used to prayer” . . . . . Well, religious belief does well in times of extreme anxiety. Wonder why this is true? Could be it’s just a straw in the wind or could be there is actually something real, true and good about belief in God who cares for His creation.
As long as God is not angry with the direction that his flock is following. The US is no longer his “pride and joy”, I am not so sure He is on our side.
I would argue the United States was never his pride and joy or any other country for that matter.
I think maybe religion works because religions tend to go back to the basics of life – don’t lie, cheat or steal – be fruitful and multiply, and try to behave yourself.
I think maybe when a nation spends millions to shave its pubic hair, that it has misplaced priorities.
What are the outcomes of the religious impulse?
At its best, religion as a moderating influence on the bat-shit crazy excesses that human beings are prone to; at its worst, it is used to rationalize and justify those same excesses.
You could say that about anything that humans adopt as a guiding principle, except that in the case of religion (at least, the Judeo-Christian kind) the moderating influence vastly raised the level of culture and civilization.
There is nothing we humans do that we cannot figure out a way to pervert or misuse, but the message of the New Testament requires a special effort (or else never having read it) to use for the justification of excesses.
And have itself tattoo’d, to boot.
Tattoo parlors must be a booming business in the Ukraine.
I think Jim is on to a winner here. Prayer and thinking more about God are probably our only hope at the moment. Going Amish is a nice thought (apart from those itchy beards), but the Amish can only do their stuff because they are allowed to. If we tried it, think Ruby Ridge and Waco.
We CFNers maybe, we Americans – no way.
I’m currently sporting a hobo beard, or Amish, if you like. Mine, at least, ain’t itchy one little bit. Amazing how nature takes care of us, eh?
Maybe not itchy to you . . . !!
“. . .the Amish can only do their stuff because they are allowed to . . .”
I’ve thought a good bit about this. They’re admirable in many ways and (except for their pacifism) well equipped to survive what’s coming without even significantly altering their way of life.
Private schools, if they’re academically rigorous, can produce people who are both civilized and capable. But they’re dependent on being able to expel those who are determinedly feral or otherwise unable to benefit from a good education. Those are ejected into the wider world, where we have to find a way to deal with them.
This is how every successful entity in this world once worked, and is the only way to produce anything worthwhile. Those who cannot or will not benefit the company, the private school, the Amish culture, the clergy, were removed and sent back into a kind of human slush pile from which they had to find their way. This used to work really well, and still does work for those (like the Amish) who are willing to eject someone.
But we’ve increasingly seen that these same entities are demonized for employing this sifting process, and it’s seen as “unfair” – so we have kids accepted into college who can’t add or read, corporations full of woke dimwits who undermine the purpose of the company and produce ideological propaganda instead of any product, churches full of clergy who don’t believe in God or in the tenets of any religion, etc. To exclude them would be “unfair”. They then proceed, predictably, to destroy from within through a combination of incompetence and ideological mania.
To get back to the Amish – they don’t do infant baptism because they believe you have a right to choose not to be one of them. You decide at the age of 16 or so, and if you don’t want to belong and to abide by their particular rules and beliefs, you’re out and it’s your choice. They don’t allow you to stay and eat away at their culture like termites. That’s why they’re still Amish, and it’s also why any culture, religion, country, corporation, that wants to survive, will have to learn to draw lines and stick to them.
Amen.
I gave up being a Christian because of the inherent absurdities and contradictions. However, I still firmly believe in God. Oddly enough, it’s science – often seen as the great enemy of religious belief – that seems to give the strongest proof of existence of some kind of creative force behind the universe. I also studied a lot about NDEs – evidence of something beyond that is increasingly hard to refute. We shall all find out for sure one of these days!
I left denominationalism, but since I am the church [ the called-out ] I will not leave my brethren.
Do you go to any kind of church or group, MD, or do you just do your own thing?
I don’t believe in God or any gods at all. Never really have. But I definitely “believe” in the so-called god gene. That is, humans have a need – we’re “wired” to “know, deep-down” that there’s an as-yet unrevealed/undiscovered dimension/force that truly underpins all of existence. And to deny it, a la Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins is supremely foolish.
JTinMD: I respect your views. It’s something we all have to decide for ourselves. My only caveat would be: if no God, why a God gene? If it’s just a trick to help us survive and avoid total despair, why make us humans at all? Interesting questions!
Absolutely. I left christinsanity behind years ago and reconnected to the Gods of my North European Folk.
If there is a Supreme Being (I believe there is) there is only ONE…get real. You thing many Supreme Beings could get along and that there wouldn’t be cross-dimensional impacts on our physical plane if there were many struggling for control? Marvel movies are not realistic.
“I gave up being a Christian because of the inherent absurdities and contradictions.”
Such as?
inherent absurdities and contradictions.”
Such as? – Ricky
===========
Well, let’s start with Jesus’s Mom being a virgin. Cut me a friggin’ break.
And she couldn’t have been because? …
Do you think the Creator God has to have sex to make a child?
Who was Adam’s [ or Eve’s ] mother?
Okay, now I don’t know how many people I’m debating the issue with.
Fine.
I don’t think the “Creator God” HAS TO do anything at all.
What He does, and how He does it, is completely up to Him and no one else.
That said, the former Christians faction here has made two arguments (i.e. examples of “inherent absurdities and contradictions”):
1. Virgin Mary couldn’t have been a virgin.
2. According to “ye Christians,” the “Creator God” had sex in order to make a child, and that’s a lie, because He didn’t have to.
Apart from the fact that, according to the Bible, there was no coitus involved in the matter:
Am I right to assume that those two points would be enough for anyone “to give up being a Christian”?
“I don’t think the “Creator God” HAS TO do anything at all.”
He has to keep His promises [ Word ].
“Am I right to assume that those two points would be enough for anyone “to give up being a Christian”?”
No.
These two points [ along with walking on water ] are adequate for someone looking for an excuse to give up.
Joseph must have wondered who knocked up his fiancé
all of it–bunch of homeless dudes who could write(very rare for thousands of years) wrote the bile,er,bible–god has never read it,never will,word of men,not god–god is way way above a humans infantile,petty,puny,immature world,way above–god does not think like us,act like us,speak like us stupid humans–maybe in 2000 more years we will know more of the mind of god being as we are like little 2 year olds in the spiritual world but god still loves his 2 year olds….
Ricky: I couldn’t reconcile the early Jewish Jesus of the first gospel (actually, Mark, not Matthew), where he basically came to drag Judaism back to its roots and away from the legalist “I’m good because I have larger phylacteries” legalism of the pharisees, and the “Paulianity” of Paul where a whole lot of mystical things that Jesus never talked about such as sacrificial blood sacrifices, “grace” and mere belief over doing good things too priority. I came to believe that Jesus was wholly Jewish and never meant to start a new religion. People like Paul brought in a whole level of mythification that just wasn’t there in the original. Anyway, that’s my view and I’m happy to hear other opinions.
Hereward: Except for saying that the new wine (teachings) would split the old wineskin (religion) and thus required a new wineskin (Christianity).
Also this little one: Soon they will drive you out of the synagogues and considered killing you a good deed.
So you’re wrong. Time to get mad at me, right?
I think that religion is calming because it gives people a sense that there is someone in charge and everything will work out.
Also, most people have an innate sense of justice (as do most animals, try petting just one dog) and they want to feel that the criminals we see prospering here on Earth will someday just their just rewards in Hell.
“Just rewards” should mean restoring the lawful order. Being confined to an everlasting bbq pit because of a transgression that might last only minutes would not be just.
This idea comes from paganism which comes from beings in rebellion to the Creator.
Interesting.
All I know is that the religious people I know firmly believe that the wicked will pay in the next life.
And that gives them comfort.
Maybe the pagans had the same need. Maybe that is the God Gene.
Fantastic idea, but I wonder how many twenty- and thirty-somethings would be interested…it kinda sounds like work…?
You’d probably be overwhelmed by old farts like me signing up, which would be great, except for our limited shelf life.
Gimmes have little skills and less resolve. Their adverse on to work is famous.
But what happens when they have no choice. Starve? Learn or fight?
Some of them will learn. Work is good. Not everything needs to be a fight.
I wonder how much of that blame belongs to the older generation that failed to teach their off-spring the value of working, planting a garden rather than running to the nearest supermarket or even bothering to buy produce during the growing season, for I’ll bet you 100 to 1 that even few of the older generation do any of the above but condemn those that they think are the culprits.
. Far too many young women today can’t cook can’t bake can’t do much of anything and who’s fault is that but the mothers who can’t do it either because it takes too much time and too much effort to learn, the fathers are too busy on the golf course to install much of anything in their offspring oh they will learn on their own I made mine they have to make theirs too.
I recently went to a local farm in Escondido called the Bates Nut farm.
They often host events to learn how to raise livestock, poultry or farming techniques.
The event I went to was a poultry event that at least 10,000 people went to on the day of the event.
It was mostly vendors selling chicks and poultry supplies but it was neat to see so many people invested in Chickens.
They had a rooster that was going to be 3 feet tall.
He was as tall as a turkey at 8 months old.
https://batesnutfarm.biz/p-9224-events.html
There’s a Sheep & Wool Festival in Dutchess County, N.Y.
I notice they are starting to bill it as a “family festival” now. When I went I was surprised to see how much of “something for everyone” there was at something you’d think was specific to people who were into farming.
I went because I had a friend who was into various fiber arts. It was nice to see how country life and culture were alive and well.
A lot of these outdoor events were for some insane reason shut down due to covid, the people who want to see our lives destroyed don’t even have to ask the local authorities to do it for them, they volunteer.
I went to a Timber-framing week long class at Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires (Hint to upcoming religious sects; if you wish to thrive, don’t ban sex) about 25 years ago. A class of about 20 of us built a little 16×24 Barn. I’ve collected the appropriate tools and played at cabinet making ever since,
In a pinch I could slap together a services coffin or two,
I came upon some very lightly used cardboard boxes that had been discarded out behind a Dollarama a few years ago. I used them for moving boxes. They made excellent containers for bedding, blankets, Winter clothing and other bulky items. I shredded and composted them once I was finished with them, but I should’ve saved a few. They’d make excellent coffins!
Nice. I would like to re-do the roof on our garden house (framing a gabled roof myself), but I can’t take the plunge just yet.
During the Obama administration I became “woke” to preparedness thanks to our host among others like Zero Hedge and Survival Blog. In that quest I decided to take a class on poultry butchering; you see I am a total animal lover and I wanted to be sure that when the SHTF I would be able to make do. It was quite the experience. The difficult thing was the actual kill, but there was no axe involved. The chicken was upside down in an orange construction cone and I simply slit its throat. Very humane seeming, at least to me!
The rest of the process is just pretty messy with removing the feathers and such. Really it’s not much different than cutting up a whole chicken from the grocery store. There was one surprise though- there were three eggs inside in varying stages of formation. Very educating
One of the reasons why FDR’s promise of “a chicken in every pot” held such appeal was because chicken was formerly a luxury menu item. I’ve been told that, in today’s dollars, a 1930 chicken would cost about $20. They’re cheaper now because of the “efficiencies” of factory farming, highly efficiency processing methods (using cheap labor), and the developement of meat birds that are ready for butchering after only a couple of months.
Raising and butchering chickens (meat birds) is very labor intensive. My daughter raised 30 meat birds a few years ago. When it came time to send them to freezer camp, it took four people doing a solid two days work to get the job done.
It was a pleasant fall day. My daughter’s husband killed them, my daughter ran them through a homemade mechanical chicken-plucker, I gutted them, and daughter’s husband’s mother did the cutting up and more detailed plucking and putting them into freezer bags.
None of us had ever done this before, so we spent the first hour of the first morning watching YouTube videos on how to do it. Admittedly, we were not highly efficient workers. My daughter later calculated that, including labor costs, she would have had to charge about $18 for each chicken just to break even–and even that would not have compensated her for the two months time spent feeding them and moving the chicken tractor around. (She did include feed costs in her calculations.) Each bird weighed about eight pounds after processing.
She decided not to bother with raising meat birds again. It is somewhat less labor-intensive to cull a chicken from your existing flock, as needed. The cost and labor of feeding them is not immense, and the eggs compensate you for that. But killing, plucking, and processing one bird is still likely to take a couple of hours. Less, once you get good at it, I guess–but still at least an hour. What’s an hour’s time now valued at? Even if you had no other costs?
It was a pleasant fall day. My daughter’s husband killed them, – Anthea
===========
My mother-in-law, Sonja, was the next to the last of a whole gang of kids procreated by Czech immigrants. They were very religious. The parents’ names were even Joseph and Mary, no bullshit. They wound up in Pennsylvania coal country living in the woods on the side of a mountain.
They grew some stuff including chickens and pigs. My MIL tells the story of the day that Tommy the pig was slaughtered by her father and brothers. She and her sister, Barbara, loved Tommy and couldn’t bear to observe the killing. She and Barbara got under the kitchen table and held their ears and also prayed for Tommy’s immortal soul.
At my MIL’s funeral I regaled the mourners with a 20 minute history of Mom’s life of which the tale of Tommy the pig was a key feature.
Subsistence farming isn’t really a cash operation, except for a few extras that might bring in some “egg money.”
We had a flock of chickens when I was growing up. Not a large flock—maybe 25. We kept them for eggs. Basically, only an old chicken whose laying career was over ever got eaten. My father would manage to get her head on a chopping block and cut it off with an ax.
She would often run around headless. Then he would string her up in the garage (actually, part of our barn) and pluck her. Occasionally the body still “jumped” with a spasm—explained by my father as a reaction of the nervous system.
He would then bring her in to the house to wash and clean the body, remove the guts, etc., and then into the pot.
The thing I recall very clearly was that as soon as he came in he would wash his arms thoroughly in the kitchen sink at least up to the elbows with hot water and soap because, he said, chickens have lice or mites of some kind in their feathers.
“The thing I recall very clearly was that as soon as he came in he would wash his arms thoroughly in the kitchen sink at least up to the elbows with hot water and soap because, he said, chickens have lice or mites of some kind in their feathers.”
trapping: trappers drop their clothes in a specific place just at the door, shed, garage or whichever such available location exists to make critters less likely to infest the house. Bagged at the door and rigorously cleansed to further keep the critters living on them from infesting the house.
When I was a kid, the neighbors across the street raised a pig one summer. His name was Rootafort, and to the kids in the family, he was a pet. So whenever the family sat down to dinner the following winter, one of the kids was sure to look at his/her plate and–with tear-filled eyes and a quivering lower lip–ask, “Is this…Rootafort?”
I only saw my grandmother kill chickens once. She grabbed them by the neck and spun them around until their heads popped off. The headless bodies ran around for awhile, like the proverbial “chicken with its head cut off.” I think the most surprising thing about this was that she was so matter-of-fact about it. She considered it no more an event than putting on your shoes.
My mother tell of her father raising meat chickens during the depression. Gran Harold would hang the chicken from the clothesline (sans grandmothers wash) by their legs and and then walk down the line using a long ice pick down(up) their throat into the chest and let them bleed out. This way they wouldn’t run around and also bleed out. Can’t say it was humane, but he would get top price for the meat at the market.
I note that most people believe that when a hen is no longer productive, the proper thing to do is kill and eat her.
Now apply that to our ruling overlords’ outlook on the teeming masses of unproductive workers and it may give some insight into current events.
What’s an hour’s time now valued at? Even if you had no other costs?
Good question. But if that one hour buys another 24 for you and your family the calculus shifts.
“I note that most people believe that when a hen is no longer productive, the proper thing to do is kill and eat her.”
Well, I didn’t say anything about “proper” or “belief.”
but if youi want to talk “proper” and “belief,” I would bet that a lot more hens are leading short, unpleasant lives these days, when they are force-fed for a few months only to meet the same end, by the millions, when they are slaughtered for meat, than the very few hens in our flock met after a pleasant, productive life layijng eggs for our family and living in a nice, cozy wooden cubicle in a room in our barn.
And landed at the end in the stew pot. We were a family of six. We didn’t keep hens as pets.
You clearly missed my point.
We aren’t pets either.
I guess I sure did miss your point.
You compared chickens to people
So, yeah, i guess I don’t get the point.
I don’t notice any people in stew pots, though. Those who have led productive working lives in the USA are most likely on SS.
When I recall the activities of my youth with a young audience they are often jealous at all the experiences I had, and wish they could’ve lived in similar times.
You really get a unique perspective if your formative years were pre-social media and pre ipad-in-every-babies-hands, pre “digital” era – heck, even if you made it through most of your youth before gaming systems or cable tv was standard in every home. Your unique perspective comes in being able to see what life can be like without those things, and how it can function just fine without those things.
I would love to learn the ways of the Amish, and I would love to teach others what I learn. JHK, make sure to let your audience know how to join when you set it up 😉
Ironically, Unperson, many of the old skills can now be learnt via…the internet. I spent an hour today looking up common edible wild flowers and plants. I learnt a lot. Then off I went to our local woods to see which ones grow in our area. Same goes for making survival stuff we might need over the coming years: wood burning stoves, outdoor shelters, etc.
Fantastic idea, but I wonder how many twenty- and thirty-somethings would be interested…it kinda sounds like work…?
You’d probably be overwhelmed by old farts like me signing up, which would be great, except for our limited shelf life.
Hi steponbugs, my partner and I are millennials (early 30’s) who took JMG’s advice to “collapse now and avoid the rush” back in 2019. We live totally debt free offgrid learning skills and cultivating all sorts of edible plants and most importantly mental health. Since we started our website we are seeing that it doesn’t matter what age Americans are, most do not have to courage to live simpler or with purpose as the Long Emergancy unfolds. We hope to change that through our website and Peak Prosperity, but it’s up to each of us to get going and start living wisely in a de industrializing country.
my family has two ranches in a beautiful mountain area–beef cattle –been in the family since ww2–we wonder if we will be able to defend the damn place if the world goes mad max–if you have food they will try to steal–my dad told about how on our farm in MN the gypsies stole all our corn in the middle of the night after dad let them camp on the farm in about 1930ties–they all split up in different directions so was hard to track them–dad and uncles only found one of their horse drawn wagons–got some corn back and shot 3 of their horses -kind of mad max during the last great depression–we have lots of family of all ages now and lots of friends—i am going to buy a surplus MRAP to help defend the ranches–Martin Armstrong says by 2032 the usa is done,i believe him
Jim,
What you are seeing with your own eyes can best be described as a Cargo Cult. The conveniences that modern technology brings along for the ride are going away. Travel has become exponentially more difficult. The ability to just open your mouth and shovel in whatever you desire is going away. The wonder drugs that made the world safe for our grandparents are going away. You get the point.
Technology allowed for us to act like tattooed obese land whales with purple hair in a land where critical thinking was openly mocked. Everyone can see that tide receding but they all believe that if they just double down on being stupid and retarded then, just like with the Cargo Cults, the technology will remain.
Yeah, that’s a good analogy. Cargo cults arose because of an outside subsidy to the people on the islands courtesy of the USA in the war. The modern cargo cult requires more bizarre rituals, like trans crap, but it’s designed to continue the subsidy from outside.
There’s plenty of oil left, but not enough to underwrite everything we are doing. Something’s gotta give, and it’s giving. Or, in this case, taking away the illusions.
Yep. It’s amazing how many conservatives still think we can sort this out via DC and the ballot box (record early voting in Georgia today – wow!). The least worst outcome will be some kind of red-blue split with real border walls. And even that won’t be pretty.
I don’t think that, but I plan to vote anyway and am always surprised at people who don’t. I understand the disgust and despair, but individuals can still make a difference or at least try to do so. It isn’t as if you had to make a big effort, so you’ve lost nothing by choosing the least awful candidate. If I was hanging over the edge of a cliff, about to slide into the abyss, I wouldn’t believe someone who told me to click my heels together and say “there’s no place like home” – but, having nothing to lose and no other option, I’d do it anyway.
Good point. Voting at this point is a lot like clicking your heels and chanting an incantation.
Most excellent, Jim! Might not want to let the word get out too widely, though, as you just might be overrun with down on their luck disciples.
On the other hand, it could be the start of a burgeoning Kunstlerian Empire in the East to challenge the other soon to be emerging fiefdoms after the fall of Ol’ DC. I can see it now: Kunstler Bucks with Jim’s stern visage as the center piece under the motto “In Jim We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” and over the sub-motto injunction “Get to Work!”
I’ve heard of crazier things.
Heil Kunstler? Doesn’t sound right, does it.
I see him as a benevolent – albeit not exactly soft-hearted – dictator. Hard times demand hard men!
Kunstler Youth!
LOL! They wear little latex bald skin caps.
Go for it, Jimbo! The human race has much to learn from the Amish.
Having lived in a number of countries designated “third-world” (not by those living there, certainly) I not unnaturally wonder whether we can also learn practical low-tech survival skills from their inhabitants. I am thinking about the aboriginal peoples in particular, who are not so tightly entangled in a money economy.
I used to think that preppers were nut jobs. No longer. Even when I take the pooch for a walk in the woods, I find myself looking at flowers and plants and wondering if they are edible.
I ate a mess of poke salet earlier today. I often crave it in the spring. You used to be able to buy poke salet in cans at some grocery stores.
Just out of curiousity, I tested my blood sugar two hours after eating it, and it was 93. I’ve seldom seen that number. (I am diabetic.) So I want to test this a few more times to see if it works to treat diabetes. There is some research that indicates it does, and it is used in TCM to treat diabetes, arthritis, parasites, fibromyalgia, skin affections, and various other things. I looks like preparations that you can buy are tinctures of the root. I see that the tinctures are either 3:1 or 5:1–so easy enough to make at home.
Some acquaintances have told me that their families used to berries to treat colds and flu. It is a valuable anti-inflammatory.
Caveat: The root is VERY poisonous if used in too high a dose; the normal dose of the tincture is only a few drops.
J.L. Hudson reports that he cured his Lyme Disease with poke root.
I have never experimented with its medicinal use. I just like to eat it. Most people only eat poke in the spring, as the plant becomes poisonous once it’s over about eight inches tall–although I understand that you can harvest the new top growth all summer, as long as it has not yet taken on a reddish tint.
I told my daughter about my lowered blood sugar and she gathered another bunch for me. It’s about 50 yards away from the house, in the woods, so I will gather more myself. I’ll also be digging the root to make a tincture.
There are many tasty wild greens around. Lamb’s quarters are a favorite. Sour dock is good when very young, before it gets tough. Chickweed and winter cress are good. I have never tried wild mustard greens. The root of the wild parsnip is delicious. You only dig those in winter.
Another interesting medicinal herb is Spanish Needle (Bidens pilosa). Supposedly it is an excellent anti-viral/anti-bacterial for colds and flu and various other stuff. A very common weed around here, and quite a nuisance.
Be careful with wild ‘greens’. Many of them are extremely high in oxalates which are hard on your kidneys and may lead to kidney stones.
Many parts of pine trees are edible
That’s a great read, Anthea! No-one here needs to be told that our medical world is completely dominated by toxic Big Pharma, so maybe it’s time to hit the natural remedies again. I’ll look into the plants you mention. I’m in Europe, but we have many of the same ones. Coltsfoot is supposed to be a good one for coughs, and there are plenty of others. As for Spanish Needle – is the Latin name really Biden Pelosi? Sounds deadly poisonous! I hope it all works for your diabetes.
It is a great idea. We will need teachers who can teach life skills for an economy that is coming. thanks for putting it out there.
Great Idea with the Amish! Extend it into junior colleges. Out here vintner degrees are being offered as more and more land is being converted to wine. We need to get rid of the Liberal Arts conversion to Woke propaganda anyway.
JHK, your diary of your small garden experiences would be invaluable. Also, spreading the word to young people looking for a way out of the cities would be great. One thing is going to happen and soon, the youngsters in the cities are going to split in half, half looking for and honorable way out of the mess the Mob has put them into, and the the half, not so much. It could get bloody real fast.
I think the skills classes are a great idea. I was thinking, as I was reading, how they stupidified an entire generation of American kids on purpose, some will be lucky if they even learn to read, and how the Build Back Better proponents hadn’t bothered to think beyond the destruction part.
Just who was going to do the building? John Kerry?
The DAVOS/WEF crowd only has use of their private jets as long as somebody else keeps them running for them.
Beryl, you got that right. I’m a retired educator and the emphasis that was put on preparing EVERYONE for college was a HUGE mistake. In Kentucky, over the past 15 years, we pretty much eliminated all shop classes and even in my rural district, our Ag program was watered down.
Now we are on the cusp of shortages of skilled trades-people of all types. I guess the elites think that our friends crossing the border will fill in that gap.
Spot on, Beryl. “Learn to code.” 🙂
” I was thinking . . . how they stupidified an entire generation of American kids on purpose, some will be lucky if they even learn to read, and how the Build Back Better proponents hadn’t bothered to think beyond the destruction part.”
Bring back 4-H!!
Amish chic. Great idea. Most practical.
A nurse colleague is recruiting me to her local mutual aid society and asked what my husband did. He’s a good all-around engineer, but worked in propulsion test stands for NASA for decades. “He once went to Pep Boys, bought a bunch of parts, and cobbled together a rocket engine igniter for a space craft. Do you need that?”
She laughed . . . But now I’m laughing at “Amish Space Force”.
Nursing skills will be at a premium in the future for those who actually learn them. Too many of the graduates I saw were poorly educated in the basics of assessment and real nursing care. They filled out paperwork and handed out pills they had no idea what they were.
Yes, a graduate nurse is kind of like a second lieutenant . . . they know very little at age 21 and fresh out of school. Hospitals LOVE to hire that kind of blank slate.
Bottled oxen farts will be the new propane for the “Fossil Fuels” idiots.
I was born in the back seat of a pigfart tractor/
Rolling down Cowpath 41 . . .
Safer than a hospital birth.
and especially for boys
I’ve noticed that the students in the schools I am connected to have all been doing projects on how nutritional bugs are and how being a vegan is the best thing ever. The propaganda just never stops – and these are private schools, not public ones.
Like a poorly-raised teenager who knows he’s about to bring home a report card with a raft of D’s & F’s, western “leadership” will do anything, Anything, ANYTHING to distract from the problems. This includes anything from petty crimes, crashing the family car, to setting the house on fire.
Hence monkeypox, UFO hearings, reviving the threat of nuclear war… What comes next?
War on Monkeys. Biden’s staff is working on the announcement now. The US military thinks it’s finally found an enemy that it might possibly be able to defeat. Undeterred, the monkeys are already mobilizing. My money’s on the chimps.
I’ve often thought that we ought to arm and train chimps—at least for their own defense.
Call a chimp a “monkey” and you will find they already know how to defend themselves quite effectively.
The drug “research” and space travel? Chimps like living on the edge and use us as their enablers. That “live fast, die young” mentality is driving their evolution like a Formula One race car. Look out – the chimps are pulling into the passing lane.
Speaking of training and arming chimps, there is a good video on the subject on YouTube (and probably everywhere else by now) of a chimp apparently recruited into some west African army learning the basics of self-defense. My advice: air drop the AKs, the chimps will figure them out.
I have it on good authority that a single adult chimp can beat the shit out of 10 humans at once. Chimps are much stronger and fiercer than humans. They just aren’t as mean.
Yes. They are wild animals and once they hit puberty they are dangerous. Many people have found out the hard way. Chimps can pull a human apart and have done so.
I’d prefer to be mauled to death by a bear, given the choice.
When they came out at you, they go to maim and incapacitate, as quickly as possible. They go for the eyes, the face, the genitals, the hands. Pretty brutal.
Yep. Biden’s already demanded Milly Vanilly invades “Orangustan”
>>>My money’s on the chimps.
Well, they’ve got Joe beat in the IQ department already, so I think you’ll win a few bets on this one.
The famed fierce Bonobo Brigades have already been recruited out of Africa by the Chinese and have vowed to fight to the last to protect Chinese/Chimp sovereignty.
Unfortunately Dis, you’ve been a victim of disinformation. Bonobos (formerly known by the ethnic slur “Pygmy Chimpanzee”) are the wokesters of the ape crowd.
Wander in the west African jungle until you hear the narcissistic fantasy Imagine bouncing off the forest canopy, then you’ll know you’re close. Make sure you knock before entering – probably a rip-roaring orgy going on. Everybody, all the time – that’s how you do it bonobo style.
Apparently it was isolation from gorillas that allowed bonobos to adopt the easy-going, fuck-all-the-time lifestyle for which they are beloved by their human counterparts. Chimps, having to live next door to gorillas, evolved the tendency to go apeshit at the drop of a hat. Bad neighbors will do that to ya.
The DC crowd, the Deep State, the Biden Mob, all are members of the ignorant gimme crowd that they work to propagate. That is why we have not seen one, not one, good idea from the East Coast mob for any of the problems we keep hearing repeated here.
JHK, the East Coast’s good land declined in the early 1800’s, as immigration increased competition for bottomland and fertility declined. It was the main reason the move west happened. Fly over population density may negate the move out of the cities. Declining resources and increasing population do not bode well. Fifty years from now, who are left may be called survivors.
First to go will be the suburbs!
I think one of the reasons for the Ukraine war is what Joe said — regime change. While Schwab and the rest preach climate change & BBB, they’ll be having yachts, filet mignon, and air condiioning. Russia has lots of natural resources of oil & gas and is, BTW, one of three nations with immense fresh water. I think the neocons want to loot Russia and this is the opening salvo.
Exactly, SW.
This is about looting Russia, not ”defending” western Ukraine.
I think that our ruling overlords would be happy to kill every Ukrainian and every Russian in order to get their greedy hands on those riches.
I have to wonder how they really think this will happen — are they so deluded they can’t see the Russians have no intention of allowing that to happen? Our European “allies” are probably praying Russia takes over Ukraine and spares them a third WW. I can hardly blame them.
Speaking of monkey pox, Ben Fulford did an excellent job in his blog today (benjaminfulford.net) showing monkey pox pictures labeled from 2017 and 2018 with the MSM showing the exact same pics but with fake dates of May 2022 (and trying to say they were current). More bullshit virus fear porn and propaganda on the way!!! BTW, Pfizer just announced that it has a monkey pox vax; those guys must be really smart, eh. 🙂
Here’s my monkey pox vaccine: Do not eat bush meat. Do not import exotic pets.. Do not let your place get overrun by rats. Do not go to a fetish festival and play butt pirate. Avoid being a garden-variety non-fetishistic butt pirate for the next few months. Monkey pox takes a lot of unusual effort to catch.
What is the significance of a Jupiter/Mars conjunction?
https://banned.video/watch?id=6288f8c2b2797b15546f4e79
crazy video and I do mean crazy.
Is this crazy?
“Member states will also be required to strengthen their approaches to “infodemic management” (a term coined by the WHO that refers to “too much information including false or misleading information in digital and physical environments during a disease outbreak.”) Additionally, non-state actors will be required to actors to work with governments to fight disinformation.”
https://reclaimthenet.org/world-health-organization-pandemic-treaty-a-fresh-push-for-vaccine-passports-global-surveillance-and-more/
Sounds about the same to me.
I’m not too worried about the new WHO crap. Of course, the maniacs will push it to the limit, and of course the usual patsy nations will sign it. But you can forget about Russia, China, India and a whole swathe of Red states playing along. FFS, even the stupid Euros are ignoring the EU’s führerbefehl to stop accepting Russian oil and gas, and are even paying in rubles. National interests will prevail on this one.
This could have all been so much simpler if they simply asked for euthanasia volunteers. Might be surprising how many they would get.
I suggested years ago that we would save a lot of money and heartache if we offered $10,000 to anyone who would be sterilized. Think of the reduced crime and government payments….and none of the drama around abortion.
They don’t propose things like this because, none of what the Davos crowd are setting in motion has anything to do with climate or “overpopulation.”
The greatest lies are always at the core. Just look at the Covid Hoax.
True. I volunteer Gates, Schwab and Soros, and all the other eugenicists. They should practice what they preach.
Chapter and verse?
Remember, if it’s not in the Bible it’s meaningless.
“Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets [ or just a great teacher ]. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.”
Thus, if it is, it IS important.
Yes, that’s why the Christians burned the Library at Alexandria. Anything not in the Bible is extraneous. And if it is in the Bible, it’s mere repetition. What need for any book but One?
They began the job. The Muslims finished. Same attitude, different book.
“It wasn’t a single individual who destroyed the library; it took centuries. The most significant lesson here is that knowledge can undermine the foundations of both political and religious movements. We have made progress possible thanks to our insatiable curiosity.
However, there will always be some individuals who fear rational thought. Knowledge is their biggest enemy.
A noble warrior’s life is done when he dies, but knowledge lives on. Wisdom passes down through generations and exposes fallacies.
Hence, those in power target institutions of learning.”
https://medium.com/publishous/who-was-guilty-of-destroying-the-great-library-of-alexandria-85f72f8f9543
“Test the spirits whether they be of God for many false spirits have gone out into the world.”
“And if it is in the Bible, it’s mere repetition.”
Where is the declaration made by Peter [ or any one else ] made prior to about 30AD?
[ new wine in old wineskins ]
I should have realized this would devolve into a bash the bible routine. I did not realize [ after years of reading your stuff ] that you were an unbeliever.
If the Father has not revealed it to you there is nothing I can [ should ] do unless you ask.
There is no middle ground concerning Jesus. Either he was a raving lunatic or He is exactly who He says He is.
Now, back to the vid – what is the significance of a Jupiter/Mars conjunction?
Read Rabbi Cahn. He writes about this kind of thing. He’s an Old Testament guy just like you.
I “believe” in all the scriptures including the “Bible” (a compendium of many books) or at least the good parts of it.
“He’s an Old Testament guy just like you.”
Another miss.
“A chapter by chapter examination of the Book of Hebrews; this book examines the ways in which God has moved towards a better covenant with man. The historical background of the Book of Hebrews as well as contextual discussions add insight and relevance to Hebrews.”
Read freely:
https://godskingdom.org/studies/books/hebrews-immigrating-from-the-old-covenant-to-the-new
The significance of any transiting planet and the aspects it makes depends a lot on whose chart you’re looking at. E.g., superficially it looks like this conjunction means I should buy a lottery ticket, as it occurs in my house of money and also speculation. Except that the conjunction makes no aspects at all to any other planet in my chart, except my Mars, to which it is inconjunct–meaning a somewhat discordant note. It probably means I’ll buy something and suffer buyer’s remorse. Mars and Jupiter can also indicate extravagant spending.
It could be interesting to look at where this conjunction falls in the US chart, but not interesting enough for me to bother looking. I don’t know much about that kind of astrology anyway. I can’t even remember what you call it.
Enter jarek, nice thread down the tubes.
I helped. Maybe I should only post on Thursdays or Sundays.
Then what?
If you only post on Thursdays and Sundays, that means you get the last word in.
I don’t want the last word. I want the truth.
Always.
Islander: You’re wrong a lot. And you can’t stand hearing about it. But that’s what this place is for. I’m sure there are sites where everyone agrees with every one else is circle rub fashion…..
He has a lot of fans, outside the regular commenters.
What’s your problem?
Elk:
“What’s you problem?”
I don’t mind being wrong.
In fact, I often hope that I am.
But there is really no interesting debate or discussion with some like ‘Rek. Some people just like to fight.
1. Gigantic chip on shoulder regarding women and commenters here whom he knows to be women. Has not yet explained his free-floating resentment of women, or women here, except to accuse them of being feminazis. Any woman who stands up for herself is a feminazi, don’t you know!!
2. Leading from the chip on shoulder he enjoys “pulling hair” and flinging turds rather than engaging with what people actual write in a reasonable fashion.
3. Leading to the obnoxious tic of third-person statements informing women of what they think: “Islander thinks X because she is blah-blah; Green Alba thinks Y because she said X.” He hates women, he enjoys insulting them, he thinks he knows them inside out and hence makes dumb sweeping statements about what they think, both generally and individually, especially those he has divined to be feminazis (basically all women). He enjoys being a jerk, deriding the stupid opinions he himself has made up for women and is sure they hold on the basis of the above. He enjoys insulting women in an utterly childish style. Of course this says a lot about him, and nothing about specific women, or women in general.
He has been called out on this behavior by others besides me, but—like a little boy who enjoys cutting farts at the dinner table—I guess he just can’t stop.
Totally agree with your assessment, Islander, and it’s always disappointing to see how many bolster and cheer on his misogynistic attacks.
And can we add the unfettered racism?
I can ignore most of the racism up here, but Jarek will inject it into every discussion EVEN WHEN RACE ISN’T A FACTOR. It’s kinda like people with knee-jerk TDS. Same goes for anything about women. And yeah, he posts non-sequitur posts detrimental to women all the time, and usually it’s religious bigotry or propaganda.
So Mary, you admit that Blacks commit far more serious crimes per capita than Whites, right?
And that you said, Men are death. Women are life?
Islander: Messi started the thread by responding to me. So I didn’t “enter the thread” out of nowhere. Wrong again! AND rude as you so often are.
Jarek insists on continuing to misquote me even after being called out on doing it to me and everyone else up here (mostly women of course).
LOL.
Welp, Jupiter/Mars conjunctions occur roughly once every two years, since Mars completes its circuit of the zodiac in roughly two years.
Just offhand, one would say that Jupiter (which is expansive) contacting Mars (which rules war and physical energies in general) would indicate an expansion of war, as well as greater funding for it/them.
The conjunction is in Aries (the sign that rules war) and is exact on the 29th/30th of May. Jupiter/Mars conjunctions in Aries probably occur about once every twelve years. I wouldn’t get too excited about it.
Stirring up wars, expanding them, and funding them is a fairly routine scenario.
The thing is, they believe [ live-by ] it.
Youtuber Southern Prepper.1 said that the Shit has already hit the fan,.just that most people haven’t figured it out yet.
He reported on an interesting email about 40 foot high ballistic walls being installed around electrical substations in NJ.
“Yes, Hwood loves short, big-headed, small-bodied manlets since the 1980s or so.
So funny.
No more Lee Marvins or Burt Lancasters.” ~ MaryQueen (previous article’s threads)
Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster, ay? LOL
Not that I give a sh!t about Hollywood, except to pirate the odd film if I have company that wants it.
But as a related aside, I find a lot of female television broadcasters manly too. LOL
Don’t get me going. LOL
“I guess they were too manly.” ~ MaryQueen
Of course they’re not every ‘queen’s cup o’ man, hon.
Certainly not mine if I was gay or female cis gender or whatever I am supposed to call it.
…But so are those two your personal faves or what?
I have a female friend who asked me once who my guy crush would be if, and I’ve been trying to figure that out ever since. The best I could come up with at the time was Carl Sagan.
“Shoplet, that’s Al Pacino on the left, and DeNiro in his elevator shoes in the pic.”
Ya, I know. I caught that the moment I sent it.
“N.O. is right, it never gets old.
Fucking hilarious!” ~ MaryQueen
(shrug) Knock yourselves out. LOL
Oddly, Gonzalo Lira made a very similar comment on his morning about filmakers’ preference for short people with proportionally larger heads because they register better on camera.
Big eyes too, you need big eyes to make it as a movie star.
Like Julie London and Humphrey Bogart.
Tim Robbins is relatively recent Hollywood, relatively tall and might have smallish eyes, yes?
I don’t know about Leonardo DiCaprio’s height, but he’s got the ‘heavy’ ‘bedroom’ eyes, so that’s out for big eyes, yes?
But again, they both seem to be apples: Small/flat asses; relatively-broad shoulders. Like MQ’s Lancaster et al.. Ditto with these cookie-cutter extra-broad shouldered, smallish boobed anchor-women and their odd wig-like curling-iron ‘hairpieces’ and cartoonish makeup.
But if, as MaryQueen writes, so-called ‘manly men’, are going to have daughters that would seem to stand to reason that they might turn out kind of ‘manly’ as per MQ’s designation for what’s apparently manly. LOL
It would be nice if your last paragraph made sense, but it just doesn’t.
See my response below in the main thread margin.
And AOC.
They know full well her big brown eyes, toothy grin, and red lips register in people’s minds.
The Doppelgängers
Tulsi Gabbard too yes? She even seems to have a kind of Tom Cruise-shape of face.
Well, let’s face it, we are all part of the same human family. I see people’s faces in others’ all the time. I even met and spoke briefly with one of my own doppelgängers (and joked about it).
Tulsi’s eyes aren’t quite as striking as AOC’s, but she does have a quite glorious raven mane.
Jarek has a crush on her, he’s said it in previous threads. Of all the people to be crushing on – lol.
Tulsi’s raven mane and Jarek’s crush on her? I’ll have to take a second look now.
Dunno about that. Clint Eastwood, Lee “Angel eyes” and Eli Wallach all had small eyes…
That might be so, but I looked up DeNiro’s height and, as I mentioned in the previous threads, it was apparently 5’9″, but due to age I guess, he’s now 5′ 7 1/2″, but so what. But that seems to qualifies for Night Owl, if recalled, as midget. Anyway, it can get pretty ridiculous pretty fast and that’s why I mentioned the pigeon toes of the other actor. I mean, let’s everyone on here, especially including MaryQueen and Night Owl take pics of themselves at varous angles, post them online and we can all have a go at their setups. LOL
But here’s something else about this big head thing: The Hulk has a small head and big body. Awesome.
But here’s something else, since I’m on a roll, DeNiro et al might still be apples. Maybe check out their asses. Their shoulders might also still be relatively broad. So maybe shorter apples than MaryQueen’s, eh, Lancaster and the other guy, but still apples just the same.
^u^
did stunt work years ago in hollyweird–at 6’3″ was always told to get away from the short guys!! if they say their 5’9″ the truth is they are 5’6″ or so–J Wayne they say 6’4″ but actually 6’2″ and he seemed really tall around the short dudes–my fav was JIm Arness–he liked hanging around the crews ,normal guy-i think he was a true 6’5″–he towered on the set..
Nowadays, it may be harder to fake one’s height in Hollyweird or elsewhere, but in any case, humans as mammals have the capacity to evolve to be quite tall (or short) over time, perhaps especially given our bipedal status.
But as I briefly mentioned in the previous threads, extra height and mass has its cons. There’s also the issue of greater sexual dimorphism.
My fave cowboy giant:
Clint Walker,
Why would Night Owl or I take pictures of ourselves? We’re not trying to be actors.
If it helps, I am 181 cm, 175 lbs., and look a lot like Ewan McGregor.
Works for me.
Yeah, and I look like Marilyn Monroe!! And Clint Walker. Combined . . .
It’s not bad going through life being good looking, as I can attest 😉
I’ve seen your pic, Mary, and you look very glam. 🙂
I feel like Worzel Gummidge by comparison!
It was rhetorical to make a point, apparently lost on you.
“It’s not bad going through life being good looking, as I can attest ? ” ~ MaryQueen
“If it helps, I am 181 cm, 175 lbs., and look a lot like Ewan McGregor.” ~ Night Owl
(rolls eyes)
DeNiro’s problem isn’t that he’s a shortarse; his problem is that he’s a leftist turd.
The short temper and desire to control others are common among short men.
This is an observation made over many years.
I never thought much about it when I was younger, but height is a really big deal to a lot of men.
Lots of jacked dudes/gym rat types are often short, too.
Dustin Hoffman
Ya, I thought about him but didn’t open up a pic up to double check. But if you are looking for something specific, there’s always a danger to cherrypick.
Ah, yes, Mumbles. Where is he these days?
Ryan Gosling and Ryan Renolds are both taller than average (likely both over 6′) and they both have bigger eyes than average, depending on what you mean by bigger. Bulgy? No. They are both from Canada, though, but work in Hollywood.
Tom Cruise.
I suggest that it may be less bout the eyes so much as who is responsible for their hiring/casting and what they look like vis-a-vis what type of face they are attracted to. Ever notice that all the actors eerily look like each other in a film? They even mention that effect in the film, ‘Palm Springs’. See it for that but also see it because it’s a fun film.
Always remember Cruise in “Valkyrie”, where he was playing the very tall Von Stauffenberg. They did a good job of making TC look tall and stringy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRbhE3GRiUE
Tom seems to like to have fun, so that’s nice.
I thought it was the larger the head, the more inherently attractive cuz that’s closer to the proportions of babies.
Because it’s true. Just google it. I have a sister who’s an actor, been on stage and TV. She has a larger than normal head. It’s what looks good on camera. This is common knowledge among actors & agents.
I’ll take some of that with a grain of salt.
I couldn’t care less what you do.
I didn’t know Stallone was that short for many years. They don’t tell you and they don’t put them next to normal sized people. It’s all camera angles.
So, maybe it’s not that they “like” them, just that they don’t care. And there may be something to that old saw, “the charisma of the short man”, a la Emerson’s Law of Compensation. So by this light, they get the charisma which the big guy won’t have, and they hide how short the stars in question really are.
Did you know that the Special Forces are full of guys like this? Very few big guys, mostly well built short and medium sized guys. They’re stronger pound for pound and they can’t take more punishment and keep on going.
That seems to be the case for construction workers too although I’m not 100% sure. And the managers might be more likely to be the tall ones. Even at Walmart. LOL
Yes, Caste is real, Shop. You can see it come naturally into play.
Women love height. Six foot in the minimum requirement for many of them now.
Jarek, I’m running late and have to head out, so we’ll earmark this for tomorrow or later today.
Understood and agreed to some degree, as in evidence with Night Owl’s ostensible height ‘anti-fetish’ demo; the brother’s ‘scary’ height, the quasi-mantra, ‘fear’ of being DeNiro’s height, (5’9″ considered ‘midget’), complete with a platform-shoe shot as if he’s not an actor playing a role, and so on. Yikes!
But nature has other ideas and is far more nuanced– beyond our comprehension.
The point is sort of inadvertently potentially embellished by the ostensible case of Hollywood’s ‘male-type’ shift.
So things can turn on a dime. .
There are cool men and women out there that are playing with full decks. Stick with those and let your conceptual tribe split and evolve beyond some things like the caste or height bullshit, and whatever else have you.
It’s about as bad in a way as Wokeism.
My grandfather must have been 5’5″. Short little farmer named Felix, but nicknamed Tough. Strap iron muscles and a bass voice. My brother was 5’9″ but had the same wiry build his whole life. I have never known two people with more iron endurance than Grandpa and my brother. I have that same build, so I’m not sure what recessive genes are responsible for my towering, mooselike son.
Maybe the other half of that towering mooselike son picked up something from hanging around those NASA propulsion test stands
Maybe you were kidnapped by a UFO and had him implanted into your womb, and then had your memory wiped.
That certainly must be it, Jared.
In point of fact, I really did not know who the heck his science-fictiony father was or what he looked like. Not for 17 years, anyhow. Kinda makes me sound like the town bicycle, doesn’t it?
The SF thing kind of makes sense. I would think bigger guys would need a lot more calories to stay in the field for extended periods.
I bet they know there is a sweet spot in terms of how many calories a guy can carry versus how many he needs to consume.
I have stood next to his brother, Frank. He is not short.
Average height for white male is 5’7 from what I understand.
big weird eyes, the captain of captain n tenille. he has some condition.
My brother is about 5’7″ and, like you, also quite touchy about it.
🙂
I’m perfectly happy with my height and just find it amusing, maybe silly that people will niggle over an inch or two here or there, apparently like you, babe.
Small-man syndrome is hilarious.
Were I short, I would be fine with it, but I must admit that it is nice not being DeNiro tall.
Small man syndrome: Exhibit A: Mini-Mengele
Indeed, Hereward.
Small-man syndrome? LOL
Or your own reverse personal promo? To smooth over some fissures in your confidence/ego? By stepping on/belittling others to elevate yourself as the saying goes?
I guess one can be ‘small’ and ‘big’ in different ways, in ways one may not even realize, and that their meanings can change/invert.
Speaking of which, I neglected to say earlier before heading out that if your brother had another brother instead of you he may have been less, as you write, ‘touchy about it’.
One or another moral of the story maybe: Just try to be the best version of you that you can be and lose those who would make you (and others) feel otherwise.
Height seems to be a big issue for you, Shoplet.
Perhaps some self-reflection is needed.
Shoplet starts a massive rant over a comment I made that’s not even on this thread.
The tantrum is starting to sound like small man’s complex alright.
Woo ya, ‘massive rant’ and ‘small-man syndrome’ quasi-mantra, etc….
‘How dare Shoplet™ challenge us like that! Take my comment from another thread!?’
LOL
Methinks some people hereon are chafing and projecting, bigly.
Here’s some Virtual Chafing Cream™. Apply as required.
^u^
You got rekt, Shoplet.
Deal with it.
LMAO! I think you nailed it.
To paraphrase Shoplet: “I’m 3 foot 9 and it bugs me!”
That’s what I’m thinking.
Burt Lancaster and Lee Marvin types look (to me) more like a representation of the average man when I was growing up. I don’t necessarily find them attractive and I don’t have ‘personal favs’ of actors, because I’m an adult and so haven’t had schoolgirl crushes on men since I was like 12.
So, they are just representative. And preferable to the types of ‘leading men’ that are now in fashion.
Cis is a slur, BTW. It’s something the trans activists made up in order to belittle women even more than they already have.
Twink? What Do You Think?
Hey, MaryQueen, how are you this fine Tuesday? ^u^
I discuss/critique all kinds of things (online and in real life), not just about height and sociopersonal issues surrounding it nor, for example, as represented in film & other media.
I also sometimes include quotes from elsewhere, such as yours in that case. That’s just good research.
In ‘gay’ parlance, your ‘manlet’, or however you might wish to ‘slur’ it/its context, might be a ‘twink’, which, if understood correctly, is something along the lines of a ‘boyish man’. Unsure if twink is a slur, but anyway…
If, as you seem to suggest, the Hollywood film industry (others?) whose product you presumably grew up with and/or were exposed to, had a certain representation for ‘your average man’, perhaps they or whomever got somehow tired of that representation, and/or it was not representative in particular locales, and so maybe it sort of evolved into what you suggest they have more of now, more along the lines of the ‘twink’.
Further along that line, perhaps some gay men and hetero women can get tired of a certain kind of man and perhaps they even get a divorce from one and decide to try a little something different, like a ‘twink’.
“I don’t necessarily find them attractive and I don’t have ‘personal favs’ of actors, because I’m an adult and so haven’t had schoolgirl crushes on men since I was like 12.” ~ MaryQueen
I seem to recall writing ‘personal faves’ as opposed to ‘schoolgirl crushes on men when you were like 12’, but in any case, I’m reasonably sure that you’ll agree that one, at most any age, can find certain people attractive…
That writ, what do you think of Islander’s “fave cowboy giant”?
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
OK, my comment is awaiting moderation.
Now if this comment is also “awaiting moderation” it will be kind of like the “Droste effect.”
I was never a John Wayne fan.
If human beings were 3-4 feet tall rather than 5.5-6.5 feet tall, I wonder if our resource consumption would be cut in half. Then lengthen lifespan to compensate for declining fertility (at least in countries where there are industrial byproducts like estrogen mimics), and you’d have Hobbit World without the hairy feet. What would be interesting is how the younger generations would respond to older generations that would hang around for 30-50 more years of vigorous middle age. : )
This reminds me of the plot twist of Kurt Vonnegut’s _Slapstick_.
The world has been depopulated by the Green Death, a mysterious plague. The someone looks at an infected specimen under a microscope, and the causative organism turns out to be microminiaturized Chinese citizens. China had figured out a way to stretch their finite resources!
Another thumbs up for an Amish school . . . assuming the Amish have the patience for educating “outsiders.” We’ll need such skills either way the future goes. If Satan Klaus and his evil elves succeed, we’ll need an opt-out “parallel” society. If they don’t succeed and we just get the classic Long Emergency, we’ll need that know-how just the same.
Today’s piece is so very different from all commentary I’ve seen on these topics to date.
It is dealing with reaction to what is coming instead of just bitching. Something the Mob in DC needs to start doing.
Except their primary purpose is to destroy the USA.
I think it sounds like a good idea and certainly one with a future. While they’re at it, maybe they could give the women you know some lessons on how to can food — I’m serious. I used to help my grandmother make “leather beans.” It was an old fashioned way of drying beans where you take sewing thread and string them and dry them. They taste differently from fresh but they’re still nutritious.
Practical skills have been lost and will have to be regained for any kind of civil society to reestablish. If people can’t or won’t learn (or have no one to teach them) eventually it will be MadMax or The Road.
Most of the women I know do a lot of canning. Tomatoes and other high-acid foods can be canned in a boiling-water-bath canner. For green beans, chili, soups, etc., you need a pressure canner. If possible, spring for an electric canner, like the NESCO one.
We’re growing a big garden this year: 50 tomato plants, a 50-foot row of green beans (with succession plantings planned), and another of okra, and lots of kale, collards, spinach, lettuce, and onions already big enough to harvest. Carrots are still small. It’s time to plant squash.
In past years, when there was not enough time to do much gardening or some things didn’t do well, my daughter and I went to the Amish produce auctions, where we would buy 50-100 pounds of tomatoes each and can them. That’s a good option for people with no time or space to garden. Many people around here buy vegetables like asparagus when they are on sale cheap and can them.
I’ve heard of the “leather beans,” but I’ve never tried that.
One good practice is to make big pots of soup or chili and can the leftovers. This works especially well for small families or people living alone. You wind up with quarts and quarts of “meals in a jar” for winter.
I love this post Mr. Kunstler! Fortunately I believe we do not have to go full blown Amish to maintain our civility but there are a lot of skills they can teach! I recently wrote a piece about horses not being a common sight for a while into the future due to Americans not growing a garden and having to eat them and any other farm animals they can kill.
The Amish will have a tough time for a while as they still spray their crops with pesticides sadly.
Fortunately, being millennials and living offgrid full time, my partner and I can happily say that we do not have to go back to the 18 century but can simplify our lives now in ways that are enriching and fulfilling.
Let’s see.
Without cars, part time electricity, most high tech items especially the Net gone?
Horses will not be eaten, they will be treasured at the prime transportation in the future.
The Amish are a good model for the future. Their lifestyle including their support logistics will be unchanged. My only fear for them is with their pacifist if beliefs, they are fair game for the scum pouring out of the cities.
A book called Lucifer’s Hammer was around in the 70’s as an attempt to show what Armageddon from a comet would be like. It makes JHK’s WMBH very optimistic and provides a good model. The city scum may be the end of us all.
The city scum won’t last long. By the time they leave their cities for the poorly understood country side, it will be too late.
They won’t get far.
@ White German Shepherd:
Only the toughest of the tough will ever make it out of the cities. The likeliest bunch are Hispanics. They are also the likeliest to be welcomed, due to both the ability and the willingness to make themselves useful.
With the Asians, especially the Chinese, I can easily envision them figuring out a way to make a nice living without leaving even very disordered cities. I think they’ll set up trade networks with somebody, somewhere, or run a “restuarant,” even if they have to cook over a campfire, and even manage to protect their neighborhoods reasonably well. Quite a few urban Asians own some acreage outside the cities, where they grow produce, and sometimes cut flowers for the markets. It’s interesting to me that you never see any Asian craftspeople at the markets; they all sell produce and flowers, and the most likely Asian small busiesses are groceries and restaurants.
I would guess that few blacks will ever make it out of the cities. They’ll flail around killing each other and robbing the businesses in their own neighborhoods. Once there’s nothing left to steal nearby, they will expand these operations outwards, eventually reaching the close-in suburbs. The suburbanites will flee.
One of the biggest problems that rural people will face is what to do about fleeing hordes of white suburbanites. Most will have no skills, nothing of value, and no way to obtain anything of value. And they will probably secretly look down their noses at the country people they want to mooch off of. Nevertheless, it will be hard blocking the freeway exits and telling them and their kids to keep going.
None of this will a nation make. A nation is one people, not this fantastic conglomeration of aliens.
We’re Humpty Dumpty now. And all the king’s horse’s and all the king’s men will not be able to put America back together again.
John maybe you’re right but I do not see people treasuring horses as most people have no idea how to ride, take care of, or utilize these wonderful creatures. Food will consume our every waking thoughts and given the amount of unskilled people in this country we see human labor as a much hotter commodity than horses.
That’s my feeling too, John. Too many assume that the psychopaths in government will let us tune out and do our own thing. They won’t. They are leftist maniacs and can’t stand people being outside their control. We will need to be Amish with defensive options.
I’m not sure how many rural people have considered that “defensive options” will not be enough. At some point they’ll have to go on the offensive. One obviously like problem is what they used to call “nesters”–little bands of people who fled from the cities who have no way to live other than preying on others.
Another problematic type are the liberals who infest even rural areas and who are used to living off of government jobs and and other sources of government money, and otherwise leeching off of their productive neighbors. They are used to having political power. They will try to maintain or reintroduce a system in which they can continue to be leeches.
Both of these types can only be dealt with effectively through proactive offensive measures. The productive community will have to…ahem…”clean the out.”
“Proactive offensive measures.” I like your way of thinking, Anthea! I’m not in good health, so probably won’t survive the kind of societal breakdown we are probably facing. But I’m danged if I’m ever going to cower before the globalist swine.
Ok, so how did our ancestors deal with insectoid pests that ruin crops? Or maybe they didn’t?
Four seeds in a row, one for the rook, one for the crow, one will wither and one will grow.
And then what? Of those that grow, how to protect against bugs?
I don’t know, I’m just quoting old folk wisdom.
If I run across another one, I’ll let you know.
It occurs to me, though, that they had a LOT more birds than we do today.
So they planted extra for the birds and then the birds ate the bugs.
We can’t picture it, but they say that the skies and fields and forests used to be full of birds.
The passenger pigeon darkened the skies with their numbers.
Old time farms were a lot smaller and more diversified. That limits how much bugs can eat, as most bugs have a favorite type of food. So, while you may lose your brassica crop, you’ll be good on corn or potatoes that year. I grow organic (on a small scale) and always figure I’ll lose something. I grew 100 ears of corn in a 4’x4′ area 3 years ago. The next year, the rats got it all. But the pumpkins did well. You have to grow a lot of variety, and more than one staple.
Hedgerows on small farms are important sources of food and shelter for wildlife like birds, who eat bugs. Hedgerows were removed to make the use of large farm machinery possible. Out here in California, they go over the tomato fields with bus-sized machines that pick, strip foliage, chop it and leave it as a mulch, and then drop the tomatoes into a carrier truck the size of a rail-road car, which runs parallel to the picker.
“Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; but in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.”
A year of fallow land breaks the insect reproduction cycle. But everyone has to obey the law or they just move to where the food is.
The medieval English standard was three different crops ( I believe one beans, one grain, one misc) then the fourth fallow.
The bugs will just fly (most insects have wings) to your non-fallow fields or to your neighbor’s.
There has been a lot written about natural pest controls. One thing that helps a lot is getting away from mono-crop agriculture. I have always had a lot of trouble with squash bugs. I am told you plant a “trap crop” of a variety of squash that is more relished by bugs, but I’ve never tried this, and I’m not sure what you do with the “trap crop.” I am also told that you can deter white cabbage flies with ordinary flour. You just go out in the garden with a flour sifter and douse the plants. Same with kale and collards. This is another method I haven’t tried. I have gotten rid of “blister bugs” by spraying them with a tea made with cayenne peppers (and lots of stomping on them). Tomato hornworms are easily controlled by hand picking.
The organic gospel maintains that, for the most part, pests are attracted to unhealthy plants, and the plants are unhealthy because the soil is poor. And often the pests are uncontrolled because their predators have been killed off by prior poor agricultural practices.
Back in the day, I read a lot of John Jeavons’s writings on this stuff. But there is plenty of material around, if you want to study up on this. One guy on my Facebook page often quotes Alan Savory, but there are many others.
NewRev…..what does your web link go to gmail???????
“…enriching and fulfilling.” That’s the key.
Technology, with its attendant comforts and distractions, can be addictive in its own right. And addicts are often not able to conceive of a life worth the living without the technology drug.
The flip side is the technocratic elites. I suspect they have their own “Whig version of history:” Before the Industrial Revolution, life was horrible. Most people eked out a precarious living from subsistence farming, their lives alternating between long hours of backbreaking labor and exhaustion. Worse, royalty and clergy kept the people in constant terror. But now many of us are mercifully free of all that, and we want it to stay that way. “How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen gay Paree?”
So this leads to a kind of nihilism. Better for humanity to go out with an atomic bang than to return humanity to endless centuries of its former humiliation. Just like the local drug lord who much prefers to to live largely and dangerously for a few brief years before dying in a hail of bullets, rather than to spend decades as a pitiful McBusiness wage slave or cubicle dweller.
End of Whig techno-history. What is missing is the imagination to see that there are more alternatives than (stereotypical) medieval misery or modern-day malaise. Alternatives that you are making real.
Also, future generations will not miss our gadgets; God willing, they’ll be too busy enjoying deeply rooted relationships that are a rarity today. We are the immigrants crossing the Atlantic for the sake of our children. They’ll no doubt hear our tales of the Old World, but let’s hope the stories kindle gratitude for being in the New World.
Wendell Berry has a school in Kentucky that teaches some of these skills.
Soil engagement and health.
How to use a team of mules.
Basic stuff.
His last class was about 20 students or so.
At least its a start.
Thanks Jim for the great read this morning.
Amish are great and they are quiet and don’t fool around.
They make great cheese…
“That’s my idea of how to build back better. What do you think?”
I think it is in line with the spirit of those adapters whose stories you recounted in “Living in the Long Emergency”.
Beautifully said ???
I put a thumbs up and smiley face emoji but they came up as “???” Lol my bad!
‘That’s my idea of how to build back better. What do you think?’
I think the N.A. population is screwed for the most part. We boomers have adopted our parents skills that were acquired from the post war years and those skills that embraced agrarian lifestyles will go only so far because of age. I am 70 now and must admit was going full bore until this milestone and boy have the lights gone regarding the realisation of stamina limits. Nonetheless I will persevere with the big hope that my children and their respective spouses come to our collective rescue. So far they do not see what’s coming despite regular updates at the dinner table.
Our locale in the Ottawa Valley is now rich with Mennonite activity and I often wish their lifestyle was my choice at an early age. I thought I was smart by leaving the big city 46 years ago to come here pursuing a life in the forestry business. Problem now, everything I have to facilitate my simple lifestyle runs on diesel including my wood processor. For now we are OK but going back to spitting with an axe is a no go. I wait for my three girls and their families to become fully aware of the Long Emergency and the World Made by Hand
Graham
The irony of nature. We get older and lose the ability to use the wisdom we have accumulated.
The millennials and “Z” have not had the experiences to guide them forward and will panic as things progress. They will, and have already started depending on the government for help to only find out the government is stupider than they are.
The initial response? Look at the homeless tent cities sprouting up everywhere now. Governments should be ashamed.
It has started, wait until this inflation shows the limitation of socialism by the government to take care of the gimmes. The SHTF day is approaching.
Graham: The Mennonites in Renfrew County are not unlike Jim’s experience with the transient Amish putting roots down in the poorer soil of the Upper New York State. Similarly in Douglas they have made some of those rocky farms into gardens of Eden in about 10 years with horse fertilizing the fields as they till em up. A real parallax from the heavily fertilized and dosed up chemical checkerboard tile drained farms producing soy and corn for ethanol and oils: which will soon become unsustainable – unlike these Mennonites who even produce decent duck eggs to consume.
Besides Renfrew County, can you elaborate where Mennonites live in the Ottawa Valley ? Used to live in Ottawa eons ago. Thanks !
They have actually migrated up from southern Ontario in the circle between Orangeville and Owen Sound. Land was cheaper here they say so we have been blessed to have them come and turn these rock farms into there former producing status. Last year in Douglas area a generational farm came up for auction and the Mennonites wowed the audience and paid over a million cash for it. 250 acres.
Many of the Mennonites use tractors from what I’ve heard.
Thoreau adopted a very austere vegetarian diet, most just cabbage or something. Where will you get your strength, someone asked? Where does he get his strength, Thoreau replied, pointing to a work horse.
Jarek: Yeah but Henry we’re not horses and we can’t synthesize proteins like they do.
Some believe that this inadequate diet, led to him contracting TB (the scourge of that civilization) and his early death.
There’s a sort of art film, Silent Light, it’s weird and is set in a Mennonite community in Mexico. I didn’t know there were Mennonites in Mexico. They’re sort of the modern Amish.
The movie has scenes of farming . That’s the arty part, you wouldn’t believe how beautiful farming with machinery could be made to look.
was he hung like a hoss?
I think the Amish skills school sounds like a great idea.
There is no end of topics that could be taught – farming, food preservation, light construction, blacksmithing, woodworking, just to name a few.
Morals.
Sign me up!
James Howard: Superb idea. Factor in lodging and vittles. Presentation as to why one needs said beasts of burden, how to acquire, house, feed and train. Then harness and direct.
For those still in love fantasizing on how the brilliant centuries old plan of evil geniuses will enslave those unlucky enough to survive the perfectly orchestrated destruction of Homo sapiens, do not read about how the -now former- head of Iran’s Quds force got capped. Nor the list of ALL Davos attendees. And, for God’s sake, do not connect the two. Y’all seem to NEED this absurd fantasy.
In times past, there were three very wise men, any one of whose intellect would surpassed the combined davos IQ. Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara. They looked upon a small Asian country, weakened by 25+ years of war, poor, unshod masses yearning for a strong guiding democratic preaching savior. Directing their massive intellect – coupled with the mightiest military force extant – they, along with the country behind them, got their asses royally kicked over the course of ten or so years.
Yet these davos clowns are going to destroy all societies and rule over the leftovers?!!
That’s some serious cognitive dissonance boys and girls. Nuff Said.
Getsome. It’s probably true about the ultimate idiocy of the Davos crowd. However, the point is that even if they fail, their efforts will cause immense damage. These people need to be kicked out of public life.
Kicked out of public life? How hanging them and watching their legs kick? After a just and speedy trial as is their right. The speedier the better, as is our right.
That’s what I wanted to write, Jarek, but I don’t have your killer instinct! 🙂
You can’t murder a murderer.
There are some practical skills schools around the country. Take a look at Tillers International.org. Doc Hammermill has a horsemanship school in Montana. You might want to spring for a years worth of the Sugar Creek national edition, a Plain people news source from Sugar Creek, Ohio. I believe that is about $45 a year for a weekly newspaper. If you are anywhere near Montgomery, Indiana on July 1st and 2nd,you could attend Horse Progress Days. Animal powered tech has continued to advance. There’s also Small Farmer’s Journal, 4 issues @ $47 per year.
Frankly, reading these publications will make you want to retain the tech you have but they do show that life can be pleasant without it. Best of luck to every one.
with open borders, what skills will save me?
Second, third, and fourth languages?
There’s never a bad time to pick up some basic Spanish on one of the many language sites.
word from silicon valley, learn mandarin.
just heard a talk by skousen. he says panama will fall to the chinese.
talk is at utube / liberty n finance.
Regarding language learning, I found it notable to learn that the PRC investors in southern Africa (not sure if South Africa) are requiring their local hires to study Mandarin Chinese.
That not only indicates that they are in Africa for the long run – not just smash’n’grab like the Euro-colonialists – but that they are dedicated to instilling a “Chinese mindset” in those rough societies.
I say “More power to them”. The Africans have fucked up their continent royally, often with the connivance of greedy paleface buccaneers. Let the Chinese see whether they can make it a decent, safe, hard-working, orderly place to live.
(I know – “rots-a-ruck” but I still find the effort fascinating.)
As for Latinoamerica, ditto. They may well be ready for a ruthless, smooth, totalitarian ethos, considering the failure and despair that afflicts the continent.
Panama is a classic case (basket case, at least without the income from the canal). Wasn’t it John McCain who suggested Uncle should barge right in and take over the whole country again?
Whitey’s day is done. He’s shot his wad. “President Biden” is wasting his time and plenty of hydrocarbons touring East Asia. Smiles, photo ops, a few million spread around here and there to the current ruling class. And when he’s gone, he’s gone.
It will be interesting to see how he intends to “defend” Taiwan against the PLA, Chinese Navy and so on. And to do so without launching a nuclear attack on our banker I mean the Pipple’s Republic.
Williamsburg Virginia is a start from skills reclamation. They still use the apprenticeship method of passing skills.
Old Sturbridge?
BTW, all the East Coasters that will want to move west?
It is awful dry out here. MaryQueen found out that a move from LA to Boise did not change her climate much, heat wise. Right?
The dryness and increased chance of wildfires are what give me pause about moving West.
We simply don’t have anywhere similar to that here in the East.
The wildfires in the West move differently from fires in the East. West moves treetop to treetop, East moves along the ground and the undergrowth.
More a comment, observation, or whatever one might call it.
I’m in California, been here for 40 years, originally from NYC. The climate has changed considerably in those 40 years. It’s much drier and warmer.
What Easterners don’t understand about the west is that everywhere 50 miles west of the Mississippi is basically desert, and should have been left in its natural state. The buffalo (or cattle) should have been left on the plains, instead of plowing it up and growing grain monocultures. The only reason it was possible to agrify the west was because of stupendous use of ground water and dams. Well, those aquifers are almost used up, and the dammed up water is now so low, it can’t run the electric turbines. Party’s over out here.
Oh yes it did! CA is temperate all year round with some cold days. But Idaho has a real winter. Big diff!
The similarity is the dryness/desert climate.
Well, ladies and germs;
Situational awareness this AM reports;
PRESIDENT BIDEN VISITS TOKYO, ABANDONS STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY ON TAIWAN: On Monday, in a joint press conference with Japan’s President Fumio Kishida, President Biden stated that if Taiwan were attacked by China, the U.S. would come to its defense. This is the first time a President has openly stated that the U.S. would defend Taiwan against China and is a significant marker that the U.S. is abandoning both the concept of strategic ambiguity and its former “one China” policy. Beijing responded by saying the issue is “purely a Chinese internal affair which brooks no further interference… Nobody should stand against the 1.4 billion Chinese people”. – M.M.
I would suggest that:
The Rubicon has been crossed…or
The die is cast…or
The shit is in the fire…or…or…
Well, you know what I mean Apparently, with the litany of other issues on his plate, Biden needs a bit of drama in our foreign affairs, and China has repeatedly responded when theTaiwan button is pushed.
If we are not yet “In it now”…we will be soon.
The monkeys will be used as a pretext for invasion. With 1.4B people and god only knows how many monkeys on board, the Chinese will be a formidable foe. “The Joe Biden” is playing with fire.
Back in those simpler times, if you injured yourself doing things by hand, you often died of blood poisoning or walked around with a limp the rest of your life.
There are tradeoffs.
Yes, penicillin wasn’t available until the early 1940s if I’m not mistaken.
A limp what?
Beryl – you are right. I have a limp from a horse riding accident, I tore my ACL when I landed. Horses are dangerous – everyone I know that had or rode horses has had some injury or other. Speaking from experience, I’ll say that bicycles are safer.
Agree about horses, but bicycles are only safer if there are no cars around.
Of course, that’s what we are talking about here.
Paula, I have sustained a series of minor but painful injuries riding my mountain bikes since 2005 – much more than I got from fifty years of high-speed motorcycling, on and off public roads.
There is a similarity to horse riding: you are going to fall, and likely fall hard. Not if but when. If you can’t take the pain then avoid riding.
Yes, I was referring to bikes as transportation though.
And I quit riding a while back when my sister fell off a horse and injured her back. It really slowed her up.
I had injuries as a teenager, but I wasn’t willing to fall off as an old person.
Very true. I did a good deal of horseback riding in central Tennessee’s hills and hollers. Never fell. Never seriously injured, but many, many close calls. Saw lots of others get hurt. Comes with the territory.
I marvel at how Gen. Forrest and his men rode like demons across this same countryside for years fighting from horseback during the War to Teach the Damnyankees Some Manners.
Tough sons of bitches.
Less risk than injecting MRNA though. So, hey.
Many strategic fires happening in USA.
Are they arsons? from who or where?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRB9JuOiPxU
Morning Jim – excellent post today! Thanks.
“I enjoyed the strange delight of being transported briefly into a scene of my own imagining” ~ JHK
I enjoyed the strange delight of being transported briefly into a scene of your own imagining (again). Thanks for that – time for a reread of WMBH and a read for anyone who has not yet read it.
You may or may not know about Eustace Conway, down at his Turtle Island preserve outside of Boone, NC – teaching the “old ways”. A legend in his own time – not unlike you.
His life story written by Elizabeth Gilbert – The Last American Man – is incredible. Throughout his life & now at 60 years old, he is larger than life and a personal hero to many I would guess, myself included.
He may well be The Last American Man – hopefully young men might follow in his footsteps, but I’m not so sure that’ll happen. Who knows, maybe BBB (the sane version) will include building back better young men.
After reading all these comments about farming, carpentry, horses, mules, and so on, I feel like I have a duty to report that large animals can be very dangerous, even the friendliest ones, cuz, well they’re animals, they’re large, and despite lots of training, they still have minds of their own. My wife, racehorse trainer, lost a chunk of her nose from a playful nip, and was sent to Shock/Trauma by a foal that machine-gunned her chest while still in the stall. A baby, for cryin’ out loud. Ex-brother-in-law also lost a chunk of his facial cheek, and another woman, very experienced, has a four-inch scar across her face.
It takes lots of experience to handle horses, mules, cattle, etc. Better get started!
I’ll admit I’ve had little experience with horses or mules. I do have a lot of motorcycle experience. I would think some good modern MX gear would work wonders around the brutes. A full face helmet and chest protector for starters. Maybe the gear would scare the animals? I’m sure the rodeo guys must have some good stuff they use. They go out of their way to antagonize the beasts.
Some of this wishful thinking on energy is bizarre indeed, even from the highest levels. For example, our Governor insists Ct will be “fossil fuel free” by the year 2030, a scant 7.5 years from now. Plans are in the works to close our one nuclear power plant by that time, as well as several other power plants fueled by natgas. It will take an estimated 12000-15000 wind turbines to replace the amount of electricity lost when those legacy plants are closed; currently we have 3, and one is broken down. What’s more, the whole grid has to be replaced to handle this new system of wind turbines but I don’t see any work at all being done on transmission lines and the like. This whole “Energy Transition” thing seems like wishful thinking at best, a scam at worst.
Also, The EV Revolution. What revolution? Rivian and Lucid are being touted every day on CNBC. The Lucid supposedly available now is priced at $179,000, the Rivian truck at $83,500 plus a $15,500 required subscription. WHO WILL BE BUYING THESE THINGS?
Marlin, maybe the gov knows something we don’t.
Who’d have thought, in America, one elected person would assume the authority to order us all how we are henceforth to live?
That we’d put up with it?
Our entire way of life is because elected people paid for the electric grid, planned the highways, zoned for suburbs, paid the farmers and made deals for the oil.
Now we are surplus.
How do they say it in the mafia movies? Nothing personal, just business.
BRH: I think what will happen is this: they will go hell for leather for their big green reset. It will cause massive misery. People will (finally!) rise up, and some kind of energy normality will be restored – if only for the time being. Even the sheep we’ve seen over the last two years don’t like freezing to death or forcing granny to ride the dynamo bike in the basement all night so they can watch re-runs of Friends.
Millstone, Marlin?
That’s the one, my friend.
Crusher, I follow RI news a little, you have your own problems with Climate Cranks in State Government interfering with the electrical grid, indeed, trying to dismantle it.
BRH: https://www.whsthelancelot.com/news/2020/01/31/millstone-past-present-and-future/
Who isn’t the slightly curious about the Amish? Maybe you could just do youtube interviews on their location without having the real estate involvement, unless you were thinking of advantages of having a faming interest of your own as well.
I’d sign up for some Amish lessons!
I live in Boonville, MO. We have a lot of Mennonite families in this area. Last week I heard the clippy clop of hooves, and a team of nice mules trotted by, pulling a large carriage.
Q: Anyone notice how we leapfrogged over killing chickens for bird flu and landed on monkey pox?
I forgot about bird flu. It’s just not scary enough, they keep trying, but the bird flu does not cooperate.
They probably realized the bird flu wasn’t translating into mass summer hysteria they way they’d hoped.
It must be tough for the dems trying to think up the mother of all scares for November. Ukraine is slipping towards the sports pages, Covid is a clunker, and monkey pox is likely a loser. WW3 is still an option, but they have their work cut out.
They need a major false flag to sell WW3 at this point.
Something on the level of the Statue of Liberty getting nuked by Russia during the 4thbof July fireworks might do it.
Oh no! Russia! Russia! Russia!
Not really having any idea what they will try pulling off for the big false flag event, sure, the Statue of Liberty.
I think this continually poking the bear isn’t going to end well. At some point they might just vaporize someplace where the weapons to keep the war going are coming from.
Putin’s March 2018 lengthy address with video graphics depicting what was on line and close to being on line should be enough to stop the bear-poking. However, greed has no bounds. The proxy war being waged is unparalleled in its prime purpose to continue enriching certain families and companies of the MIC.
The continual stream of celebrity types to the capital city of the territory referred to as Ukraine should be a tipoff there is more afoot than some contrived stories of Azov types becoming the enemy at the gates.
“It’s given me a business idea: to start an Amish skills school, buy a few acres with a barn and hire some Amish men to teach all us non-Amish how do a few things that might be good to know in the years ahead, like how to harness horses to a cart or a mule to a plow. (The Amish like to make a bit of cash-money when they can.) That’s my idea of how to build back better. What do you think?”
What do I think? Brilliant.
My grandparents retired to Lancaster Co., PA and lived there or 20 years or so before their passing. I’ve daydreamed recently about heading up there, knocking on a door and asking of they need farmhands in order to gain experience homesteading. Having some experience, from my grandmother’s background growing up on a farm to her expansive gardens – she rarely had to buy produce – and observations from visits to her Amish neighbors, I want to caution backyard gardeners who think they could cultivate their own: we have no idea what it takes to live like the Amish.
I’m a backyard/community garden gardener, and I grow a LOT in a very small area. It all comes down to soil. The trick is to build the soil into terra preta. I keep quail, and compost the poop.
Yes, it all comes down to soil.
This seems to be what Gustav is not getting about the difference between monoculture and Amiculture.
Amiculture stresses building the soil via crop rotation, letting fields get R&R via lying fallow, fertilizing with manure to build microorganisms in soil, using draft animals instead of tractors (easier on earth; no fossil inputs), knowing in which season to do what—
I am not any kind of expert, although I have read up quite a lot on the history of agriculture. And, I can learn!
I did watch the videos I linked and the Amish seem to have developed a pretty good system for actually putting in place basic concepts of productive agriculture based in soil building that is NOT monoculture, but on a larger scale (e.g.k 40-acre farm, not 1-acre, but 40 acres is about the max that one can farm this way).
Others are doing the same or similar, on a smaller scale
Another source of good, extremely practical, step-by-step instruction (with photos) for “waste-free farming” that incorporates the Japanese concept of kaizen and the “lean” approach is Ben Hartman. See his The Lean Farm: Guide to Growing Vegetables (Chelsea Green Publishing). Detailed resource guide at the back of the book.
This is about gardening for a living, not backyard gardening for family supply.
The Amish like to make a bit of cash-money when they can. – geomo quoting JHK
================
The Amish are first rate capitalists. I’m sure this doesn’t make Jarek happy.
(madness is freedom : freedom is madness)
The body can’t escape the cause-effect chain; it is doubtful that the mind can. But if it can, is the non-causal space the land of the non-sequitur?
(who wants to be free?
who wants to be insane?)
Love the Amish Skills Academy idea, Mr K! I’ve been thinking about doing the very same thing down here in north-central Maryland. And I love their cash-based society too. Go for it! If it’s even modestly successful, you can be sure somebody from the gummint will be on your trail right soon too. Bastards!
I like the idea of an ‘Amish Skills School’. Except for the unfortunate initials, we might be able to convince our students that meat and corn come from a farm and not a shelf, or that you don’t need Ikea to fill up an apartment.
I think we tried to do this in the 1960’s with Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. The scary thought is that the very same people that bought the catalog and thought it was so-o-o cool are now running the country. Happily, they are in their 60’s and 70’s.
In any event, time marches on. We’ll need a school song. I’d be happy to design the school crest. Let me know.
The same ones who say Connecticut will be carbon neutral by 2030. They never really understood science and don’t want to either.
We could just plagiarize and modify the Green Acres theme.
As long as Mr. Haney can be the bursar.
Wonderful essay, Mr K.
We’re in Tennessee up on the Cumberland plateau. There is an Amish community here too. A couple of them have helped us with building and fencing. They’re smart, hard working, with good carpentry skills. Sadly, the trait of hemophilia runs through their lineage, and in one family of 8, 3 have it. The others are carriers.
But testosterone laden rednecks on the roads, and the relatively delicate carts drawn by their delicate horses (who have Morgan blood) = a dangerous combination. Last year one was rear ended by a pickup truck. Both parents and several of the children were killed. The horse too. So please be careful driving, while we can still drive. Go slow, avoid killing things. If you see a turtle trying to cross the road, stop, put on your caution lights, and carry it to the side of the road in the direction it was headed. We’re all in this together. And pray.
.
Yes, guys in pickup trucks are sometimes the worst of the worst. Many of the trucks are never used to carry anything – purely egotistical masculine display.
The Hummer drivers were the worst out there.
On-road Jeep Wrangler drivers are pretty awful as well. You constantly see them doing 15 and 20 over, dissecting traffic on their mud tires and jacked up suspensions.
It’s like they need us to know their vehicle isn’t just for off-roading.
Well, you got the new GM Hummer EV coming down the pike, 10,000 lbs. fully loaded, MSRP $139,000.
Are you ready to “Go Green?”
Please, God…no…just no…
Two social credit points deducted from your account for failing to mention GM’s commitment to diversity throught its expansive child cobalt mining program, which supports our most disadvantaged communities with reliable high-hour-count jobs.
Yeah, Jarek – I call them Dumb Dodge Drivers. Idiots in black smoke blasting loud oversized trucks that they don’t use for work. Heaven help you if you want to ride your bicycle on a country road around here.
” I call them Dumb Dodge Drivers.”
Rainmaker,
Idiots. I did not know that about myself…1996 Dodge Cummins diesel, dually, hydraulic dump bed. I’ve been retired for…37 years.
Oh yeah….
Power Wagon?
BRH,
Ram. If they still make a Power Wagon, I am not aware of it.
And…the link;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Power_Wagon#:~:text=The%20Dodge%20Power%20Wagon%20is,1945%20to%201980%20by%20Dodge.
“Yes, guys in pickup trucks are sometimes the worst of the worst. Many of the trucks are never used to carry anything – purely egotistical masculine display.”
Ego?
Hunh….how do you characterize those who use the living hell out of their trucks? Heavy towing/hauling on a regular basis?
Isn’t Ego the reason people have any kind of big car? I have a small car because I travel a lot and my income isn’t that high. I’m constantly amazed at how the enormous cars people drive. They can’t go any faster than mine without getting a speeding ticket and they are just as stuck as me in the traffic jams. And then there’s the tax and gas costs.
There used to be a guy who lived upstairs from me (here in the city) who drove a huge pick-up truck. Never had anything in the bed, it was his daily driver. I once saw him sitting in it while it was parked below my kitchen window, jerking off.
Sounds like a charming fellow.
CC,
Finish him off! Tell us of his lack of…gifts.
Many of the trucks are never used to carry anything – purely egotistical masculine display. – Jarek
===========
There’s a lot of truth in ^this^. I shopped around for a year or two before I bought my RAM 1500. I looked at every kind of pick up known to man. The salesmen would ask me what I intended to use it for and I would tell them only half jokingly “I have absolutely no need for a truck, I just want to look cool. My plan is to have a couple of 8 ft 2x4s sticking out of the bed with a red flag attached to the end” and that is exactly what I did. But then you find out that both you and everybody in your family has need for a truck every now and then. It’s very handy, plus it’s super comfortable.
I’ve actually had a guy at the firehouse with a pretty boy truck ask if he could borrow mine to get a load of mulch. His statement, “I can’t put that shit in my truck'” I told him to fuck off.
OMG, the friggin’ nerve!
An interesting subculture destined to surface at the appointed time shall be the fellowship of model railroaders; the DIY purists who know how railway track is constructed- smooth riding & fast running. These people can build a real railway on abandoned rights-of-ways (Trails To Rails the new political correctness) with horses & wagons & come-alongs if necessary. If this octogenarian can do it….
Able-bodied legions of US Army Railroad Operating Battalions will provide track machinery & muscle mentored by those with railway engineering savvy. Like yours truly. See the Army Base at Ft. Eustis VA , remaining example and template for DOD RR Transportation Units.
Through recent decades mainline railways have shrunk and consolidated their utmost, aided by pea-brained city officials all to happy to remove metro railway spurs and vestiges of “unsightly railroad tracks -ugh! Early Famine Hedge step should include tax-exempt status for railways again used for food distribution? Trails offer fastest means of getting rails back to agriculture loading districts. Thomas Bros Maps circa 1940’s help new generation youthful Civil Engineers how to flow the downtown tracks into warehouse districts an farmer’s markets.
Along with the military railway organizations, number one go-to present day secondary savvy rail line human resource is “American Short Line Regional Railroad Association”, crucial for engineering new branch line junctions with existing trunk mains. Armchair observers can help by obtaining Mike Walker Publishing offers “US Railway Map Atlas Volume, over a dozen regional map gazettes of North American rail lines -past & present- Please get spares for your respective County Planning Bureaus/OES Offices.
Contact Walker: Also, heritage Mexican and Canadian railway maps including abandonments are available from Walker Publishing. Canadian Wheat trust Provinces, recently stripped of rail links, must get back into rail play in the Famine Hedge role. Union Pacific is purportedly well staffed with persons of the Mormon persuasion; Mormons following these lines can share & encourage Omaha along the branch railway line renaissance!
“Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform” was Army lingo for RR. -When America was a lending not a borrowing nation-
“Many more Amish are landing in the county these days. I hear they go around to the failing or inactive farms with bundles of cash and make an offer, just like that. Evidently the method works. It’s given me a business idea: to start an Amish skills school, buy a few acres with a barn and hire some Amish men to teach all us non-Amish how do a few things that might be good to know in the years ahead, like how to harness horses to a cart or a mule to a plow. (The Amish like to make a bit of cash-money when they can.) That’s my idea of how to build back better. What do you think?”
Excellent idea James! That’s a great example of turning a problem into a solution. Run with it.
And really it should now be rephrased as “Build Back Broken” because that’s what Klaus Schwab will get instead.
He doesn’t seem to have the faintest clue you can’t run a global digital panopticon upon an unstable, unreliable green grid.
There is no and never will be a green grid. The term green is the rhetorical shroud over the digital prison walls being raised around you.
Oh, they’re trying.
But they’re shutting down all the coal, gas, and nuclear plants they need to power all the server farms in their dystopia.
Good luck with that!
Those plants they are shutting down are to push us peons into the Great Reset corral.
If you think they will rely on a green grid to power the beast system, then I would have to disagree.
We’ve already tried a green grid. It was called The Dark Ages. As for the digital prison, did you hear that scumbag, Bourla yesterday? “Imagine the compliance!” And this guy’s parents survived the Holocaust!
AOC’s chief of staff Chakrabarti openly laughed and admitted the “Green New Deal” was nothing but a vehicle for complete take over of the economy. He resigned shortly after that.
Happy that Jim brought up teaching of sustainable living and homesteading skills.
May I direct the attention of the gentle readers of this blog to the Brazos de Dios community in Elm Mott, TX (bit north of Waco off I-35) and their permanently established school, the Ploughshare Institute, teaching exactly those skills.
https://www.sustainlife.org/
There are free videos on key sustainable skills on the site. I have attended two classes in the School of Woodworking (they teach traditional woodworking with hand tools.) At one time, maybe now, they taught plowing with mules.
Well worth the time to check out.
Newsflash from the road: we will all probably be going Amish soon. Just back from a ten day road trip for a family memorial service in Iowa and a vacation to the Black Hills of South Dakota and I can state with certainty that America doesn’t run on Dunkin…it runs on DIESEL!
From small farm tractors to mammoth harrows and planters; from backhoes digging up pavement on the interstate to the rock grinders that eat it up’; from trains miles and miles long to tugboats pushing barges up and down the Mississippi. Mining equipment, logging equipment and of course over the road trucks.
Relatives in Iowa tell me that corn planting is very late this year due mostly to cool and dry weather. Corn usually takes 100 days until harvest so May15 is usually the latest but this year they are pushing it out to the 25th.
It was wonderful to get out and really “see” America and what makes our culture go. It’s a very fragile system and the price of diesel is hammering it into the ground.
Duh?
The highly distributed US lifestyle was a one-off affair that lasted from 1920-2020.
It didn’t exist at any time under any condition during the preceding eons, and is quickly coming to an unglorious end as we speak.
People who mourn over its passing or issue vague doom warnings act like it’s a tragedy, when in fact it was entirely built on fantasy. We are now reverting back to the mean, which means constrained urban.
You can either understand these facts and begin to position yourself (if previously failing to do so), or join the starving masses as it becomes too expensive to drive, to expensive to operate (small) farm machinery, or impossible to maintain equipment given the lack of spare parts.
Thanks, Farmgal, for the report from the road.
I truly don’t understand the confidence people express when they declare the WEF won’t prevail. News flash: they are already winning, and have been doing so for a long time.
By all indications, even in the face of evidence and the recent trend of operating in the open, they are still facing zero resistance as they go about steamrolling everything in its path.
I guess this logical failure results from lacking the ability to link a broad array of current trends/events to intentional strategic sabotage being conducted to ensure full spectrum control during the rapidly approaching end game stages.
(Lack of IQ ability among the 2% is doubtful; rather it’s judt a demonstration of willful ignorance aka *denial*. It’s just so much more comforting to convince yourself it’s just one giant cluster rather an intentional program to first neutralize, then remove you/yours from the playing field.)
As far as educating people about the underlying causal factors to perhaps mount some kind of broad based grass roots resistance, good luck kid, go knock yourself out.
First, the general population is simply not smart enough. 100 doesnt cut it, you need 110 to suspect; two, even those who are capable will deny the facts and even refuse to read/consider if literally handed the information; and three, knowing the horrible truth, many conclude not to worry, but simply play out the clock having a good time.
This is why the WEF is winning, and will ultimately emerge triumphant. It’s why I follow what they’re doing, and shadow/anticipate/understand each step, each program, each initiative, and make my moves accordingly.
Mitch, it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, surveying the left in the United States and Great Britain, that very often it’s the most intelligent people who are the biggest dupes.
nonsense. emotional intelligence? moral IQ?
Zero Resistance? What a dumb comment to make. No they are not winning, in fact they are losing because they sense resistance around the world and are becoming more desperate in their actions. That’s how you know when the opposition is losing !
Heck, apparently the Schwabster himself just presented a slide at the WEF meeting that recognized economic nationalism was on the rise to the detriment of globalism.
Mitch, you may be right. I hope you are wrong. However, your error is to conflate IQ and intelligence. Sure, the WEF goons have big IQs. But they have no awareness of reality and are blinded by their insane arrogance. That will be their downfall. Even an intelligent minority of resistants will outnumber them massively.
I am skeptical about the IQ of “the WEF goons,” along with the various and sundry other goons among the ruling class. As with the royalty and aristocracy of the past, they are not in these positions of wealth and power because of their own merits. It’s not like they worked their way through pharmacy school and invented penicillin on their days off and got a lot of money that way. For the most part, they have never been trained in any skill or knowledge base, other than those that promote the interests of their class. Most will not be highly motivated to excel at anything, since they have nothing more to desire in the way of money and prestige.
I wouldn’t bet on their intelligence (or IQ) being much higher than average, overall.
IQ is largely inherited. Character is not, though some emotional tendencies might be.
They are much smarter than average people. I don’t say better or wiser.
Yes! Viva The Long Emergency. Build back better World Made By Hand novels! That was your forte, your strong hand. No more hopium about DOJ indictments, leave it doggy!, in which we detect a residue of your defunct NYC Dem party liberalism. Isn’t it obvious by now, as astute students of political economy have long ago demonstrated, that the DOJ, like all of govt and other major institutions of capitalist society, are little more than tools of a ruling class of financial and corporate elites?
Coincidentally, the version of horse farming that I practiced for thirty years in the southern tier hills of upstate NY suffered the same Amish invasion 20 years ago as your Saratoga region today.
Jim, have you heard of this place?
Adirondack Folk School.
https://adirondackfolkschool.org/
Beryl? Do you know of it? Seems expensive, but then again, maybe not?
Anybody?
I think I saw a writeup once, probably in Adirondack Life. I don’t personally know anyone with firsthand knowledge of it.
Amish school sounds like a great idea. Best of luck, Mr K.
“Unfortunately, the vaccination scheme has gone very much awry …”
Call me cynical – and I certainly have become excessively so over the last year – but I think it’s gone very much as planned, apart from so many people deciding not to keep getting boosted, and so many finding out what’s going on.
So, monkeypox, then HIV? Then Marburg, if we’re really unlucky. You’d think even the dopey would start to ask themselves how life became so relentlessly pathologised.
I dead, and fifteen with “injuries” after the Brooklyn Half Marathon?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/21/us/brooklyn-half-marathon-dead-injured/index.html
Thanks, Beryl.
Nothing to see here (or something).
My opinion and experience is 1/2 marathons are populated in part by individuals working towards a marathon. They are in rather good shape, have an idea about their limits and what they are pushing to improve. Many are moving up from 10K.
It will be interesting if they release any further information with substance or put out a fluff piece instead.
When I clicked on the link, the first thing I saw was two obviously obese ladies running the race. Good shape indeed.
best I can say is, if such was the case, zero-experience runners
Right. CNN couldn’t blame it on the temps (60s to mid 70s), hence the high humidity reported. Not a word about the real culprit.
Just read that ALL of the injured and the dead person were vaxxed up.
Thanks for all the info. on the previous thread, Mary (supplements and stuff) – I’ll paste it in an email and send it to myself! I’m taking a few already. Might have to cut down the Vit D a bit.
I was surprised my naturopath dr. had me cut down to 5K UI from 10K UI (which I had only upped from 5K recently).
You are welcome – as I learn stuff, I’ll post it.
Quelle Surprise!
I take 10,000 IU , but I split it into 5,000 IU BID. What I came up with after some research was 8,000 + not quite 9,000 IU was reasonable for me, split as I have suggested. Difficult to dose, therefore 5,000 IU BID is close enough
It’s the individual’s body uptake which makes a difference.
Start low, work up. One can always add a little more, it’s the getting it back out where difficulty enters the picture.
“You’d think even the dopey…”
I’ll go along with ‘dopey’. They’re dopey for a reason, a lifestyle choice for some perhaps?
“By all indications, even in the face of evidence and the recent trend of operating in the open, they are still facing zero resistance as they go about steamrolling everything in its path.”
Really? You must not have been paying attention to the Canadian Truckers i.e. “Truck You Trudeau”. French protest and riots, riots and protests in Sri Lanka. That’s just for starters. There’s growing pushback around the world. You want to see real violence? Wait for starvation to take hold around the world as is happening in Sri Lanka and Yemen.
Just wait until the Plebs connect the dots that this is being done on purpose around the world by its corrupt leaders. Expect the internet to get taken down.
You are getting the illusion there’s ZERO RESISTANCE” because the Government Media doesn’t want you to know, what’s really happening behind the scenes. Which is people are getting worried about feeding their families.
You want a great example how the Media is working the Plebs? Here’s one! You’ve heard about the Baby Formula shortages in the US, right? Well that’s not the case as we’ve shipped shit loads of our Baby Formula to Mexico.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/baby-formula-available-for-illegal-immigrants/
Trudeau who’s a Klaus Schwab puppet demands his people get vaccinated or else. Yet, he’s waved that requirement for Ukrainian Refugees who enter his Country. Where’s the Media reporting this shit? They don’t because the Government and Media are now one and the same.
You might want to rethink the “Zero Resistance” because resistance has taken hold and is in fact growing around the world.
Duh? Thanx for informing us of the basics and explaining the truth. LOL
Seriously, you are demonstrating the D-K effect so well I can sense the cringe crying out across the interwebs.
The truckers, as you know, were broken like bitches. Too bad about their finances seized, their operating licenses cancelled. How stupid would you have to be to fail to see that rule of law is declared null & void when the state is threatened?
On that note, police and military havent even flexed once in response to riots and social disorder. Ordered to stand down 2 years ago, that won’t be the case when those slated for replacement wake up to find themselves in the hog chute.
But you keep doing you; I enjoy the petulant defiance, the puny fist shaking in impotent fury.
I’ll remind you of “History” which you seem to ignore or possibly are quite ignorant about. Throughout thousands of years of human history these tactics always end with “pitchforks and torches”. You seem to forget the Arab Spring which brought down theTunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen Govt’s without firearms.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/arab-spring-cause
When governments impose authoritarian tactics, they usually work for awhile until the people snap. So while you seem clueless and ignore history, i’ll remind you of one basic human element to the equation. Ready?
Here it is: “When people lose everything and have nothing else to lose, THEY LOSE IT”. That’s where this is all headed and it’s already taking shape around the world.
@MC – I wanted to comment on what a smug, supercilious asshole you were but my manners got the better of me.
I’m not sure what Mitchellc hopes to accomplish here with his sneering displays of superiority over anyone who dares to hope for anything. I, for one, don’t care how well he has prepared. He doesn’t have the one thing that will be necessary in order to survive: friends. He may shove everyone else out of the way and leap into the lifeboat, but he won’t last long there. People loathe cruel, morally deficient, smug sociopaths. Before you know it, they’ll have tossed him overboard and redistributed his ill-gotten gains.
He’s got money and he wants you to know it. Somebody will put a target on his smug ass.
Farmgal—he is a troll.
I ignore him.
Pass right over.
Smug and rude and . . . trollish.
.
Don’t step in my fighting hole,asshat
@ mitchellc:
Your point is of course that there is little sense in trying to combat these monsters with some of the methods we see in use. Trucker convoys, yellow vests, and various other forms of protest have the sole advantage of creating a broader public awareness that there IS resistance.
On the other hand, throwing in your lot with elements that you know to be criminal, immoral, and anti-human is never a good decision. This too has very real consequences–and I’m not talking about in some afterlife, either. Kissing cats’ assholes is one of the lesser indignities.
There are methods that do work for combatting monsters. Resistance has so far been ineffective because the strategies are poor and ill-considered, people are nowhere near mad enough, and nowhere near being ready to make the necessary sacrifices.
I will not mention the violent methods. The non-violent methods begin with nurturing spirituality, civilization, and proper feeling within your own sphere, and following the good Biblical advice to, “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” This latter can be done at a number of levels. It could involve refusing the vax, quitting your job in health care or in the pharmaceutical industry, taking your kids out of the public schools, moving out of the city, etc.
This is what the Mennonites did in the 1500s.
The Canadian truckers at least shut things down for a bit. The American truckers completely wimped out and were banished from the capital. They just drove around the loop in circles tying up traffic a little. If they would stick together they could get anything they wanted.
The trouble with the often-suggested methods of either a general strike or a truckers’ strike–to “bring the economy to its knees” and thus presumably cause significant pain to those in power–is that economic destruction is precisely the goal of the elites.
THEY forced a general shutting down of the economy over the covid farce. They have forced further economic destruction through energy policies, the sanctions against Russia, etc. THEY are seeking to wreck the economy.
It thus kind of irritates me that Karl Denninger has so often suggested a general strike. Our ruling class would LOVE that.
I read a lot of Karl Denninger (The Market Ticker), but he does irritate me. He’s getting more and more angry and embittered, and thinks he’s the only person doing anything. And I’m not sure what he does actually do in the way of resistance, apart from issue tirades.
Is it effective resistance?
I’m with you and the resisters. I even attended RFK Jr’s rally in DC.
At this time, US hospital employees must be vaxxed; US military must be vaxxed; some employers required the vaxx. Some employers have reinstituted masks.
I cannot go to a family wedding in Canada because I cannot enter the country unvaxxed without a 2-week quarantine. I also understand I cannot ride an bus, train, or aircraft in Canada if I am not vaxed.
Resistance is there, more than what media says, yes. But the rules, which are enforceable, remain.
And now, the situation in Ukraine, has divided those who are against the vaxx and for individual freedom into the anti-vaxxers who support the collective West’s misguided war, and those who see thru the BS and do not.
Good post.
This is why many of the organizations in the fight against the Covid fraud are focusing on the PCR test, as the fraudulent test was the sole basis for the fraudulent pandemic.
This is the only line of attack that matters with regard to reversing the unprecedented assault on bodily autonomy and freedom.
The genesis for the entire so-called pandemic is a fraud; therefore, any regulations that are based on the fraud are, ofc, fraudulent.
Though correct, many people will continue to cower and obey rather than admit they fell for the lie.
It takes a strong person to admit this sort of thing. Most are weak.
I’m not so sure about the Amish.
The ones around here seem to rely on the rest of us for their income, and none of them have horse drawn wagons.
Must be Reformed.
I would like to learn practical stuff though.
I went to a How To Grow Organic Fruit seminar one time and it was packed.
What he told us was You Can’t Grow Organic Fruit in the Ozarks unless it’s mulberries and pawpaws.
The Amish wheat farmers in Kansas were losing horses to the heat. They adapted to using tractors. Now they drive the tractors just like cars, accept slower.
Smorgasbord religion is like that.
In most cases, it’s not that you can’t grow organic fruit; it’s that you can’t grow it for sale. It will have insect damage–although still quite usable.
I’m also in Missouri, in the Kansas City area. One of my neighbors who grows apples and peaches told me that he tried growing fruit organically. The problem was, no one would buy it; it wasn’t “pretty.”
I’ve had apple and peach trees that produced more fruit every year than I could use in many years. If you have one peach tree, one apple tree, and one pear tree, you will be drowning in fruit every year. But you will have to cut out the bad spots. And you’ll still wind up struggling to get it all canned.
Mulberries are kind of an acquired taste, I guess, but you get to where you crave them as mulberry time approaches. I may have to can or freeze some this year. At both my present and former houses, I had white mulberries, which are kind of choice–though I also like the black ones. I’m surprised they aren’t grown commercially.
The Amish sell pawpaws at the produce auctions in the fall, but I’ve never tried them.
I actually planted plum, apple, cherry, peach and nectarine trees when I moved here.
Fruit production was spotty, but it wasn’t the insect damage that ruined them, it was the fungus.
Fungi love the heat and humidity.
That is why I went to the seminar, to see if there was some trick to it.
I wouldn’t think that the Ozarks would be more humid that my area (exurbs of Kansas City). The apple tree at my former house was a Granny Smith that produced a heavy crop every year. There were worms here and there, and the apples always had a coating of some kind of black fungus that had to be washed off. Some fruit rotted on the tree for unknown reasons. But we still had WAY too much fruit. Many people around here have productive apple trees that they don’t spray, but there seems to be an unfortunate tendency to plant Red Delicious, which about the worst-flavored apple in cultivation.
I had sweet cherries when I lived on the Kansas side, and one tree produced…I don’t know…bushels of fruit, I think. If I remember right, that was an Emperor Francis (yellow sweet cherry), which the birds don’t bother.
My daughter has a couple of peach trees–and I had one at my previous house. My peaches did have a tendency to rot just about the time they got ripe, but I still got a decent harvest. One of my daughter’s trees is a late-ripening variety that is immensely productive. Her other tree has early-ripening fruit, which is problematic, though I can’t remember why for sure. I think it might be that the fruit ripens at the peak of the Japanese Beetle season. My daughter’s one rather small and very young pear tree yielded 100 pounds of fruit last year.
If you are growing fruit for home use only, you can probably get by fine with organic methods–a more than adequate harvest of fruit that is too ugly to sell but fine for fresh eating and canning, once you cut out the bad spots.
The county extension agents can advise you on the best varieties for your area. They don’t have the resources to research every variety that might interest you, which is irritating. You’d like to call them up and ask, “Is a Karmijn de Sonneville apple a good variety for Lafayette County?” But with fruit trees that take awhile to mature, it’s best not to take any chances. You can try out exotic tomato varieties all you want, and plant a couple of Druzba or Purple Calabash and see what you think. (Druzba is a GREAT tomato, btw.)
OT, but, once you get me started…. The best variety of green beans I know of, for flavor and productivity, is Strike.
Thanks for the tips.
“I’m not so sure about the Amish.”
It stands to reason that they have to adapt in some ways in order to survive in different settings. It is their choice where to change their tactics, not ours. Certainly not ours to judge their choices and decide that they are not “true” or “real” Amish because we don’t think they follow their rules!!!!
That is ridiculous.
@James Kunstler
Dear Sir,
Amish school: neat idea.
The trouble is there are too much weapons around, too much psychopaths-warlords-in-the-making, so unless the Amish are also guerrilla warfare experts (are they?) the future won’t escape a phase of uncontrollable mayhem regardless of all the handy skills the Amish could impart to the rest of us.
Just south of Salmon, ID where I’ve been RV camping for an extended period while house hunting, there’s an Amish community. I’m told they’ve arrived in the last decade or so. They run a grocery store and they are the go to people for getting a quality pole barn or garage built.
The other, larger religious group here are the Mormons.
Mormons recruit. The Amish don’t appear to. So how do they avoid inbreeding? I have been wondering if I present any genealogical value to the group. I’m old, but I have my own bundle of cash. How does it work to create a new family branch in the Amish community?
Someone above mentioned hemophilia among them. So maybe they don’t avoid it very well.
Keep in mind that the Amish are a religious community. I don’t know if anyone can join them, but if there is a way, it would be open only to those who share their religious beliefs and are willing to be actively a part of a religious community. Don’t try skipping church.
Oh, of course. One would have to be a true believer.
They can’t avoid inbreeding. They have a much higher rate of a certain form of dwarfism then is normal in the general population.
Genetic diseases caused by inbreeding are a serious problem for the Amish. Downs syndrome and cystic fibrosis are common problems.
Nik,
I don’t know the details about the Amish, but other smallish social groups that have been studied by anthropologists note that groups come together in larger gatherings for annual festivals etc. and this is a time to find spouses from other groups or branches of the clan and avoid the downsides of endogamy.
(allegories)
You do what you can to prevent, hasten or delay change; there’s nothing one can do to prevent, hasten or delay change. Ultimately you want to rig change, unaware that change is subtly, then abruptly, managing you. The more you try to affect change, the more the change will have an impact on you. Change’s a river, you’re the margin: the margin tries to tame the river, the river wears the margin away; in time rivers move elsewhere, new margins emerge, old ones disappear.
Rivers make margins, only to erode them;
Changes make things, only to have them to fade away.
The soul had come to lodge in this body –
a desolate wilderness,
a rapidly crumbling bank of the river of time.
It will collapse – tomorrow if not today.
Lodged on the edge of such a shore
how can a traveler sleep in peace?
For where sand and water meet
no embankment can hold, O Bahu.
Sultan Bahu
A complete set of the Foxfire books is a handy tool. Also, although it’s been over 50 years since Stewart Brand and some other people published the Whole Earth Catalog and its supplements, it’s still a handy reference tool for living simpler and closer to God.
Mr. Kunstler,
If the probable upcoming episode of runaway inflation parallels the one of the early 80’s it’ll be a doozy. Way back, toward the later half of the 3rd quarter of 1980, Mr. Volcker decided it was time to correct for rampant inflation. Whammo! He (they) skyrocketed the Fed rate. For example, the rate for an average FHA mortgage was 10-11% and I remember that rate hitting 18% and then around November it was around 22%. House lending stopped. Ouch!
The businesses that depended on monthly rolling credit were the first to go. Next were those who needed quarterly credit. Then the businesses that depended on semi-annual and annual credit went away. I had rental property back then and all my tenants moved out because their employers evaporated. I lost everything. Coast-to-coast people were living in their cars, tent cities all across the country. It took years, nearly a decade, for business to get back to normal.
This time around it’s clear the Fed and Gov’t leadership is behind the curve, willingly committing “ostentatious stupidity”. It’s as if our brilliant leadership in DC and at the Federal Reserve have been desirous of plunging the entire nation (and probably globally) into economic disaster. If it comes about there will be millions living in their cars and tent cities from coast-to-coast. I’m sure our ‘alleged president’ and his merry men will see that as an opportunity to convince the public of the beauty of socialism/communism.
And, of course, your words are quite right: ‘those unused to consorting with alleged “higher powers” might consider getting used to prayer.’
Cheers
Inflation is much easier to sequester these days. Record stock market and home valuations are the most obvious sign. You have to remember, their are two economies now. One for the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate), and one for the actual productive economy, or lack thereof. Commodities are kept reasonably low through imports – exploiting cheap labor and lax environmental law the word over to deliver the cheapest shit to the masses – leaving the rest of the Fed’s funny money to slosh around in speculative investment markets – the casino economy – all over the world.
Seems like a good time to buy a roomy, boxy tent, the kind that you put on a platform. Move in a bed and a bureau, and voila!
In the seventies a lot of people around here lived in tents and wigwams for the summer.
Actually, this is a pleasant way to live, as long as the temps are above ca. 60.
And below 90.
Yup. In 1983 or ’84 I was THRILLED to be able to assume a home loan at 11.75%.
One of my daughters is now balking at 5%. Still a pretty good deal in my book.
Amish, Amish, Amish!
We spent a few days in the middle of Lancaster, summer 2019. As per my usual, I had done some research, including reading this seminal study:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Amish_Society/-Rl4qQtph-IC?hl=en&gbpv=0
My wife is into arts & crafts, I’m more interested is social organization. Since we had similar goals in terms of doing a deep(er) dive, we spent the days driving around & down (somewhat) unmarked dirt farm roads searching for genuine farms, food and personally hand crafted items.
What I found, and many will concur, is that the Amish survive/thrive by selling goods and services to the “English”.
After our first day scouting out the highest concentration of farms that seemed the most prosperous, we did a second pass the next day looking for lunch. We had seen a sign before, but they hadn’t yet opened. 30 minutes later, there are 20 cars parked as they’re dishing out complete chicken dinners with all the fixing + desert.
Picnic tables were spread all around the front lawn of their home under the canopy of some enormous trees. I asked the husband if I could wash my hands, and he pointed to a huge barn like structure in the rear. I went in and saw a giant furniture factory with modern milling equip & stacked finished product awaiting shipment
Really impressive operation. We spent the rest of the day cruising around, and while there are plenty of self sufficient farms, I now noticed all the tilt up like structures dotting the landscape. Yep, mini factories.
So, yeah, read the book linked above. Definitely a resilient culture, probably more capable of surviving, but just remember a significant portion of their wealth comes from trading with the Empire and their fiat bucks.
Two more stories:
I pop into a old time sporting goods store – no fashion sportswear here, just actual hunting clothes, ammunition, etc. Two teenagers are leaving, heading towards their carriage.
Well, just like some/most teens have/work on hot cars, these kids had two young stallions (dont think they were gelded) hitched up.
He gave me a casual sideways glance as he clicked his tongue. Boy, those horses took off, with the boys absolutely in control and unconcerned. Teenagers!
The next story involves our slow roll through the backroads. We were crepping along, cruising around, when just then a team of 5 horses abreast comes out of the field and does a huge U-turn using a small part of the lane.
The dad is riding the combine with his two young teen sons walking along side. I’m screaming at my wife to get a shot as this Visage is trundling back down the next sweep of their farm.
Thankfully, she got the shot, which is one of our keepers and is mounted on a dedicated wall alongside all our other travel photos. It’s sort of surreal, because 5 horses across is a lot of horses. The combine is big, the man is big, and there a slight dust haze that creates an almost a dream like effect.
What in the world is the problem with trading with the “English” or “the Empire”?
I guess this is supposed to be a gotcha of some kind.
Misplaced and wholly erroneous expectations and strawman arguments don’t lead to impressive “gotchas”!
The Shakers, too, traded with “the Empire.” In fact, their products had a huge effect on the development in the larger national economy of standard household items such a the broom, packets of seeds, farm implements. There is no reason the Amish can’t play a similar role vis-a-vis mainstream culture (minus the celibacy, of course).
“Now, we’re finding out the hard way how much daily life must change, and is changing, and how disorderly that process is in every way from the imperative daily life adjustments to our spiritual attitudes about them…”
Much as we may have wanted it to be so… there was never anything permanent about the ‘American Way of Life’.
You know, the land of plenty and prosperity. The land where you could ‘make it’ if you worked hard enough. The land where dreams were made. The land of opportunity. The land of the nice house in the suburbs safely and neatly removed from the encroaching ills of urban life where your kids could play in the yard and go to nice schools with competent teachers who looked like something out of Leave it to Beaver.
Sure, some of that was myth. But part of it was very real, too. Ah yes… lots of Americans got to know that life for a generation or so. And then Reality crept back in. And the American Dream was shattered into a thousand pieces that we are just now beginning to count up.
Prosperity… gone. The ‘Plenty’… used up. The Dream… now a distant memory. And yet, our lives goes on.
It was fun to live out a happy fantasy. But the blissful fog has been blown away by the cold and stark realities of a job and industrial base that was stolen away from America by money-grubbing traitors who make too much money while plotting their next atrocities in well-furnished corner offices while sipping on imported designer coffees.
It was blown away by a Predatory Medical Industrial Mafia that has purchased our government and installed itself as a Medical Dictatorship over America and the rest of the World.
It was destroyed by laughingly-named ‘Public Servants’ who get into office already believing that it is the Public who must serve Them. Who sell their offices for the highest dollar. Who enter politics as beggars and who soon become rich Kings and Queens fully drunk on their own sense of self-satisfaction and entitlement.
And caught in the middle of this nightmare scenario is The American People… the vast numbers of souls who just want to live out their lives in peace and as far away from these Elitist Vultures as they can get.
We the People are tired. We are weary of the fight. We are financially broke and getting broker by the day. We are spiritually drained. We just want it all to stop and go away.
But as tired as we are… and as much as we want the Old Normal to come back… we must summon strength we did not know we had. We must stand up to The Predator Class who is going for the kill shot to Humanity and Their final takeover of the human race.
We can’t afford to rest now because the battle just got even more serious. Even more is at stake now… nothing less than the fate of the entire Planet.
We long for peace and quiet… but we must gather our thoughts and our strength for yet another grand battle. The Battle for the Ages. Everything on the line.
And it’s not just for you and the people you care about today. It’s for all the generations yet unborn who want to know a World as prosperous and orderly as we once knew not all that long ago.
Yes, indeed. Life is changing for all of us. And if we are to have any kind of a future worth living in, the future must all be changed in deeply fundamental ways for the Traitor Class as well that has pushed the human family into this corner of poverty and broken dreams.
One day soon, we’re all going to watch The Law of ‘Untended Consequences’ manifest itself in the World in ways no one saw coming… and certainly not those Predators who have worked so hard to set all this disorder and chaos into motion. You know, the ones who worked so hard to shatter the American Dream.
A cornered animal is a most unpredictable and dangerous beast. And for the last few generations… Americans have been pushed into the corner. And never more so than right now. And God only knows what the results of this are going to be.
Hold your loved-ones tight and hang on. There’s a deepening thunder hanging in the air…
And if Providence gives us the strength and guidance to survive… maybe one day we will find our way back in to That Beautiful Dream once again.
And next time… we don’t let Them ever steal it away from us again.
No unrestricted Capitalism next time. Monarchy, Fascism, or National Socialism. Authoritarian systems made up of people who despise banker and business types on a deep level.
The Founding Fathers, alas, were mostly merchant lovers or merchants themselves.
I’ve said it before, I love your writing.
I used to think along similar lines, but that was before I reached full realization. Here’s the clue: if you aren’t the predator, you’re the prey.
There isn’t some kind of noble expression of moral righteousness bestowed among the quietly suffering. Rather, the desire for peace, tranquility and a general longing to be left alone is a mark of the loser.
How did you get here, who came before, why are leaders psychopaths, why are your peers unable to organize, to mount effective resistance?
It’s because you were born and bred this way. Hundreds of generations before, those who conformed, those who consented to rule were allowed to live, to prosper and to have families.
Over 1000s of years, the vast majority cherish peace, dred confrontation, and will accept any insult or injury to what little dignity they may possess to have one more chance to live a normal, event free life.
Theyve elevated this mentality to an admired characteristic, one where people take great pride in working, paying taxes and contributing to society.
So again I say, if you think like this, if you know people who do, you’re what’s called a normal person. Iow, Prey
Because on the other side there are those who are consumed with control, power and prestige. Confronting, fighting, persuading, cheating, it’s all part of a fun game that makes life worth living.
If you think they are evil, amoral psychopaths, that says more about you than it does them. It doesn’t bother them a bit if you feel that way. Express it, and they know who you are, what type of person you are, and will set out to fuck with you for the sheer entertainment value.
So, you do not believe that civilizing advancement had anything to do with human nobility of character? So, why are you here commenting on our host’s site?
“There isn’t some kind of noble expression of moral righteousness bestowed among the quietly suffering.”
There is no single motivation for why someone suffers. There are as many reasons for suffering as there are people in the World. The sad reality is that suffering has been deeply woven into the fabric of Life on this Planet. And we all get caught up in that web.
The fortune ones among us try to get out of it. The ones who suffer in silence deserve our compassion and a helping hand out if they want one. That’s where the ‘expression of nobility’ will be found.
“… the desire for peace, tranquility and a general longing to be left alone is a mark of the loser.”
Again, the ‘desire for peace, tranquility and a general longing to be left alone’ has many reasons for being. But since most people are at heart this way rather than trying to be installed as Emperors of the Universe… there must be something fundamentally sound and righteous about that desire for peace. And it feels human.
“…why are leaders psychopaths…?”
Because being a psychopath is rewarded in this World. You get the top positions. You get the most power. You get the most money. Because — without a silly thing like morals to get in the way — you can just run over people with impunity. And do it again and again. Decent people want no part of that dreadful game.
“… the vast majority cherish peace, dred confrontation, and will accept any insult or injury to what little dignity they may possess to have one more chance to live a normal, event free life. They’ve elevated this mentality to an admired characteristic…”
The Big ‘They’ Behind All Things have attempted to elevate this mentality amongst We the People. But the main reason this has taken really root is that much of the human family is just lazy and prefers to exert as little effort in anything as possible. Fighting The System is hard! You know, we like the ‘American Way’… We want Quick and Easy!
A great cultural observer, Groucho Marx (yes, really), once said to someone during one of his flick’s plots… ‘I’m fighting for your Honor! Which is more than YOU ever did!’.
Today, a tiny remnant of the Human Family is fighting for the honor of our entire Life Form. Which is more than most of us will do. Being groomed that way? Partially. But built upon a solid foundation of simple laziness.
“… on the other side there are those who are consumed with control, power and prestige. Confronting, fighting, persuading, cheating, it’s all part of a fun game that makes life worth living… “
That’s an interesting way to look at it. Sure, at one level it’s like a fun old TV Western of Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. But at a deeper level, there is much more going on here.
The Cosmos we live in isn’t shallow and simplistic. There can be fun and honor found being in the middle of a battle that we never wanted to be in. Layer upon layer of things going on that we can discover if we choose to.
And in a quantum universe of unlimited potentials… the outcome of all this never gets boring because we never know what the outcome will be.
““…why are leaders psychopaths…?””
Unfortunately, many leaders get a high from controlling others and finding ways to demonstrate this control repeatedly. That is their motivation to lead. I don’t consider such people genuine leaders.
Not all leaders a psychopaths.
For instance, Putin is a genuine leader.
There is one member of my immediate family who is a genuine leader. Generous and kind, always willing to help others—and able to do so as well. The generosity plus the chops to actually get things done, and inspire others with his good nature.
Sounds like you’re describing the mob in NYC in the 70s and 80s, characters like John Gotti, Roy Demeo and Crazy Joe Gallo, who looked at anybody not part of ‘the life’ as simply suckers and prey.
“Because on the other side there are those who are consumed with control, power and prestige. Confronting, fighting, persuading, cheating, it’s all part of a fun game that makes life worth living.”
So you’ve opted for a life that is degrading and shameful. You can also make some pretty big bucks as a pole dancer or a prostitute or pimp, and, if you were shrewd, you could open your own whorehouse–with attched juke joint and gambling parlor.
You perhaps have no sense of this, but what you’ve done is to trade life itself and all its goodness for some trinkets.
“There isn’t some kind of noble expression of moral righteousness bestowed among the quietly suffering. Rather, the desire for peace, tranquility and a general longing to be left alone is a mark of the loser.”
“Loser (Live at Tivoii Concert Hall, Copenhagen, Denmark 4/14/1972)
Grateful Dead
If I had a gun for every ace I have drawn,
I could arm a town the size of Abilene
Don’t you push me baby, beause I’m moanin’ low
And you know I’m only in it for the gold
All that I am asking for is ten gold dollars
And I could pay you back with one good hand
You can look around about the wide world over
And you’ll never find another honest man.
Last fair deal in the country, Sweet Suzie,
Last fair deal in the town
Put your gold money where your love is baby,
Before you let my deal go down
Don’t you push me baby, cause I’m moanin’ low
And I know a little something you won’t ever know
Don’t you touch hard liquor, just a cup of cold coffee
Gotta get up in the morning and go
Everybody’s braggin and drinking that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on the inside straight,
Well I got no chance of losing this time
Well I got no chance of losing this time
Well I no chance of losing this time…
Last fair deal in the country,
Last fair deal in the town
Put your gold money where your love is baby,
Before you let my deal go down
Everybody’s braggin and drinking that wine
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to daddy on the inside straight,
Well I got no chance of losing this time
Well I got no chance of losing this time
Well I got no chance of losing this time…
Songwriters: Jerome J. Garcia, Robert C Christie Hunter. For non-commercial use only.
Great comment. You could be JHK’s understudy.
reminds me of these two…
“I’m going to be a happy idiot
And struggle for the legal tender”
Jackson Browne Pretender
Grateful Dead, “We can run but we can’t hide (from it)”…
” We don’t own this world though we act as if we did,
It belongs to the children of our children’s kids”.
“Hold your loved-ones tight and hang on. There’s a deepening thunder hanging in the air…
And if Providence gives us the strength and guidance to survive… maybe one day we will find our way back in to That Beautiful Dream once again.”
They played this one in Providence, Ri.
“The wheel”
“The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down,
You can’t let go and you can’t hold on,
You can’t go back and you can’t stand still,
If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.”
“For this is all a dream we dreamed
One afternoon long ago”
Box of Rain
I’m in. I can spin wool, knit, train dogs and other animals, know how to raise chickens and quail, can harness and saddle a horse, know about the care of many animals, am a really good gardener, and also a good cook. I can id a lot of plants, and have some knowledge of herbalism. I also draw and paint, play the recorder, and write great limericks. Problem is, I’m old and decrepit.
Just wait until all the vegans find out how hard it is to keep weight on when it’s 30 below and you’re eating wheat-grass and tofu.
Read “When the English Fall” by David Williams.
Really good read about exactly this subject.
https://www.amazon.com/When-English-Fall-David-Williams/dp/1616205229
I can fix bicycles!
That one will be really important
I am fast on a 10 key adding machine.
But I’m fooked with no electricity.
Get an abacus.
Can you machine the parts needed for the bikes? Eventually they all wear out. especially the replaceables, Tires, brakes, cables, chains. Start a boneyard now. Spare parts are from china and that boat’s not running.
It is distressing to see how many bikes are just trashed at the dump when one part gets broken. These are treasure troves of spare parts, being thrown away.
In the Netherlands such bikes are taken down and the the part stored in bins to use for refurbishing used bikes. At least, there are some organizations that do this and then donate bikes to Africa.
We will need this here pretty soon! is there anyone out there with a spare barn for bike parts?
Actually, this parts issue will soon be pressing for many, many of the machines we currently take for granted. such as electric ranges, etc.
We need to start thinking Zero Obsolescence!
Agreed!!!
We have many of the same skills–and the same problem of being old and decrepit.
The spirit is willing bur the flesh is weak lol.
The way it happens in your head is, “I think I’ll just skip down the front steps and scamper out to the garden and cut some greens for dinner.” This is how you see yourself, till you hoist yourself painfully out of your chair, shuffle a few steps to the front door, and struggle to keep your balance while you put your shoes on. By then you’re winded and considering sitting back down for awhile.
Hmmm…’work so hard to make it worse’…nine 11 should have been our first hint; if the PTB couldn’t justify a war, making something up sure did. All wars are resource wars. I’ve long referred to this country’s culture as Disneyland where physics doesn’t matter, limits don’t count and consumerism trumps being energy literate.
I accept your proposal; I use a wood stove, have no centralized electricity, make candles, grow real food, stash cash, recognize waste as potential wealth, build relationship with locals, plants, soil, and animals. Presently identifying weak areas of knowledge and focusing on building skills.
Thank you JHK
Chalk this up to another vaxxed Covid death?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/erin-jayne-plummer-dies-suddenly-at-42/ar-AAXCIw2?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=552ab70230724d76a20082741162ecdb
No doubt Cowbell. I have it on ‘good authority’ (i.e.CFN blog roll) that any unusual or early death is, of course, entirely attributable to the Gates/Schwab/WEF Global Depopulation Plan, delivered by vaccines.
The whole monkey pox thing is a complete joke, I could barely make it through this article with a straight face.
https://metro.co.uk/2022/05/23/eu-advises-countries-to-plan-vaccines-for-monkeypox-outbreak-16693859/
folks use words like crazy or joke but no, its diabolic and much deeper than some random craziness.
OMG, the sky is falling and world is coming to an end because 60 people in the entire world have come down with the Monkey Pox. This is largely an African disease, as so many of these weird things are, and it causes no harm and resolves on its own. A good calamine location would probably clear it up in a few days.
I have an idea, why don’t we lock down the entire continent of Africa once and for all to keep all those nasty diseases from escaping to the better off 1st and 2nd World countries?
The Africans are calling bullshit.
““I’m stunned by this. Every day I wake up and there are more countries infected,” said Oyewale Tomori, a virologist who formerly headed the Nigerian Academy of Science and who sits on several WHO advisory boards.
“This is not the kind of spread we’ve seen in West Africa, so there may be something new happening in the West,” he said.”
and
“We’ve never seen anything like what’s happening in Europe,” said Christian Happi, director of the African Centre of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases. “We haven’t seen anything to say that the transmission patterns of monkeypox have been changing in Africa. So if something different is happening in Europe, then Europe needs to investigate that.”
Do ya think that will happen? Yeah, right
.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/monkeypox-spreads-west-baffling-african-112930241.html
Serves ’em right. Maybe this was all cooked up by Putin and being spread by Russian agents. I’m surprised the West hasn’t pulled out that card yet, since blaming Putin for everything these days seems to be in vogue.
I think Belgium is in Monkeypox lockdown.
A scenario is pushing smallpox vaccine on the unvaccinated (real smallpox vaccine) which was used a few decades ago to eradicate smallpox.
Younger people might not have this. Now they have the jab screwing with their immune system. Could this make them prime candidates for AIDS-related smallpox under the pretext of ‘protecting’ them from monkeypox. It’s another sell-job in the making. Lies without end.
Bill Gates has been talking about a smallpox outbreak for years now.
Smallpox was eradicated by 1980 and back then, they didn’t think they could push vaccines for a non-existent illness, so they stopped the vaccinations.
They have learned otherwise now. There are people so easily swayed by propaganda they will line up for an experimental GMO product that doesn’t even work.
But there are still resistant people.
Say they announce that everyone needs to get a smallpox vaccine to “protect” them from monkeypox?
Everyone with brains scoffs and refuses.
The compliant and gullible go for the jabs.
Then they release the smallpox.
Only the compliant survive.
The Fact Checking Industrial Complex is on to Monkeypox misinformation already. Never fear.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/monkeypox-conspiracy-theories-five-false-claims-about-the-virus-debunked-as-misinformation-spreads-online/ar-AAXClZk
The main takeaway is that it’s nothing to do with Bill Gates. Because of course it isn’t – what were you thinking, you lumpenprole conspiracy nut?
While entertaining for sure, Mr Kunstler’s predictions have never materialized. Go back and read his yearly predictions, all hyperbole and dead wrong. When one has zero descendants one can be as dark as hell. No kids or grandkids? Who cares if the world goes to shit, it’s just me myself and I . He’s getting old and turning into a bit of a suicide pilot, despising a world he no longer understands.
You forgot to say you loved his books back when he was writing on town planning and stuff.
You always crack me up with this, GA.
Ahahahahahahahaha!
Docmartin, time for you to go to timeout.
docmartin, your shoes went out of style in the 1990s!!! lol Time to get with the program.
“When one has zero descendants one can be as dark as hell. No kids or grandkids? Who cares if the world goes to shit, it’s just me myself and…”
I would suggest that your having grandkids, coupled with your “giving a shit” should have no bearing on your understanding of future events.
You have a dog in the fight? Well, as they say on the Russian/Ukrianian front…”Tough Shitski”.
We all have concerns, the intelligent amongst us know that we have absolutely NO bearing on the geopolitical, macroeconomic, nor major societal issues. None. What. So. Ever.
Your grandkids will adapt or suffer….just like ours.
It’s “Tough Shitskyy”.
Q,
Obviously, whatever gibberish they speak over there is not your first language….
NEVER?
1. The end of HAPPY MOTORING.
2. The end of the 3000 mile Ceasar salad.
3. The return to Main Street…
4. Marauding gangs…
Docmartin:
“When one has zero descendants one can be as dark as hell. No kids or grandkids? Who cares if the world goes to shit, it’s just me myself and I .”
Very sad that you have no one to love.
…”(probably not far away), the economy will be so wrecked, the people of America so deranged, and our circumstances so desperate, that the government will resort to a supremely stupid act of national suicide, say, starting a nuclear war. The government under “Joe Biden” seems perfectly disposed to that possible outcome…”
One of the theories making the rounds in what used to call itself the intelligentsia is that Putin is ill, weak, losing and in a final act of desperation will launch the nukes. Of course as is usual, the propagators of this scenario are in fact describing their own deranged helplessness and projecting onto The Other. (In fact the Russians have a strong survival instinct, lots of land and resources, an educated population, and no need for the West economically.). The mere fact that nuclear war has become a topic of conversation bodes ill considering the immaturity of Western leadership.
The Long Emergency looks more and more like the optimistic forecast.
I just went to a hippie-owned grocery store I frequent.
The cashier remarked how nice and cool the weather is and I agreed, but said that it’s good for me but not my pepper and tomato seedlings I have out.
She said that the kids on the farm were also running around covering their peppers. Then she said that the kids had decided to build a house so the farmers told them they had to learn how to make a frame first. So every kid made their own frame and then then put them together and put plastic over it and made a greenhouse.
So I have no idea how many kids are involved here, but I thought of this post and how there are at least some up and coming youth who will know how to farm and build.
Well, well, well…..look at the woke schlub that AOC is finally tying the knot with. I wonder how much this wedding is going to actually cost the taxpayers? Also, we should all take note of her ceremony to see if people are wearing masks, or if only the “help” is all masked up. Let’s make it a point to protest at the ceremony and make it miserable for her!!!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-confirms-engagement-to-longtime-boyfriend-riley-roberts/ar-AAXCOKB?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=a20e4bc0c2e341619ad0f3a694c02ec7
“While entertaining for sure, Mr Kunstler’s predictions have never materialized. Go back and read his yearly predictions, all hyperbole and dead wrong. When one has zero descendants one can be as dark as hell. No kids or grandkids? Who cares if the world goes to shit, it’s just me myself and I . He’s getting old and turning into a bit of a suicide pilot, despising a world he no longer understands.”
=====================================
uh…..bingo
i was going to say he understands the world, but i’d be contradicting my ‘bingo’ remark
i still love jimmy tho’.
you US and A americans should do like me and get out of the Slough of Despond the US has necrotised into
pleny o’ nice places abroad to be had for a song and a dance
“…abroad…” indeed. One must choose carefully, and the alternatives are often discouraging. New Zealand, for example – prime target for flight capitalists, richies who want the good living. The people – tight-assed, narrow-minded, glum. The climate: miserable. Prices & availability of imported goods: often high & difficult.
Thailand: great until the 1980s or so. Now expensive, ultra-polluted & quite dangerous. Many cases of foreigners marrying Thai women, bringing over their resources (everything of value in the wife’s name) and then “…suffering a heart attack…” and quickly cremated before anybody can cry “autopsy”.
Anywhere in Latinoamerica: more despairing and dangerous than ever. Give me one city, one country, where educated, intelligent locals are not anxious to flee.
Canada: fourth Reich. I spent ten comfortable years in Vancouver-by-the-Void, but it is out of the question these days. Climate also dreary. Prairies not bad if you can put up with winter half a year long.
Chinese richies are reportedly piling into Malta. Maybe not a bad choice but likely politically unstable. Banking questionable. Banking probably questionable anywhere in Europa these days.
If there is any really desirable place they are probably keeping it quiet. Or going for the zillionaires. I’d like to live in Vietnam but they are not particularly welcoming to foriegn immigrants.
https://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2017-07-24/local-news/Malta-becomes-fifth-most-popular-country-for-rich-Chinese-emigrants-6736176949
woefully incorrect as regards latin america and thereabouts
the media’d lead you to believe antifa/blm is the norm in the US, but they don’t exist to someone in the interior of alabama
same holds true of other countries
Well sir, I would like to think that I am in the wrong in this view, perhaps biased by media reports, since I have not lived in South America for some decades.
All reports, however, are downers, even when they are explaining how to stay away from the omnipresent criminal terror (“…always avoid the favelas, even with a guide…”) and the smaller cities like Florianopolis or Valparaiso, which I would definitely prefer to the monster megapolises, are starting to report the same instability and insecurity.
Do you recall the recent reports of our honorable colleague Rulo D. about life in Argentina? There is a huge “no-go zone” in Buenos Aires (as I recall) where they bottle up all the teeming masses of junkies (mostly meth-heads). You simply do not go near that area.
I wonder whether living in some of the German expat communities sprinkled around the continent might be an option. The question which has been raised in these comments on more than one occasion is whether you would fatally stand out as “The Gringo” when martial law is declared, banks shutter and all certainty about life is up in the air. Who will protect you?
What country in Latinoamerica is not relatively overpopulated, considering resources? None that I can think of. Maybe parts of Chile. But life is hard.
If you think I am wrong please furnish some examples of safe, clean, stable areas of the continent, where they would welcome someone like you or me.
Malta appeals to me: great climate, fascinating history, and neolithic ruins.
And before you know it, even the State of Vermont will begin looking like a 3rd World country:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/more-than-300-refugees-planned-for-vermont-city/ar-AAXCMq4?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=1ccf3de82d8344a3b93b320fd7c8d2e7
Must have run out of space in Burlington.
oh yeah, i forgot to compliment the global masters on introducing their 2nd worldwide virus that demands global control.
nice work guys, yep we’ll just have to get used to restrictions on movement/travel/social interaction in order to implement your plan to force people to stop using petroleum products, reduce the population, eliminate free speech [it’s so dangerous], end meat production, and, finally, to set up social scoring so that we only get to live work and eat if we obey your demands.
just remember how mussolini ended up
Il Duce was hanging out at the gas station, as I recall.
The human condition reduced to one single question:
– How far are you willing to go to ensure the next meal?
The – often tacit – answer to this question is the history of your life.
Do you think people would be willing to prostitute their bodies simply for that next warm meal? In a collapsed society, how much / what acts do you think a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew would be worth?
They are – and they will (and it even doesn’t have to be warm – just chewable and edible.)
I best start stocking up now.
“Ladies of the world, come see me for that next bowl of beef stew, followed by a nice warm bed to sleep in for the night. Please just stay away if you are a carrier of the Money Pox. Thanks and enjoy!”
If you’re not a thug, that’s unwise, because the thugs of the earth will steal it all from you (and occasionally turn you into a punching bag.)
Why give up a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew for something you’ll be able to get at knife point?
:”Do you think people would be willing to prostitute their bodies simply for that next warm meal?”
Cowbell,
Jesus…please start reading history. Humans in distress will do far worse for a few slices of moldy bread.
Browse Selco Begovic.
Women will sell their bodies for food. Or even a candy bar as German women did after the war when they were being systematically starved by the Allies.
There are suppressed videos of American troops pretending to offer German children candy and then snatching it away. All in line with the “no fraternization” mandate that was given to them.
So will men.
Mary, may I be first in line to sell my (male) body for a Full English Breakfast (with black pudding and extra mushrooms) when the Sh1t hits the fan?
LOL
“The – often tacit – answer to this question is the history of your life.
AK,
Not the history, but rather the current moment will decide an answer.
We are all Amish now–or about to be. But some of us don’t have the Amish skillset…
I think this Monkeypox panic will be fading out in a week or two. It doesn’t seem to have ‘gravitas’ as they say, as it looks like its largely confined to the ‘Gay Community’, which is at most 3% of the population. Remember a year or two ago the ‘Killer Bee’ scare, hybrid bees the size of humming birds coming in from Latin America — due to Climate Change — with stingers the size of ice picks that will swarm you and kill you in 10 seconds flat. It got my attention — I’m allergic — but haven’t heard anything about these monstrous bees since then.
Indeed, Monkeypox is pretty much the scare du jour. A new one will come from the woodwork in the next week or two. Honestly, I am surprised they are willing to degrade monkeys everywhere by naming a virus after them. Whatever happened to using the Greek alphabet to name all viruses in order to gain complete neutrality?
The Pat virus, that’s neutral
“It’s a man.”
“No, it’s a lady.”
The beauty of MonkeyPox is that it has actual, unmistakable symptoms, which can’t be confused with a cold or the flu. So we will see where all this goes, but I think it’s a bit too obvious to be useful for scamdemic purposes. Now, once they go all in for the real deal, who the hell knows? I think any of the hemorrhagic fevers would be a great choice for scaring the living shit out of the gen pop. No doubt whatsoever that everyone will line up for the vaxx for those.
When I saw the gay men references as it first emerged, my mind immediately went to Fauci’s antics with HIV and AZT, and the attempted crossing the line to include heterosexuals. Might there have been lessons learned from the failed effort which have been refined?
Didn’t you hear, the ‘gay community’ now expanded to LGBTQWERTYUIOP is 30% of society now.
Yep. You can be a sexual pervert AND improve your touch typing skills. A twofer.
Ohhh…where to start?
First, Dear Mr. K, you are making remarkable progress but you have yet to embrace the full and total fuckery of our situation. I am surprised to read from you– yea even at this late date– your apparent belief that the galactic convergence of fuckery is somehow *incompetence*. Please. If it were mere incompetence we would have the Blind Squirrel and Broken Clock principles at play (the occasional nut and the correct time twice daily). No, this Regime is exceedingly competent, even talented– they manage to *always* find *exactly* the policy that destroys, harms, ennervates, divides, alienates, impoverishes. That is not possible without intention. Even Heinlein couldn’t ascribe that to nad luck.
CC,
Yes, excellent! It is a grave mistake to assign benign attributes, such as stupidity, to your assailants.
Exactly. But now for the fun part: dial “this regime” back, all the way back, to the first proto-human troops, when master-servant relationships began. (Mirroring ape behaviors observed today.)
I’m still a bit surprised that some actually believe there was ever any true republic. People tacitly understand monarchy, but like trusting fake news, they seemingly buy the democratic narrative once we flip away from top down directives.
All you have to do is ask yourself why on doG’s green earth would anyone willingly give up rank, power, wealth and control? And grant equality to someone they feel is greatly inferior simply because, what, they were born here?
Now, if you cant quite bring yourself to admit the whole truth, let’s say indeed there was a period when the contract was honored. OK, then when did it end?
1846, 1861, 1898, 1913, 1914 and so on – at what point? Oh, just 2016, or even as late as 2020?
The truth is, commoners have always been lied to, abused and neglected, but like the obedient sheep they truly are, they masked up and took it with barely a whimper.
The WEF is essentially telling people to their faces that they intend on surviving as they intentionally bring down the facade. They’re counting on the masses to take like they always have so that the fittest once again succeed.
“Fittest” according to those who deem themselves fittest?
They seem incapable of righteous judgement.
It’s a great question to ponder– is there any form of government that isn’t prone to tyranny?
I’d say, no. The Framers were explicit in designing as many curbs against the tendency toward tyranny but eventually those safeguards proved inadequate.
What now? Best i can figure, the only workable safeguard against murderous tyranny is some kind of hyper federalism that pushes the maximum amount of power and control to the smallest possible governing body. So, for example, assign to your town council all powers and responsibilities of government unless absolutely necessary to be done by the county. And assign to the state only those functions that absolutely can’t be done by town or county. And the federal government only does that which absolutely can’t be done by states. The tyranny that inevitably arises will do so locally where it can be swiftly identified and dispatched (the kunlangeta model). The kind of mass murder and genocide can only happen when psychopaths are allowed concentrated big government power. Psychos are always w us but we don’t need to give them a massive government to weaponize.
This requires major shifts in society. No more federal sugar daddy. Any social safety net is purely local. Families and charitable groups will flourish once it’s clear that government isn’t coming to the rescue.
The good news is that it’s quite possible now for communities to thrive locally and regionally. It may mean that we don’t have nearly as much variety or choices in products and services. But the quality of life might be far better all around.
“It’s a great question to ponder– is there any form of government that isn’t prone to tyranny?”
It is the question of our age.
When the realization comes that only our Creator can be trusted to appoint rulers some of your good ideas may be implemented.
“… the only workable safeguard against murderous tyranny is some kind of hyper federalism that pushes the maximum amount of power and control to the smallest possible governing body.
CC,
Or to put it into real terms;
Maximum amount of power=weapons
Smallest possile governing body=Citizen
Jim,
Wanted to share some videos from a group that holds seminars on the training of oxen and the overall importance of caring for cows and bulls, both from a practical standpoint, as well as more subtle, spiritual perspectives from the age old Vedic culture of India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS_sV4_5xwg
I have come to believe that Amish, or any such monoculturalist farmers, are not ideal templates for human civilization in the long-term. I believe the seed of runaway population-growth is in intensive monoculture-agriculture as an economic basis for a society.
Anybody want to give an example of a monoculturalist-agriculture-based society that did not progress with inevitability toward an endpoint of population-sprawl?
Are Amish monoculturalists?
The narrator’s voice is pretty annoying, but this video is informative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUUUHzkua68
Here is another quite nice one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlomCUhcKoM
When you use horses instead of tractors you must grow fodder crops, in addition to any others.
This is interesting, and relevant:
Britain, and Ireland, forced to grow own food during WW2, owing to blockade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNpeCgzn22w
I’m referring to any agriculture in which a large percentage of arable land (i don’t know… 20-50% minimum maybe) is devoted to plowing or orcharding in large chunks of a single predominant crop-plant. So, Amish cornfields definitely meet the criteria.
You are of course welcome to your own criteria and definitions.
However, the accepted definition of “monoculture” is:
the cultivation of a single crop in a given area.
So crop rotation automatically is not monoculture. Planting some fields in fodder for the horses is not monoculture. Other Amish practices such as leaving fields fallow etc. falls outside the monoculture picture. Size of “fields”/area planted with a crop is another factor. If I plant an acre with corn one summer, that is not monoculture. If I plant 150 acres with corn every summer that is monoculture.
So, What would be your plan, as a farmer, if you had a 40-acre farm?
Hello.
You know, Islander, I had thought you were of the male persuasion before your post about the dude farm, for some reason, I don’t know why.
A basic cornfield is monoculture. Crop-rotation is just rotating monocultures.
A 40-acre farm is already a small-enough parcel that it would require intensive agriculture to live on, in most cases.
The ideal “farm” would have a gentle-agriculture, permaculture organization that utilizes independently sustaining ecosystems to yeild a harvest… systems that run themselves, harvested by hunting/gathering. The average population-density historically is, I believe, about 640 acres per person, on average (within a range depending on the environment).
If I had a 40 acre farm, I would sell it and move to the least populated temperate coastal region I could find, and start learning how to fish the area effectively.
“A 40-acre farm is already a small-enough parcel that it would require intensive agriculture to live on, in most cases. ”
Somehow, I don’t think you are actually a farmer.
According to the vids I linked (and watched), most Amish farms are 40 acres or less. Why not watch them and learn something??
“If I had a 40 acre farm, I would sell it and move to the least populated temperate coastal region I could find, and start learning how to fish the area effectively.”
LOL.
As I said, 40 acres is great if you’re going to plow every level inch of it with monocultures and raise the usual farm animals in enclosures, like the Amish.
I’m no farmer, but I have messed with homestead farming a little.
Last week I had a similar “conversation” with her. She said: it’s not the population but the “load” – as if the world’s billions are going to start living simply on an acre or two per family. As if there is no relation between population and load.
This kind of denial is par for the course in women and feminized men. They can’t face the mass die off with the equanimity that incarnate gods like you and Mitch are able to muster. Somehow I think it comes very easy for him…..
Nothing simple bout simple living. Simple livin’ is what we have now. Turn a switch and on things go. Our jobs are monoculturalist for the most part too. Fast food. Fast mind. Fast life. Fast death.
FWIW, I mentioned something to this effect on Peak Oil Barrel some years ago:
If humans can do away with some or much of their mining-based material technology and live in harmony with the planet, Earth could sustain them then. It’s rather like how there might be more mass of ants, but they live in harmony with the planet so their ‘load’ is not as great, even if their mass is.
So, on the one hand, Islander is right– maybe (I haven’t read entirely upthread, but just poked my head in here)– and on the other hand, Jarek has a point insofar as we may be kind of locked-in to a techno lifestyle that might be difficult to unlock ourselves out of, at least short-term.
Techology can mean different things, too. It can simply mean ‘permaculture’ and an approach that also tries to enhance nature. What we are doing now in part is drawing it down.
“Our jobs are monoculturalist for the most part too.” ~ Jarek
Yep, I posted this sort of idea almost to the letter more than once on Peak Oil Barrel. I also suggested that many jobs were glorified obsessive-compulsive disorders.
“You know, Islander, I had thought you were of the male persuasion before your post about the dude farm…” ~ gustafson.robert.22
I’ll gather, then, that you missed Islander’s ‘Clint Walker’ comment.
“This kind of denial is par for the course in women and feminized men. They can’t face the mass die off with the equanimity that incarnate gods like you and Mitch are able to muster. Somehow I think it comes very easy for him…..”
Lol. I’m not heartless, calloused about die-off concepts / realities. I don’t believe confidence of survival whenever things fall apart is realistic for any individual, really.
But, what keeps me optimistic is the idea that healthy human life on Earth is still very possible, maybe even inevitable, once the junk clogging us up now is jettisoned. I don’t have many roots in our contemporary world (on purpose). I’ve devoted my few years to focusing on the world of ideas and on distant futures – optimism inducing.
“Our jobs are monoculturalist for the most part too.”
I like this line.
We are fortunate to own a 45 acre farm in the Appalachian foothills of upstate South Carolina. It’s about half lush pasture and half mixed forest. We have about three fourths acre in a garden where we grow green beans, field peas, Butterbean, okra, tomatoes, squash and peppers. It takes every ounce of my energy along with my tiller to manage working this small area and there is no way in hell it would come close to feeding the two of us.
Because we don’t live there all of the time we can’t keep livestock. Going Amish sounds like a wonderful dream but in reality every minute of every day is involved in the production and procurement of food. My father left the farm in Iowa and never looked back. He always said he never wanted to work that hard again.
Re the concept of “load” vs. that of population, poor old ‘Rek just can’t bypass an opportunity to display his ignorance.
Farmgal:
The Amish use teams of horses (some may also use tractors). In some of the operations shown in the vid linked up-thread you can see a team of six horses, so harnessed and driven that they can easily maneuver around the corner of a field, etc.
These teams pull many implements that a tractor would also pull, for the various activities such as creating furrows and turning over the soil, planting, weeding, harvesting, etc. Many implements for these functions were developed for small-scale farming.
That is what made the video I linked up-thread on the Irish potato farmers interesting—using small, antique tractors for small-scale (but not subsistence) farming. Many of these devices are really quite ingenious.
Not to forget, Amish farms are run by fairly large FAMILIES. That is a lot of person power.
Obviously, Amish families are on their farms 35/24/7.
I think that for many of us, Amish or no Amish, getting back to prayer will be the end all and be all.
COVID, despite the recent uptick, was diagnosed by world authorities as something akin to the common cold: widespread and frequently occurring.
People thought: no more vaccines, no more passports, no more lockdowns, no more tracking, no more restrictions, no more masks.
But people forgot, as they always do, that this was a test run.
Not only did they forget, they willfully ignored the fact that that the same people who brought you COVID and the vaccines told you as much.
They not only told you that but they told you that a more serious pox virus was on its way. They even ran simulations of pox virus outbreaks. Their same lab in Wuhan published GOF with pox viruses.
The virus is the vehicle for the disorder. The antecedent.
That demands a new order.
It is not carts and horses.
You’ve been warned
Again
Preach it bro, exactly.
At this point it’s like cat & mouse. Bored of all the pussy, wine, food, luxuries and desires anyone could possibly want, they’re now entering pure debauchery.
At this stage its probably a bit of a thrill to tell someone directly to their face how badly they’re gonna fuck them up, when they’re going to do it, and how they’re going to do it.
I mean, survival seems to be baked in, so why to taunt and dunk on the losers?
Kind of a smug prick ain’t ya, mc?
You still assume that the moneyed people – and you are evidently one – are going to come out of all this just fine. I don’t think that’s a safe assumption at all.
So in other words, you’re going to take the HIV Monkey Pox vaccine because they’re all powerful, your gods so to speak?
Earth created an apex predator that got out of hand and became its own predator. And now, via the predator’s own system(s), Earth is trying to treat itself.
It’s endlessly irritating and sad that people can’t learn this. It took me 1 week. I’m no genius. So WTF is wrong with most people?
I must have read your book (and John Michael Greer’s and Orlov’s essays) in 2007 because I can date my certainty of the failure of industrial civilization to Sept 1, 2007. But none of my Southern family or friends or neighbors share this insight. Conditions here have only become markedly better every year. For almost 15 years now.
The growth in my town is incomprehensible with all the DoD money sprinkled on a huge research park of contractors. Last week we were named by US News and World Report the best place to live in America! Imagine–Alabama being the best place to live in the USA! Actually, it’s not that great because I would like to do all in my power to discourage any more people from moving here.
There are vanishingly few who view our current good fortune as a last hurrah. So, I am going to throw a retirement party for everybody I know, take a road trip out West to visit the National Parks I haven’t seen, join 3 European bike tours to say a proper goodbye to Western Europe and then return to my overgrown garden and prepare to go Amish whenever the Bubble pops.
An excellent plan, Rocketdoc! Just because something is ‘inevitable’, one doesn’t have to commit all ones time & energy to “fighting” it. Enjoy the wonders of the modern world – it’s NOT ALL BAD out there. Try the South Pacific while you’re at it!
Is your town Huntsville?
Yes. 210,000 people. 215 square miles.
I knew a fellow from Huntsville. The only town in Alabama that I can name!!
His father had a huge cement plant there.
I got the impression that this fellow’s dad had gotten rich on government contracts.
Maybe building the interstate highway system.
Now we know where you live.
Old news. 1993
A 30 year old “book review” of today’s problems:
https://youtu.be/ZbEF0XseVjs?t=2
Brought to you by the author of The Ominous Parallels – the End of Freedom in America. How (as of 1982), the US is following the Nazi Germans, step by step, into apocalypse.
When I was hiking in Bavaria some decades ago, near Andechs, I stopped in a small “Bauernkneipe”— a small room in a farmhouse where you could sit down and order a glass of the farm’s home-made schnapps. Probably this tradition has gone the way of the dodo.
So the mother was a very striking-looking farm woman, maybe in her forties. Brown hair and blue eyes. Her son, healthy, handsome, same blue eyes, VERY shy. The mom suggested (jokingly, I think . . .) that I consider marrying her son, although by that time I was too old for him (I thought)! I demurred—had a job in NYC!!—but suggested they put an ad in the Wall Street Journal for visitors to their “dude farm.” I reckoned they would get plenty of candidates among frustrated Wall Street bachelorettes who might like to help a sweet young farmer run his farm or at least have a nice rural vacation . . . But it was a job to explain the concept of a “dude farm” to a pair of Bavarian farmers.
Jeezus! I hope you didn’t corrupt the poor bastards! That’s all they needed – a bunch of Wall St whores showing up to take them for all they were worth. Christ, I think it might be better if they just ring-fenced the US altogether to keep all the crazies in. We’re a hopeless race of people here. Fucking Devil’s Spawn.
“Wall Street whores” ?????
“some decades ago” ????
I was just thinking of secretaries . . .
Honestly, the projections that one encounters here could be case studies of some kind.
Love Death + Robots
Short Dystopian + Cynical
Exit Strategies
11 minutes and Brilliant.
Humans could have made changes and used money and resources to maintain a habitable and healthy planet
But different classes bought different modes of survival: guns, bullets, chili, oil platforms, yachts, bunkers, and rockets to Mars.
It didn’t work.
The producers and writers of the episode know it won’t work. These silly plans of foolish people.
The Davos crowd also knows that these options won’t work.
So take them away.
I sense I must trot out once again what I feel is an excellent analogy:
A successful ant colony happens across a forgotten 5lb bag of sugar, left behind by weekend campers rushing to get back to the city for the beginning of the work week.
(Yes, I know, it should probably be updated to reflect current employment realities. As in, im quitting if i have to come into the office more than once a week.)
Anyway, do they have a top level pow wow to discuss how best to utilize this one off gift of the doGs? That maybe, if thoughtfully husbanded and managed, perhaps ants could cure cancer or develop suitable technology to explore the stars?
HA! Fuck that noise, we’re gonna party like mofos, screwing, eating, drinking, no more hard physical work foraging for scrap morsels, we are enlightened kangz!
Get the picture? What if you’re guarding the stores, whispering to the queens handlers the cache is running low? You know, a few others know, but the rest have no clue.
You.Are.Here.
Getting pretty preachy lately. What, are you trolling for a following?
mitchellc is doing nothing more than trying to convince himself – endlessly – that taking the ‘rational’ (read non-empathetic, even psychopathic) road, in view of what we all know as well as he does, is ‘justifiable’. Counter-intuitively, that might suggest that he’s not 100% psychopath. If he were there wouldn’t be that weeny bit of concience left that makes him need convincing that saying a great big fuck-you to the rest of humanity is the way to go.
Personally, I hope to go down speaking the truth and not taking advantage of anyone else’s misfortune to secure a few more weeks or months. Nobody is going to get out of this alive, in the longer run, but it’s possible to exit with honour.
I’ve mentioned already that there’s one really, really important job waiting for those that make it through to whatever comes after – there will be a heck of a lot of orphaned chidren needing to be looked after by decent people, before the indecent get hold of them. What could be more noble than that? One of them may be my grandson, so I have to stay hopeful.
And yes, I know in mitchellc’s universite noblesse is for losers. The trouble with ‘winners’ in such a scenario is that they are not well equipped to see the value or otherwise of what they hope to ‘win’.
mc’s a bit stunted, ain’t he? The people like that can never see it in themselves. I’ve got a friend just like him. I’ve learned when he calls just to let him talk, as he’s not really talking to me anyway, but to himself. I’m just a placeholder
Beautiful analysis there. GA on fire.
Excellent analysis of mitchellc, GreenALba. Brava!
You never know, Mary, he might have a change of heart and found a well defended orphanage. 🙂 Stranger things have happened.
That was meant to be ‘universe’, btw – I wasn’t suggesting he went to a French university!
Green Alba: you are a good and wise woman. Don’t ever change!
I fear he is seducing poor Gustaf.