734 Comments

I watched MSNBC this morning just to laugh while they gossip incessantly about Trump’s cabinet picks. They reminded me of the middle school super duper clique lunch table. Gossiping and trashing those who just aren”t “good enough” to sit with them. I do believe that’s what that network has become. The middle school lunch table. No value whatsoever. Vapid clowns.

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Agreed. Unfortunately, a LOT of people (some of my family included) watch these shows, BELIEVE these people, and when sufficiently riled up, ACT accordingly, usually spitefully.

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Perhaps William Shatner should look back at his role in another movie to figure out why we voted against her, against the Democratic party. Judgement at Nuremberg:

https://archive.org/details/movie-judgment-at-nuremberg-1961

The movie tells us how the system itself failed because the people who were entrusted to protect the constitutional rights of Germans failed. Judges, doctors, "experts" who believed they were right, they were "perfect" government above reproach destroyed their nation and committed the worst crimes against humanity the world has ever known. It's cast included: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Werner Klemperer, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, along with William Shatner. Bill - Pssst - watch your own old work.

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🤣

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Yep, they really are the roving pack of Mean Girls we all had to deal with in middle- and high-school.

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Bingo. Even those liberal pussies behave like that. Morning Joe, Conan, Andrew on SquawckBox.

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What do you think about Joe and Mika’s visit with Trump?

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Not much.

“EXCLUSIVE: PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald Trump said on Monday that in order to "Make America Great Again," it is "vital" to have a "free, fair and open media," telling Fox News Digital that he feels he has "an obligation" to the American people to work with the press, even those who had treated him "badly beyond comprehension.” I guess the adage applies. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

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Or, he's not going to hold anyone accountable - again.

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Mary

The problem is not Trump!!!!

For things to change, the hearts of the people have to change. The Deep Sate has acquired its position because of the people sending the same cretins back there, over and over. The Deep State is a reflection of us. Until Trump wins over the hearts of the people, change is impossible. Steamrolling DC will not help.

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I think he’ll have more success with a republican house and senate. It remains to be seen though.

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Yep,

Lets just call a spade a spade,

The reality, as hard as it is for people to stomach, is it will take all out revolution and a purge of ALL domestic enemies, ALL OF EM

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Heathers.

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Yup.

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MSDNC should be kaput

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Comcast has put out feelers for selling CNN and other news outlets. They cannot correct their brand. They went too far, and show no signs of changing. It is quite amazing to watch them lie without blinking or blushing, making it up, and "reporting" as if it's real.

They have no reverse.

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When they lose their idiot watchers, Comcast will lose its advertisers and shitcan this obnoxious network. Do not stop with MSDNC, take out NBC TOO, then ABC, then CBS.

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"Comcast will lose its advertisers"

No. They will have advertisers that pay less for their diminished and focused demographic: Gimmiedats with TDS and Karens with hemorrhoids. Think Lifetime/Oxygen/Hallmark/et al.

That being said, Women watching Womyn cry will not balance their finances.

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11/18/24: Having attempted to read Walter Isaacson's unreadable "Einstein, His Life & Universe" (2007; PULPED), I can only imagine how inarticulate this pretentious boob must be. Kudos to Mr. Kunstler for forcing himself to listen to Isaacson's inane criminal defense alibi.

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His bio of Steve Jobs was pretty good though.

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11/22/24: Glad to hear it. Try Thomas Kunkel's "Genius In Disguise" (1995). Avoid his sequel, decades after academia ruined his joie de vivre, "Man In Profile" (2015).

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I'm a locked-down Apple user. Even when Wozniak left. Got fucking angry at Jobs for the shit he did. But, whatever. The worst thing they did was to source-out their hardware/software. I was an absolute victim of this. Fuck them.

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11/22/24: Huzzah! If I were to tell the horror story about our attempted/aborted conversion from Microsoft 7 to M11 in 2023, I suspect that my story would match yours, to a T. Then there's HP, which decided that their copiers no longer needed to be compatible with M7. A genius move. Now I now longer have to buy their expensive ink (a tech I know tells me that HP's profits come from ink, not from their machines). Then Verizon comes in and replaces my router, which destroyed my desktop computer connection to FanDuel, a wagering site. Yes, this all happened recently. I'm running out of morons to make appointments with so they can wreck something else.

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The jaw boning is beginning to discredit and character assassinate President Trump's choices to fix our federal government. Trillions of dollars are at stake. The key ones are DOD and NIH being brought back on track. The paid mouth pieces can't see beyond their paycheck.

RFK Jr. task is daunting! https://thomasabraunrph.substack.com/p/bobbys-goal

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LOL. So true. I’ve often had similar thoughts.

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I agree. Mean girls! And Joe is as mean as any of them. He's the one in the middle school girl clique who talks conciliation but never misses a chance to denigrate another.

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Excellent analogy

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Is there a better start to the morning than this in my inbox?:

"James Howard Kunstler from Clusterfuck Nation"

Seriously on-point with this one, maybe demonrats(and neoliberal 'republicans') will finally understand what they have done to us.

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They’ve known it all along but there never were consequences. They will suffer those consequences now. We should beat them until their moral improves. I’m giddy just thinking about it.

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Absolutely - they can only learn by having to deal with the consequences.

There is this absolute nutter in Vegas named Robert Telles, and he was a low-level councilman on a power trip. He became so deranged with power that when a local reporter wrote some (deserved) hit pieces on him, he killed the guy. He actually got arrested and went to prison. He was sloppy with the murder, figuring (as narcissists and psychos do) that he could just talk a judge and jury out of believing he was the murderer (!!!!). That didn't happen, and he's in jail for life.

This is what should happen to every single public "servant" who was in on and pushed the covid and trans agendas, who probably are responsible for more misery than even Robert Telles.

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I hate to break the news to ya, but “Operation Warp Speed” was under the Trump administration.

This is ONE reason that I did not vote for Trump a third time.

How soon people want to forget…

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That is the $64,000 question. Why has Trump refused to acknowledge the wrongness of his decision?

I did vote for Trump, thrice. In all those elections it was a no-brainer to vote against the Democrats.

But yeah I'd like to ask Tucker this question.

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Because Trump is a liar. I fell for the bs in 2016, and I probably shouldn’t have voted for him in 2020. I don’t usually give people the benefit of doubt anymore.

After I lost my career of 23 years in 2021 for non-CONvid compliance, I went down the rabbit hole.

What a wake up it has been!💥

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I don’t believe that ANYONE can put Operation Warp Speed and Covid and the lockdowns in the right & proper context without a basic understanding of peak oil.

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You're not breaking any news, and I didn't vote for Trump, either. I have never voted for him. He absolutely still brags about Operation Warp Speed, which is why I remain skeptical that he will even mete out the appropriate punishments.

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You said you don't vote at all, ever, for anyone, lol.

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That sounds like a story a guy once told me at a Blackjack table at Binion's Casino. Except nobody got arrested and no bodies were found.

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He will take care of it! He has a lot of irons in the fire just now! Patience!!

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Had to laugh…giddy is good, girl…

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That's good. I'm giddy too.

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I wrote a piece a while back asking if the "swamp" is now too big to ever drain. It probably is, but let's drain as much of it as we can. What the world needs is a Mass Purge of the dunces and sociopaths who have ascended to the top of all the key leadership organizations. A Baby Purge would be better than no purge.

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I imagine draining that swamp. But all the swamp creatures need to be contained and dealt with. Before draining the swamp an invisible fence must be built around the swamp to contain the creatures. So when it is drained there will be no escape.

First contain the creatures, then drain the swamp. Then Matt Gaetz can deal with them.

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"Then Matt Gaetz can deal with them."

Revenge much? Fucking hell yeah!!!

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Oddly enough, they have built a fence around the White House about a week ago. There was a guy in D.C. who filmed it and put it up on Yoo Toob.

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Well said, Bill. It will never drain from the top down, which is what people envision. It will have to drain from the bottom up, just like your bathtub - this is where the drain-plug is. No-one wants to hear this, because of the hip waders, hardhat and dedication needed to enter the local political arena. We’ve become addicted to be liked on social media. Yes, your next door neighbour may not LIKE you any longer. Local government has been under foreign attack since early 2000, intentionally removing our elected officials and bureaucrats from our reach. Under auspices that mere disagreement with decisions and speaking your opinion is an aggressive assault on vulnerable bureaucratic servants who download UN swamp agenda into your community every step of the way. No-one wants to rock the community boat and call out UN foot soldiers. The war is too close to home.

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Agree to all points.

I don't think either party of self-aggrandizing grifters will ever care what they did to us, as long as they made a buck or won office, etc. These are psychopathic people. In fact, they set out to damage others because they hate humanity. The goal is to replace them. In order to do so, we have to start recognizing who is actually a narcissist, a psychopath, etc. and stop worshipping those. Sadly, our society shows no signs of being able to do that.

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HG Tudor, (on YouTube), who ought to know, says Trump is a narcisisst too. The whole system is set up by narcisissits to reward narcisissts, and thus attracts them in great numbers. We're fortunate in Trump, as he is the sort whose ego won't allow him to fail. May God protect him, because those people will kill him, if they get the chance.

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He might be a narcissist but if so, he's a brilliant one, because he is not killing the host, like most of them do. So perhaps he's more of a showman than a narcissist? It's hard to tell. He has many narcissistic qualities, but he is definitely not murderous like, say, Obama. At least not demonstrably.

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Yup. Do you think he means it when he says he is trying to save America?

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I know he does. I've watched him for 45 yrs, he has spent 40 yrs pointing out deep state to us and what is going wrong in America. He said 40 yyrs ago he may have to run for president one day but didn't want to - politics is a mean place and he had a great life. He has done many good things for a lot of people and he absolutely loves America.

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Only he knows. We can only judge by his actions.

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H.G. Tudor is to be taken with a grain of salt, always. If Trump is a true narcissist, he's a prosocial one. The very best kind. They serve a useful function.

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Trump is a lot of things. I do not think he’s a narcissist.

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Re: HG Tudor, Do you really think a narcissist is going to be brutally honest about himself? I was a therapist for many years and made diagnoses of my clients. I don't see how any narcissist can be completely honest about narcissism. I've watched Trump for 45 yrs - was never a narcissist. You might want to watch his body language in this video from 1980, I don't see anything arrogant or narcissistic about him:

https://vimeo.com/937105935

Just my 2 cents.

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On one hand, hanging that painting of a younger version of himself in tennis sweater, in a prominent place is purely narcissistic. On the other hand he is very kind to others. No matter their status. Everyone who knows him likes him including his children! Trump is a bona fide mystery.

One can be a supreme egotist and not be a narcissist, correct? Trump is just very self-confident with a natural sense of majesty. He's basically a king.

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A person can be vain and not a narcissist. You probably are not very familiar with the disorder and what it consists of.

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I guess I'm not Mary.

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“These are psychopathic people". No they are not. They are sociopaths. I wish people would get their terms straight.

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I wish you would.

Sociopath does not mean violent. There are plenty of peaceful sociopaths. Psychopath means violent, and able to kill people - totally without conscience. Some sociopaths can do that. All psychopaths can.

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I care. I care so much that I didn’t vote (for Trump a third time).

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Yeah, you already said. Turns out he didn’t need your vote after all.

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Maybe. Much of it is right what we want to hear. I am all for decentralization and the rolling back of collectivism - which has become an ideology for many. Because - the peddled ‘safety’ factor. Meaning it will take time and much hand-holding to return to functional communities currently sporting bureaucracies fixated on top-down hand-outs and a UN SDG ideology to the last hole-punch. So, it all depends on how many will continue to ration their personal involvement to a 4 year vote and a hero roll, and how many will activate on every local level to sort bureaucratic apples from oranges sporting a Spartan topcoat. The deception will come in a rebranding of ideology, rather than a replacement. Such as the call for new, safer and more functional communities, which currently are peddled under a UN thoroughfare of 25+ local bureaucratic acronyms to hide the beast of 15 min. Cities, Compact Communities, and what else has become too hot a brand. All of these tentacles are in place, right now, right into the smallest enclave, everyone’s front door.

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Walled towns and cities. Every man a soldier. Nobody has anything they can't keep from robbers and gangs. The return of a sane understanding of economics: You didn't build that by yourself. And nobody votes who isn't part of the guard.

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Sounds like Israel, not the USA.

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Well said. Instead of being fan boys of Israel, why don't we become like them?

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Oh, I just knew someone was going to bring up Jews.

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They control who key sectors of our nation. Everyone knows that - except you apparently.

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Lou, Lou, Lou. You just don’t get it.

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Drinking my coffee awaiting your adjectives . . . I moved rural and the farmers’ markets are thriving everywhere. From homemade soap to homegrown vittles…if Trump returns schools to the villages, all will be well.

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I live in the center of every natural local food you can get. I have a stack of their business cards that gives me comfort and good clean food. I just need a bigger freezer. If the insane regulation is stopped then there will be a revolution in food and health ahead. GO RFK jr. !!

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Two factors have driven the food industry to do what they have done. One is the creation of “Big Food” the result of price control and government regulation. This has been driven purely by the socialists driving to control everything from DC. The second is the pressure to reduce costs while creating “Big Food”. These huge food producers are corporations. Their function is not to produce food for the people, it is to make a profit. Cost reduction is not a double digit deal, it is saving single digit costs.

Antibiotics in livestock to save a few percent sick animals, or to prevent wholesale epidemics of herds. The reason “chicken kills” happen is because chickens are jammed together in dirty crowded environments. Same with beef herds, or pig farms. A really scary thought is what happens to these animals that die? What happens to the grounds they are raised on as the accumulation of wastes becomes toxic.

Farming of crops is just as bad. Trying to control pests and weeds, toxins are applied to fields. How do you remove toxins from crops? How much of the toxins become systemic? What is the effect of GMO crops on human DNA in the long term. You would think that the vaxx would tell society not to mess with cellular level modifiers. The other potential toxic problems stem from fertilization. Fertilizers come from fossil fuel, or animal waste, both potentially toxic. Fertilizers are required because the balance of nutrients in the soil is destroyed by over production.

Everything is happening because our food industry is trying to keep up with our population with the amount of arable land decreasing due to housing requirements. As supply and demand wreak their control, the price of everything is going to go up. When RFK, Jr. tries to control these bad practices that have evolved, expect the cost of food to increase as production costs increase.

JHK has discussed these influences since I started reading him in 2005. This is just food. Everything we have as commodities are under similar pricing pressures. Kennedy’s job is enormous, to re-structure American agriculture without price increases. Mission Impossible? Maybe they need Tom Cruise as an advisor!

Then there is oil production.

Then there is the “production” of medical care.

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There was a great Joe Rogan episode a year or two back with a guy about how the planet's soil is in big trouble ... and without changing course, we're basically screwed. Monoculture is literally destroying parts of the planet ... for profit.

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Yes.

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Oh yeah, the idea of local supply of food in farmer’s markets is great,

Except, it works in Red rural small town realms, but does nothing for the Blue big cities where people live that have not a clue where food comes from, they think that it comes from Krogers. The cities under Dem controlled government have allowed the over-production of the nation’s agriculture, and without much supervision.

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Well the moderately sized blue city of Portland is obsessed with food and where it comes from. It's almost sport.

The main farmer's market downtown is gigantic and it has affiliates in every neighborhood running throughout the week from Spring until Fall. The large, multi-level James Beard Public Market will become a real thing downtown in the next year. It's a very exciting development and of course James Beard is from here. If one wants to get in on a farm share for direct delivery then you must act now as they fill up quickly.

It's mushroom hunting season and my local grocer has freshly foraged Chanterelles for sale. Crab season is just around the corner – again you have to act quick as they sell out.

Many have been going around the "food Industry" for a long time. I Portland is surrounded by bounty and celebrates it. Organically Grown began in Oregon.

The "Farm to Table" idea is one that began on the Left coast.

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I want to know the name of my mushroom or crab and if it had a good life. Can James give us that? Or do we have to get high and listen for which item says, eat me?

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LMFAO

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But

How many folks use the farmer’s market vs. use the supermarket? How long would the bounty last if no food came through conventional routes?

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But

You claimed "the Blue big cities where people live that have not a clue where food comes from, they think that it comes from Krogers" and my point was that isn't the case in my blue city where the alternatives to supermarkets are very robust.

Asking me for numbers or to speculate on catastrophe is simply a lame attempt to avoid my point.

If you think taking back food production from the big producers doesn't begin the way I describe then please do tell.

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Your comments made me think of the Amish communities

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Trump doesn't understand small is beautiful (and inevitable). Bigness is everything to him. He's bigly small like that.

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LMFAO. Again.

You're killing me, Jarek.

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"JHK has discussed these influences since I started reading him in 2005"

What the hell took you so long?

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“This is just food. Everything we have as commodities are under similar pricing pressures. Kennedy’s job is enormous, to re-structure American agriculture without price increases. Mission Impossible? Maybe they need Tom Cruise as an advisor!

Then there is oil production.

Then there is the ‘production’ of medical care.”

Couldn’t agree more. You’ve described the polycrisis.

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Freezers don't grow on trees. We have to get back to root cellars and ice boxes.

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I read a book about building log cabins. The first step is to dig the root cellar to store food.

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Our only neighbors, where I grew up (in an early1800s as was they), actually cooled their food in the spring in their basement.

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Don't forget Joel Salatin.

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What RFKjr is saying is what I have been saying for the past 20-odd years. Food in the USA is not what it is overseas. That's a fact, jack. Case in point (and I know this isn't the best one), I'm not a Coke drinker, but if you want to drink a Coke, buy Mexican Coke. Sugar, yeah, but at least it's not HFCS.

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Right. No local schools, no local life.

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Soros knew that concept long before we did. Change begins at the local level. I see things reverting back to the “old days” when life really was better. Can’t happen soon enough for me.

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“I don’t know why the Democrats lost. I don’t understand …" — William Shatner (Captain Kirk)

"I don't believe you." — Ron Burgundy

William Shatner seems like a nice guy, but I'm sorry, I just cannot comprehend how anyone let alone an allegedly sentient human being like Shatner doesn't understand how the weakest Presidential candidate in American history running the most pathetic campaign since Biden deservedly and decisively lost the election. Not buying it.

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Truth doesn’t touch them. They live above us, in a wealthy celebrity world of narcissism.

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IMHO, the reason half of the Hollywood and celebrity crowd and much of the city culture in the USA support the Dems and the Deep State is because they want that border open. Why? Serfs and drugs to be unobstructed and cheap. The elite have their slaves and drugs, and the government has its revenue from the cartels. Isn’t that a lovely picture of America? I am watching the effect of RFK, Jr., DOGE, on the flow of drugs into the country. Human trafficking will need border closure and control. Will this country be able to control the cartels and their goon squads? That would be a legacy of Trump.

Mexico hasn’t.

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We're into one of Taylor Sheridan's shows, "Lioness". While the premise is pretty ridiculous (gorgeous females in SpecOps who handle business like John Wick) this season is actually touching on real issues, including human trafficking. At least some folks in HollyWeird are trying to bring attention to it.

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Are you describing Donald Trump and Elon Musk?

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Trolling, Tom?

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Tom's not really wrong though, right? Those two are empirical Elites who found populist politics when the time was right. OTOH, the true, lifelong populists of the core crew, who have lived their lives more or less like regular folk, would be people like Gabbard most obviously, then Vance and Kennedy. Billionaire celebrity johnny-come-latelys just represent the natural first, transitional step in reverse engineering or -- depending on one's perspective -- organically navigating a way out of a plutocratic society in which the working class is hopped up on celebrity worship. Once hard times come, the true populists will need to be taking the reigns. Won't be all that long before Maralago starts rubbing the base the wrong way IMO.

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What do you think “populists taking the reins” — after the hard times following the collapse — will look like, Ben?

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Conservative left-libertarianism in fraught contemporary terminology. Forward-looking only, young, high-performing, steady, earnest, communicative, and hard-nosed. Gabbard, Vance, Ramaswamy, Massie, Rand Paul. It's anti-marxist, anti-finance capitalist National Socialism in simple, structuralist socioeconomic terminology, not to be confused with all the standard baggage surrounding the Third Reich. A nationalist return to public banking via a restored national treasury by ending the Fed. Digital public greenbacks as opposed to private CBDCs, for as long as the grid holds. No more credit cards. A whole lot of nationalized industry servicing the rationing of essential goods. An emphasis on worker-owned syndicalist market economics and producerism in general. People dying by the millions. Open carry guns become the new open carry smartphones.

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Nah...I love you and you're always on my to do list to read Mon. morning. A day w/o Kunstler is a day w/o sunshine.

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I need my Vitamin K every Monday and Friday.

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Did you vote for Kamala? What did you do when you realized your side had lost?

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How did you get the "new navigation bar at the top of this blog-page" to appear at the top of a post page? I don't see a setting for that - unless its only possible with some themes...

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My website manager found a way to do it.

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You can also look at the page source code to see how they did it.

Type Control-U then CONTROL-F and search for the word "navbar".

I'm assuming you can read html...

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His coding looks a little different than my Substack posts... But Substack is not Wordpress - I don't think we can do much coding beyond a "code block" that can be inserted into posts (unless there is a line of code that can be inserted into such a code block)... I was thinking there might be a setting on some Substack themes OR with custom domains (but there are not a custom one on this Substack)...

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No, just the opposite, Tom. Your Blue world is going to get a rude awakening, hopefully.

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I agree with you Tom. And I voted for Trump twice.

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3 times for me!

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I couldn’t do it a 3rd time Annette. Silence is golden😉 (OWS and Israel).

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The only thing you accomplished by not voting is absolutely nothing which is your right but when you have to proclaim you took a “stand” over and over on a comments section that’s the only effect you made

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For multi-millionaires like Shatner the economy is good because that's all they see in their sphere of influence. They only hobnob with other wealthy people. They hire and pay servants to do their shopping and prepare their meals, clean their homes and maintain their yards while they hop from vacation house to vacation house. It doesn't surprise me at all that Bill Shatner (one of my favorite actors as a child) can't understand Trump's victory. A wealthy person's opinion on the economy is as worthless as sock with holes.

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I call that archetype the "Limousine Liberal". They exist in their own vacuum/echo chambers.

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My brother lives in that neighborhood. The "Main Line" of Philly. The place that David Brooks called, "Bobos in Paradise."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobos_in_Paradise

He's not one of them, though. The assholes who were wearing masks during the covid crap while DRIVING ALONE in their cars.

He was too scared to put up a Trump sign. That's how bad it is.

But, their day is coming. Already the petty crime spillover from West Philly is happening. I just hope he'll get out of there before the property prices plummet. Wishful thinking.

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And that’s why they want plenty of illegals. Very cheap labor to babysit, clean their toilets and mow the grass on their estates but they’ll sure bitch and moan about capitalists

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Alas, much as I like Bill Shatner (Boston Legal was side-splitting hilarious at times) he is old and living in the past.

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I was listening to his album he worked on with Ben Folds and Henry Rollins, "Has Been" ... it came out years ago and I decided to cue it up again while I was out running errands. He touches on subjects like the death of his wife, his relationship with his daughter, and life in general. Good for a few laughs. He was probably more "with it" back when they cut those tracks.

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Thanx for that TCG. I fucking love Henry Rollins.

This, I can get behind. LOL.

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He wept when Leonard Nimoy broke their friendship without explanation.

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Nimoy's a you-know-what, what did you expect?

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Well there's the problem right there. ".......seems like a nice guy". HAHAHA . Great depth of thought. In fact, Shatner is an ACTOR. Brain dead Hollywoodian ACTOR. He ACTS for a living!

It's what he DOES.

But how we FEEL about anyone now is supposed to count for something ??

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But, I’m trying to reach him to find out where he shops(LOL). Prices have gone down!

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Shatner arrived from Canada, fully indoctrinated in the illusion of wealth via robbing the working poor as Government Mandarins (CBC) bleed you out as they tell you daily, they are there to "help" you.

Contribute nothing, take everything. Shatner's Canadian disease.

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Yes, I'm a fan. He's actually a brilliant man in many ways. But alas, a hard core member of the cult apparently.

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"allegedly sentient"

Hank,

You assume.

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I believe Shatner was being sarcastic.

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Oh now that’s giving credit where it is not due!!!

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That, I believe. At least I would like to believe he was being sarcastic, because I would prefer not to believe anyone can be so clueless.

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what you shouldn’t be buying is that the democrats actually tried to win. they didn’t. they purposely lost because chrump is the preferred deep state puppet this time round. both parties take orders from the same globalist boss.

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Yeah, I'm wondering about that too.

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what i’m not buying is that the demoncrats actually put forth a good faith effort. looks to me like they ran a campaign to get djt elected. which is not good news for murica

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Unfortunately, people do not realize the pain and suffering they will be forced to endure from the years of Dems (uni-party) in charge. This is where were going to live the result of weak men creating hard times. Only good news is that it will lead to hard men who will make good times.

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Strong men, not necessarily hard.

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Semantics….and I suggest given the shit that we are in there will be few (in any good) options. Unfortunately, it will be hard men that will have to lead the way out. Thus the saying….Hard times make hard men….hard men make good times…good times make weak men…weak men make hard times….and the beat goes on. Pax

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Yes, many can do hard things, but how few can withstand public pressure or the contempt of their own family and friends? Moral courage is the rarest. Many men have physical courage (rescue workers, fire and police), but many of those couldn't stand against another man in physical combat. And of those who could, how many could stand up and give a speech? And of those, taking a radically unpopular stance?

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We have a nice local run coffee shop in our 9,000 pop city. Unique and used by me snd our large Hispanic population. Young owners. Now, the stupid city has let Dunkin AND Starbucks in on the main highway through town. I will not be drinking coffee there. Starbucks coffee sucks. Hopefully we locals can keep our local one going. Walmart has prevented any other grocery store from opening so we’re stuck with it. I do use the local nice Mexican supermarket but it’s actually more expensive and lacks things I need. But produce and other products are “cleaner” in ingredients. I hope the Democrat snobs writhe the rest of their lives with their voices a tiny squeak in the background. I was a democrat who learned the truth in 2021.

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Starbucks coffee sucks.

My ex and my eldest son love this acid.

Starbucks taste always reminded me of the last dregs in the pot as you turned out the lights in the office.

No wonder sugar and creams are needed to offset the swill.

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My local independent coffee shop’s founder at one point experimented to test a theory. He offered a faux Starbucks coffee. He took a mediocre bean and roasted it to death pretty much destroying it. Starbucks buyers who came in did indeed enjoy it! Point proven but he couldn’t bring himself to do it again :-)

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+100 for hilarity.

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Coffee in general tastes like dirt to me though I do enjoy the aroma of coffee in the office. I don't understand peoples' obsession with it. Back in the wild west people used coffee to mask the taste of river and well water. Today? Not sure what it is. The caffeine, probably.

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It is a drug.

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Just like oxygen.

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To paraphrase Rick James, oxygen is a helluva drug.

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Like Navy coffee, which much of the time was the last dregs in the pot.

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John the NAVY as far as I can tell no longer roasts its own coffee.

I no longer see the five gallon tins.

Instead they buy pouches of Starbucks dark roast and Maxwell house.

I have seen this to be true on the Carl Vinson, Makin Island, Essex and the Abe Lincoln. I assume this holds true across the fleet.

In addition to over roasting the beans Starbucks also pumps the caffeine content up.

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Army coffee will put hair on your chest.

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Lol! True! Not to mention $3.50 for a small cup of swill.

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Have you ever noticed how obscene the Starbucks logo is? I'm a graphic designer, I pay attention to this shit. A mermaid with a SPLIT TAIL? And WTF does that have to do with coffee? Yeah, call it a "siren" if you want, thanks Tim Buckley. A siren with a SPLIT TAIL. Yeah, right.

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I learned how to roast coffee when we moved out to the boonies and started our own businesses. Been doing it for over 30 years now, only takes about 40 minutes for 1 week of fresh roast for 2 of us (400 gm). Average cost for the green beans is about $6-10 lb. for stuff from all over the world. You can roast it in a popcorn popper, but get better results from a more automated roaster for a $100 or more.

A satisfying hobby if nothing else.

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I had an Arabica tree in San Diego that was doing well until we moved.

It was to hot and windy for the tree and it got rust and died.

I did manage to get a couple of pounds of beans off it but have not roasted them.

These were picked when the fruit was super red and sort of sweet.

I have read in the green bean form they can last years properly stored.

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Yes burned beyond any recognition as a once sweet fruited bean.

Their dark roast is vile.

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Yep, I hear what you're saying. I live in a small community in rural Texas (about 3500 and growing...eye roll), and we have two local pizza places. Recently, I began noticing Dominos delivery vans in town and I wondered where they were coming from. Turns out there's a new Dominos pizza right here in our town now. I hate seeing it happen as they will undoubtedly siphon a lot of business from the local businesses.

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The local pizza place should change the name to “Checkers” and start delivering.

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We should start wearing blue check more often anyway in honor of Matt Gaetz.

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OMGLMFAO you are really killing me now Jarek.

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LOL! Great idea, love it!

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Yo Jeff, perhaps not. I remember when Domino's came into my town and set up shop, and they had a whole fucking caravan of vans, at least 20. Well, they picked the exact wrong place to fuck with. We gotta lotta dagos here and there's pizza places on every corner. I really enjoyed watching the caravan of vans diminish to only a couple of them. Yay.

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Well, I guess only time will tell how it plays out. Hopefully, we have a similar result.

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The Blues want control of every aspect of life. Incorporation allows them control of just about everything.

Just heard an interesting statement. Musk’s main influence in the Deep State will be the ability to expose the cretins on X, uninhibited. He is the Red equivalent of the MSM, being able to make toast out of the shenanigans of the Left. As news moves more and more to the social media approach, his influence will do nothing but increase.

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"Incorporation allows them control of just about everything."

Finally, you are getting it. Props.

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Great observation.

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Starbucks tea is horrible too. Bitter and acidic.

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The task ahead is truly going to be one of Herculean proportions, and perhaps it’s most challenging aspect will be the essential element of having a single unity of purpose. That’s a tall order, with so many with their hands out for “their piece of the pie”.

Freedom has come to mean a lot of different things to a lot of people, and for most, it’s most necessary ingredient of personal sacrifice doesn’t even come to mind. But the transformation back into our original Constitutional Republic will not happen without some level of sacrifice in some measure being willingly borne by every American.

The people’s concept of the very original purpose of our form government, the Federal government in particular, has been thoroughly perverted after decades and decades of its flagrant disregard and willful ignoring of its very stringent Constitutional limits and parameters.

Our government was never intended to “fix every problem” - especially made up ones - or to “give us hand outs” for every damned thing under the sun.

It was designed to be nearly inconsequential and purely perfunctory in relation to our everyday lives, not the arbiter of every aspect of them.

Thus, the process of dismantling the monstrosity that currently masquerades as our federal government must absolutely and unequivocally go hand in hand with a “Manhattan Project” re-education of the American citizenry as to its original purpose, which, inevitably demand a sacrifice to varying degrees from the populace, but will be the only way we will ever truly get to experience genuine freedom, if that’s truly what we want.

It will be excruciatingly difficult, painful and disruptive, but absolutely necessary.

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Very well said, Suzie. An appropriate maxim: Nothing worth having is ever easy.

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Government cannot fix every problem. We are too many. Too diverse. Too many unique problems to be fixed. Hence the reason we need to be able to govern ourselves and resolve our own problems.

Trump cannot dismantle everything even if he were willing to try. He needs a willing Congress and that he does not have. Correct me if I am wrong but I don't think the Republicans can break a filibuster in the Senate, especially with so many Republicans willing to vote across the aisle.

Any real change is going to come because it MUST come, not because we want to fix things. Too many people with too many differing views. Something must happen that unite all of use and cause us to cast off the political parties and work together to resolve the issues.

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"Any real change is going to come because it MUST come..."

Probably be forced upon us by the circumstances we have tolerated and lived with (and in some ways found short term benefit) for so long.

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You are right. it takes 61.

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BUT, they majority party controls the committee chairmanships and what gets attention, that is a big advantage.

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"But the transformation back into our original Constitutional Republic will not happen without some level of sacrifice"

I am not so keen on how our representational Republic works. Perhaps term limits would make a difference but we need things to evolve to reflect the realities of our population and the 21st century.

And when I hear a "Manhattan Project" of "re-education" of the American citizenry why does Mao comes to mind? And what exactly are the sacrifices you're expecting for this so we get "genuine" freedom?

See there's never been a magical time when the citizenry of the U.S. was all on the same page and participated in the government. That should not be a goal.

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The job of our government is to protect us from foreigners. That is its number one job per the Constitution.

Open border is a direct obliteration of that charter and is why all the Mayorkas types should be imprisoned for being traitors to their oath of office.

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You know he's one of the special people, right?

MIGA is not MAGA. To the extent we have MIGA, we won't have MAGA.

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Yer duh 1 hooz speshul.

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He definitely needs to pay consequences for his treachery. Above all.

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An outsized portion of Americans think it is the government’s job to care for them from cradle to grave.

It is not.

And It is not Maoist by any means to want our children (as well as adults!) to be educated about their country’s Founding Documents, freedoms, and principles. Every school should include that in their curriculum, as once upon a time we did just that, but conveniently stopped doing so little by little over time.

By sacrifices I mean Americans have to relearn how become more self-reliant, and no longer so dependent on the government to fix all their problems. That is not, and never was the government’s job.

The problems in the 21st century are pretty much the same as they were 250 years ago: war, crime, poverty, corruption, etc. The Constitution addresses all of these when applied appropriately, just not always the way some people may wish it did.

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Giving people a hand up, not a hand out. What a concept.

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Yeah, it's kind of Maoist to want to educate every person in the country on the founding documents because how else are you going to do it without somehow making it compulsory?

Will everyone have to take a test?

I get your general idea that if everyone knew the Constitution in and out things would be so much better but that is a fantasy. In any case the Constitution doesn't address all these things as much as the Bill of Rights does - but you knew that didn't you?

You may want to believe that the "problems' of the 21st century are the same but the solutions aren't. You understand the Republics don't last and neither will ours so we might want to be thinking about that. How to pivot? Maybe direct democracy or a different version of representation to the federal level? Regional governance?

What the government is and what some believe it to be hasn't been because some folks aren't self-reliant. Since FDR (throw in The Great Society) and the government has been purposely positioned to "solve" all problems. "Relearning" something you never had is impossible (go ahead and try it on somebody).

Every day in the U.S. sacrifices are made by any person of working age as by law we have to give money to the government to give to those who don't or can't work. In the real world it's called a ponzi scheme.

Yes, it's frustrating that few in the culture seem unable to manage things on their own but that's the way it's always been. Sacrificing something to be self-reliant does not make one so.

Emotional simplification of the problems of our country does nothing to work towards solutions.

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Well said. We found a stone age people here and we conquered them. We took this continent by storm. We (the Whites!) are the Native Americans. If you can't get behind this, don't even bother with the documents. THEY were all behind this. THEY were for their people!

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Lugh

Right! The purpose of the American common culture is to absorb all peoples here into a common bond, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit. Any people who do not join in will be outsiders and treated as such. The Natives rejected that premise and therefore created their own nations. You reap what you sow.

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And in some cases are now doing better.

Casinos are making a difference when the tribes are not corrupt..

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You hit on a point that has disgusted me for years-referring to us always and only as “consumers”, not as citizens. The differences between the two are monumental.

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Amen.

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Blood bags to be squeezed when something is needed or worse as human resources.

Human resources to be used as capitol.

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A lot to do to save America. There will be pushback by those that benefit from its destruction. Big Pharma, Big Ag, the Military Industrial Complex, the MSM. These are not inconsequential foes. They won't be defeated in a single election. We must be strong and forget expecting the government to come to our aid with other people's money. $35 trillion won't be found under our sofa cushions. Firing 80% of the government work force sounds drastic but may be the ONLY way to significantly shrink the deficit.

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I know. As relieved as we are with a sane man now in charge, looking at the waste and lies, there is battle ahead…

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First, eliminate deficit spending and balance the budget. Once that is accomplished, eliminate half of our defense spending. We would still be spending more than the rest of the world. Put the savings towards paying down the $35 trillion.

But, you are correct. Big pharma and the MIC won't take this lying down. Trump has only 4 years and the American people will swing the pendulum back to the Democrats in 2028. These problems are not going to go away.

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Cankerpuss

Balance the Budget? Impossible. The service on the debt alone is over a trillion a year now. In microeconomics, the USA, by definition is bankrupt. Half the population is dependent on government outlays. Think about what Trump and his group face, how to make economic policy more conservative without driving society onto the streets.

Best case? Slow the increase in spending, and keep the tax and spend Blues out of office. It will take fifty years of slowing the spending to be able to balance the budget or start working on the debt. Mission Impossible?

Start thinking what will it be like to have no government support for the masses, AKA bankruptcy.

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Get rid of the Fed. It was and is illegal. Start printing our own debt free money again. In a book on the JFK assassination, I found one of the debt free bills he had printed. He was on to them. The last guy to do that was Lincoln. What else do they have in common, eh?

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Ya forgot about Jackson, Jarek.

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Start printing our own money? Who? What is debt free money? Are you wanting to just default on the debt? How much of this world's economics do you think is based on the Feds promise to pay? Even the gold bullion banks have US Treasuries representing gold. Folks, we are so screwed, with no way out. JHK fans should have read that the oil supply as well as the money supply is going to peter out over time. WMBH!

BTW, we default, who gets hurt severely. The creditors, right. Who is that? You and me. Look at a one, federal Reserve note, right? Even our money is a debt to the Fed and thus the government. IMHO, as the Boomers get older and start to withdraw their savings, they are the creditors that may make the debt default, except they will just run the presses and create more Federal Reserve Notes. Weimar?

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Read the Constitution, Patriot. The Government prints or coins money, based on gold and silver. The latter is not the only way to do it, but it is the way they decided to do it. There is nothing about "loaning" money into existence. We have to pay a debt on our own money? By definition it can never be paid back. Think about it!

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Yo Jar, are we the only ones who think JAZ is mostly clueless?

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UH, agin you do not read. We agree 100%. The Constitution says nothing about printing paper and calling it money. Money is to be based on man-hours, not created out of mid-air. If the amount of money was controlled by the goods and services produced, ie honest GDP, inflation or deflation would not happen. Inflation and deflation are created by power hungry politicians buying votes.

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I disagree, JohnAZ. Balancing the budget is always possible. It's just going to be extremely painful and I don't know if there is the will to endure such pain.

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Okay, say we balance the budget. How, obligatory payouts are bigger than the tax intake, so where do you get the funding. The whole problem is that discretionary spending is almost non-existent to obligatory spending. So let's say we just cut across the board 20%. 20% lay-offs at federal level, 20% reduction in all payouts. SSA. welfare, illegals support, Medicare and Medicaid, military paychecks and pensions, etc. etc. What happens to the consumer base of the US with everyone making 20% less? How many paycheck to paycheck debt ridden bankruptcies are going to occur?

A guy named Hoover thought he could become austere with the federal spending and the economy would just reset itself. He was wrong! We are so much further down the dependency path today that balancing the budget would make The Great Depression a mere bagatelle.

My answer is that the rate of spending must be slowly decreased over a long time. It took us a hundred years to get us into this mess, it will take as long to get us out without killing the country economically.

BTW, a good start additionally would be to tariff the shit out of everything and use the additional income to lower the deficit. As the internal manufacturing returns to US independency, the price impact will go away. Short term, inflation alert.

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All good and valid points, JohnAZ, I don't disagree. That is why in a previous post on another thread that I suggested sending many Federal employees a notice and give them a year's worth of severance. Plenty of time to go find new work elsewhere. Balancing the budget doesn't have to be done over night. But it does have to be done.

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Absolutely no argument. Now let’s go convince some idiot Leftists that money is more than paper.

BTW, the pipeline fiasco at the beginning of the Biden crime wave is a good example. When he killed the pipeline, he promised that green energy jobs would hire back the displaced. Never happened and now they sit on the dole.

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"the American people will swing the pendulum back to the Democrats in 2028. "

CP, do you ever tire of being the "glass-half-empty" sort? Asking for a friend.

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@Kelly Harbeson I like your comment. Unfortunately, quite a few of those federal employees "work" in the business of administering government programs, and the biggest programs (in dollar terms) regard transfer payments that benefit people, including quite a few middle-class people, who will not like it.

Interest on the federal debt. Military spending. Transfer payments. If Federal employees could be replaced with robots, and their payroll (pay and benefits) eliminated, we are still left with the first three items, which are vastly more costly than the pay of Federal workers.

And there are many shell games, perfectly legal, played in the US. One easy example--the tax coded, which is very complicated. This complexity employs hundreds of thousands of accountants and tax preparers in what is essentially non-constructive work. Do you think these accountants' lobbyists will permit simplification of the tax code?

Still, every bit counts. It's a sure thing that, had Kamala Harris and the Democrats won, NOTHING positive would happen, and most likely, things would degrade even more. With Trump, it's possible we could see improvements. We need every bit at this point.

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"and the biggest programs (in dollar terms) regard transfer payments that benefit people"

Perfect job for AI to do. In fact many of these jobs might do thing that appear complicated but a computer can figure out the differences in tax codes pretty quickly. We're going to see how many jobs are worthless.

Also, understand the difference between AI and a "robot". No need for robots.

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We dodged the simplified tax form: 1. How much did you make. 2. Send it in.

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Funny, sickening but funny.

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We need to stop mandatory withholding, is what we need to do. That will shut this bullshit down real fucking fast.

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Long, long before the 4 year term is up, you will know if this Herculean Task can get started.

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"forget expecting the government to come to our aid with other people's money."

Amen, sistah!

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Morning Jim - excellent as always. Thanks as always. I love you - sane, relentless, a fighter.

"The aggregate insult alone deserves a world-class beat-down." ~ JHK

Amen.

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"Garage Sale Nation".

That's epic.

I'm a big-girl-garage-sailor, btw. Lol.

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Good text, but it doesn't look far enough beyond the tip of the nose, let alone the horizon.

Rebuilding America, or any part of the world, to its former glory, whether real or imagined, is anachronistically delusional.

It's time to start connecting the dots, namely societal, economic, and, most importantly, physical issues. The way the world, the Occident in particular, has developed over the past few hundred years is fully owed to hydrocarbons - coal, oil, and natural gas. More specifically, cheap, easy to get hydrocarbons. That is no longer the case, they're not so cheap anymore, in the sense of energy needed to invest to obtain energy (not money, money is worthless shit). This will only get worse, and similar problems are faced in regard to just about all other resources. Energy, however, is the master resource, and matters the most.

Thus, rebuilding America's glory is impossible because the physical conditions that formerly allowed it to thrive are no longer there. That includes the aforementioned energy and other factors, such as privileged status after the two world wars, control over the world through the dollar and military strength, soft power thanks to the entertainment industry.

Gotta look to the future. All of humanity will have to reinvent itself and embrace a whole new paradigm. The notion of ongoing progress, growth (in the physical sense), the biblical dominion of the world, will have to be abandoned and replaced with a sustainable, unchanging existence aligned with natural cycles. The transition to a different source of energy is a pipe dream, not to mention that it wouldn't solve the dwindling reserves of other resources, rare earths, minerals. Fertilizer made using natural gas too!

As fucking disgusting as wokeism is and as heartwarming as is its rejection in Trump's election, the vast majority of people have no clue about what's in the pipeline, and the vote was mostly reactionary, cast in vain hope of returning to the heyday of America's prosperity. That ain't happening, as per the above.

It would behoove everybody to start looking forward and instead of invoking RE-building of this and that focus on building something new, taking into account the physical constraints humans will be facing.

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Another point to make in addition to your points is that people are not having children anymore. Population is set to begin decreasing once the Baby Boomers are gone. Without population growth there is no economic growth. Who is going to buy all of those new homes if there isn't population growth. Who is going to buy all those new cars if there isn't population growth. Our young people are so obsessed with their phones they don't notice each other. Our young men are neutered by pornography addictions. Our young women have been taught to believe they don't need men and have grown to hate men. Babies are our future. Lots of babies result in economic growth. People aren't having lots of babies anymore.

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The point I was trying to make is that people have to start looking beyond economic growth. The age of economic growth, driven by cheap energy, is nearing its end. We're on the downslope already, as energy is becoming too expensive (in the physical sense, in the sense that you get less energy from the energy you put in or, in other words, more energy needs to be invested to obtain energy).

We've built a very complex civilization and there ain't enough juice to run it and maintain it. Shit is crumbling all over the place. Bridges, roads, power infrastructure, you name it. The same goes, by extension, for everything else.

In the long run, the fact that people are not having kids is a good thing. The world's population has doubled over the past circa 40 years and that can't go on, even if there were enough resources (especially energy), which there aren't. Population will have to be reduced and if it happens because limpdick faggots can't get it up, so much the better. Certainly better than a war or some other violent event or another fucking covid and fuckccination.

The decadence you allude to, women fucked up in the head (men too), and all the other shit are side-effects of the energy- and resource-related structural issues.

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I didn't disagree with you, Paul. I think you are right. I was just also stretching what you were saying to the fact that humans are naturally going to de-populate themselves by not reproducing. The need for all of this energy is going to naturally reduce itself simply through the reduction of population and the economic contractions that are going to follow.

Believe me, I agree that there are too many people on this planet. I can't go anywhere and be totally isolated, even back packing in high Rocky Mountain wilderness still yields other back packers who can't go three days without listening to loud hip hop rap music on their I-phones (true story).

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The problem with population size is primarily energy. Although you can fit zillions of people into a city, everybody lives from what a chunk of land somewhere out there produces (distributed all over the world). The stuff is grow, harvested, processed, and delivered to us thanks to energy (hydrocarbons). Without energy, we'd lose the connection to the land out there and starve. Even if people went back to manual farming and even if they did it collectively, they wouldn't be able to produce enough to sustain themselves.

Rap in the Rockies is sick! The bears will hopefully eat the fuckers!

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And you are right about food. I am an avid gardener. I grow a mean potato, cucumber, tomato, cob of corn, cantaloupe, carrot, bean and cauliflower, but no way could I grow enough food to sustain myself or my family for more than a month. I have neighbors who have chickens and they act like they are superior because of it. The problem is they have to go to the local farm supplies store to purchase the grain and the oyster shells to keep the birds fed and their gizzards working properly. So, yeah, you are right. We are doomed if we have to grow and produce our own foods.

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Paul, no joke. We backpacked 12 miles into a wilderness area from the nearest parking lot. During the night a group in a campsite a near by was playing hip hop rap music late into the night. Don't know what kind of speakers they packed in but the were plenty loud. I expect that kind of bull shit at car accessible camp sites but to hike 12 miles with a back pack on and still blast shitty poetry with a bass beat. Blew my mind. People can't enjoy quiet solitude anymore. Everything has to be noise, noise, noise, noise. Like I said, you can't go anywhere in this world anymore without encountering another human being.

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I now live in Europe and it's pretty densely populated here. Luckily, I have a house in the woods and not too much traffic here. It's pretty peaceful.

Reproduced music is another thing. I happen to be a musician, trained professional in fact. When you say music today, it's what you play - usually some sonic shit - on your phone. Few normal folks can play an instrument or even carry a fucking tune. Total decadence - technology (while there may have been some merit to it at the beginning when the Neanderthal man or whoever the fuck it was invented the wheel) has atrophied people's abilities to zero, if not worse!

Humans are lazy fucks who focus on perfecting doodads that make them even fucking lazier, instead of focusing on perfecting themselves.

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Reducing all human culture to matter? Sounds familiar. Oh yeah, Marxist communism or Adam Smith type Capitalism.

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Not sure what you're trying to say and not sure that you know what you're trying to say.

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Whites who listen to this stuff are self haters even if they into the "natural". They will go the way of the Dodo and Saber Tooth.

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Walked by a parked car on my way to the gym today. Sitting inside was a white boy and he was blasting loud rap. As I walked by I heard the words "nigga" and "motherfucker" shouted at least 4 times. Stuff ain't music. Don't know what it is but it ain't music.

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“Music” has returned to the Stone Age. Even the maranatha songs in church are low talent song writing, depending on loud guitars and drums. John Wesley was a great songwriter, producing good lyrics and melodies. There are no Wesleys around today.

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Cankerpuss is right. Demography is destiny. I see your point that we don't need a permanently increasing population, but there needs to be balance.

On paper, the lack of young people can be filled with "immigrants". In practice, when the immigrants are "too different" and too many, I think that will end a society, albeit less violently than war, or with less pain than natural disaster or economic calamity.

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Agreed.

The problem is that the so-called elite, the people who run the circus, are not only the worst scum (they get where they are through the most abominable practices, backstabbing, corruption, the worst possible sleaze), but also stupid as fuck. They're good at scheming, sucking dick, and backstabbing, not looking beyond the horizon. If anything, they do quick fixes and myopic solutions.

Immigration is a farce. Instead of picking educated, hardworking, high-potential people who want to integrate (kinda the way it used to be), they not only let anybody in, but the newcomers are assigned a privileged status, allowed to bring whatever problems fucked up their world back at home, and all the rest.

Things are fucked up to the nth degree, just about completely inverted. All these issues, however, are secondary to the energy predicament and the underlying raison d'etre of this civilization - technological progress and economic growth for the sake of progress and growth.

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No. Civilization is not a zero sum game.

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Not sure about that. There’s Civilization and Un-civilization. This model of civilization is fatally flawed.

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The first question to ask about human depopulation: Who is going to go and who stays? Obviously you want the other group to go. Those like Paul who don't see it that way get the Darwin award.

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You're in denial of facts and are responding by invoking ad hominem shit.

This is a simple biological phenomenon. Like any other species, humans have happened on a bonanza of an easy-to-get resource - hydrocarbons - and have overmultiplied. The human population is sustained solely by availability hydrocarbons, even though the size of the population and the quantity of hydrocarbons needed to sustain is are debatable figures. There is a limit, however, your denial and insinuations of malevolence notwithstanding - the former is okay, your problem, the latter you can shove back up your asshole.

Who's going to go? With any luck, the population size will shrink naturally over a long period due to reduced birthrate, people dying earlier due to reduced access to healthcare, what have you. The other option is a fight over the last fucking loaf of bread.

This is not personal, these are objective observations. If you care to contribute, go right ahead. If you want to insult, go fuck yourself.

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In other words, you don't identify with any people, tribe, nation, or race. You can play omniscient narrator all you want, but you and people like you will win the Darwin award nonetheless.

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Lugh, what are you talking about. Darwin award? The Darwin Award is for someone who straps a rocket to his chair and blasts himself over the Pacific Ocean without a parachute or a life preserver. Paul's comments are excellent considerations about the growth of humanity based upon finite resources. So, where are you coming from?

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Didn't I tell you to go fuck yourself if you can't resist this ad hominem shit?

Yeah, wake the fuck up and smell the coffee. Earth is not inflatable and there IS a limit to its carrying capacity. That will be corrected one way or another, whether I, you, or any fucking body else likes it or not. That's reality, your fear of realizing its inevitability notwithstanding.

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The real metric is people/household. This has been declining since the 70's. It is an indicator of slower population growth as well as increased wealth which translates into sprawl. The wealth variable mainly came from cheap reliable energy sources. It was government intervention which curtailed the "cheap" part. Eventually we'll either be back to being serfs on farms or else living the good life with modular nukes in every small town.

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We call all read all kinds of things into the election, and they all have varying elements of truth. IMO, the election was a referendum on the state of the nation under the Biden Administration--and Biden/Harris lost.

Even before reading JHK's "The Long Emergency" in 2006, during my young adult life, the 1980s and 1990s, I felt America was going in the wrong direction, by doubling down on suburbia and the new "exurbia". More sprawl. Bigger houses, with more house to cool and heat, with more wasted space, further away from jobs, doctors, shopping, etc.

Not that Americans are necessarily greedier and more materialistic than others--it's just that land was relatively cheap and plentiful AND America was relatively affluent. The energy crises of 1973 and 1979 should have alerted people to the physical constraints and resource limitations, but they did not.

Also, in the early 1990s, after the relatively peaceful implosion of the USSR, rather than declare "Mission Accomplished" and come home, the US decided to become the unipolar power, a position that is not sustainable by anyone, especially a nation that is not a dictatorship. The US has wasted trillions in what Candidate Trump called the "forever wars".

The US government/deep state has rolled the dice with Russia (Ukraine) and the middle east (Israel), and the latter (perhaps both, if Biden and the Deep State can provoke Russia) are going to spectacularly blow up and boomerang and overshadow the earlier paragraphs of this comment.

Empire. Suburban sprawl. Big moves with big, long-term impacts that cannot be undone in four years, or even four decades.

Of course, we need to do what we can as individuals to adopt, but I'd bet things in this world will continue to deteriorate--and we should try to slow the rate of decline. In that sense, it seems Trump's victory is the better outcome.

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How hydrocarbons have been used was a choice. The model of civilization that was chosen for the plebs and the middle class isn’t for the plebs and the middle. The model of civilization was chosen by the overlords and for the overlords. The overlords decided on how the global economy was going to be built and powered. They went with centralization and maximizing political-financial-ecclesiastical power for themselves.

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I don't expect that we (the western world) will have a say in the matter. It will merely be whack-a-mole in an attempt to manage the chaos.

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The western world is in serious decline. Out of all the aspects of that, the most serious is cultural decline. Since circa WWII, America has steamrolled the world with its cheap entertainment, which perhaps had some value at one point, but has slid into absolutely worthless shit that fucks up people's heads, makes them fucking stupid, and makes them wallow in their fucking stupidity. The whole world is infected, the closer to the US, the worse.

There is no spirituality, no introspection, no nothing, just mad craving for another useless piece of shit, without purpose, sans aucune raison d'etre.

The West is fucked.

Is Trump's election or the revolt against wokeism (an extreme manifestation of the decadence) a harbinger of change? Are people sick of this shit? Or do they want more? Good question. I'd like to believe the former, but the latter is probably the case.

It would seem that the global East has been better able to hang onto common sense, not to embrace every new craze, but who knows - they like the cheap horseshit just like the next guy. We shall see what happens.

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Looking forward to 2030, we are all supposed to be chock full of self replicating nanotechnology with built in alarm clocks so we can do the deep staters' work. You mean that "looking forward"?

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Dems are truly the party of numbnuts. But also, as the party of liars, they know they were caught with the pants down, finally!

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It will take a while to filter down to the democrats around me. Some will, some won’t. It was the child trans evil and my own president threatening me if I didn’t get the kill shots. A fairly sudden awakening. A realization that what my 14 yo granddaughter was going through—a transgender grooming, WAS THE PLAN ENABLED BY THE LEFT. As far as I’m concerned, the left is irredeemable and will never get my respect ever again. Ever. Over. I want vaporizing revenge. Now.

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Now if you would just awaken to the Republican scum who have stabbed you in the back over and over and over. How many times have the Republicans held the Congress and the Executive but done nothing with that power to curb spending, reduce government, and eliminate unconstitutional agencies? People are still playing the tribe game. Democrat or Republican. Republican or Democrat. Their tribalism is blinding them to the fact that both parties want and do the same thing, they just use different jargon to get themselves there. Both spend too much money. Both continue waging foreign wars in lands that pose no threat or interest to the USA. Both refuse to deport all of the illegal immigrants. Political parties are the demise of America. More Americans need to cast off the party brainwashing and just think America first.

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Get out of the business of passing lame to the Dems or the Republicans, these do not really exist any more. RINOS are counted as GOP and they are not MAGA, they are Deep State.

Trump has Dems in his group, get it? He is anti-Deep State, MAGA, not GOP. I wish he had declared a third party, MAGA. He couldn’t, but now perhaps with other anti- Deep Staters coming out of the Blue closet, he can form the MAGA party. Screw the RINOS! They are the worst.

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Reject Israel and millions of Democrats will rally to his standard - as well as countless disgruntled traditional Americans who don't bother voting for the most part.

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Yeah, Jarek. This.

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Blame!

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I too wish Trump had said fuckitall and gone Independent.

What better term than that? Independence. As in, the Declaration thereof. As in, non-gimmes. Which is what the Uniparty is, lock, stock, and barrel.

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Anti-deepstate. Is that when a person wears the little beanie hat and worships at a crumbly wall? Trump IS deep state but not everybody knows that. Know anybody who believes everything Trump says?

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Anti-Deep State is when you use outsiders and people persecuted by the Deep State to man your cabinet. Turn them loose to undo the damage that has occurred. His education lady for example knows that her job is to pass her job to the states and put herself out of business. Matt Gaetz as AG is self-explanatory. If Gaetz gets in, the Braggs, Smiths and James of the USA are going to feel the pressure and the FBI will be curtailed in power or eliminated. The direction of power and control will be reversed away from central control. Hopefully. That is anti-Deep State.

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I had thought RFKjr would be the best pick for AG. But now I realize, Gaetz is even better. Who gives a flying fuck if he "lacks experience"? Revenge porn, bring it the fuck on, Allelujah, Amen.

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Primaries are important. Weeds must be pulled out and replaced.

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I missed where she said she was going to the other side. All I got was that she didn't want to be a Democrat any more. That's a win. The end.

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Oh, come on Red, you know for most people it is either Democrat or Republican. Even "independents" still vote Republican or Democrat.

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I don't spend a lot of time worrying about normies, Cank. I tend to run with a better crowd.

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"Even "independents" still vote Republican or Democrat."

I'm an "independent" voter. As soon as I was old enough to vote, I voted for Ron Paul for President in 1988. Libertarian.

And my Mom voted for Ross Perot.

And my Dad, as a registered Repuke, used to vote for Lyndon LaRouche.

So, there.

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Yes, people try to "think" with the part of the mind that just reacts: good/bad, pain/pleasure, yes/no.

Even one third party would help break this log jam of human consciousness. Of course many won't ever be able to go beyond this and of course should be weeded out from voting.

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The positions of the two parties in the political spectrum have shifted considerably since the Bushes turned Left and Obama happened. Instead of Mid Left or Mid Right , we are now faced with insane ult-Lefters and mid to right MAGAs. The real issue is the feeling about the USA, MAGA wants the patriotic world of Reagan back where the USA is powerful and a beacon on the hill for the world. The ult-Lefters hate the patriotic USA and want it destroyed in favor of a third world status. They want to steal the wealth of patriotic America for themselves. Think reparations, think immigrant welfare. We are sadly at the point that we cannot afford all the fiat money being used to support the Have-Nots.

We need to start removing Have-Nots from our society, not encouraging their growth.

Hatred is growing with each election, how long can Union last?

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"I want vaporizing revenge. Now."

Fuck yeah! And I'm stealing that.

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I heartily enjoyed this morning's article. It's brilliant. I don't know how you manage to so beautifully and accurately describe the condescending self-owning ignorance of the Woke Jacobin left, but you do it like nobody else. So many great lines in today's post! I don't know where to start.

I guess the most satisyfing line is: "the punking of America by a gang of vicious, criminal snobs. The aggregate insult alone deserves a world-class beat-down. They know it, and they know they are going to get it, and it will be satisfying to watch them rat each other out as judgment nears."

I endeavor to avoid schadenfreude; however, I am only human. And I have saved all of the proof of the horrors unleashed upon us during the covid psyops, and the inducement of TDS to the point where I can't even talk to my former friends and most of my family - even if I don't bring up even one "political" issue or figure. The damage that the MKULtra tactics used via the mainstream media is vast and deep, and I don't know if it can be reversed. Peoples' minds are destroyed. In any case, if these people aren't somehow able to be deprogrammed, I am not sure how much we can progress.

Perhaps the answer is to just begin the work ourselves, and see whether they are smart enough to come along.

Thanks for the excellent work, Jim.

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They make a claim and back it up with an opinion, and when challenged, they substantiate their claim and opinion with additional opinions.

Their claim essentially being that my deceased wife, my oldest daughter, and myself are part of the problem because we choose not to be "vaccinated", and they won't entertain any perspective or facts that would destroy their claim and opinions.

By doing so, they are essentially telling me that they don't respect my opinion, and ultimately certifying that they have a closed mind, where they are either married to an agenda, or subject to any derangement syndrome that their sources promote.

I can think of no reason to tolerate a relationship with such individuals. They ultimately clutter and cripple your mind, and I have better things to do.

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Mary, in regard to the claim that the unvaccinated are the problem, what is your best source of information that implicates Fauci as being the problem?

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Where did I mention Fauci or the unvaccinated being the problem?

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Mary, you said "I have saved all of the proof of the horrors unleashed upon us during the covid psyops", and I just figured that you would be a good source to provide me with information to counter the claim.

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RFK, Jr is using hindsight. In 2020, the entire world was enveloped in fear, mostly because of the bullshit they were being fed by the governments and the supporting media. If his book stops government overbearance and the consequent grab for power, good for him. If he uses his knowledge in HHS, yay! Until Fauci invents the next biological weapon and it escapes.

Can't happen? Hahaha! There are a lot of monkeys in I believe S. Carolina that would disagree with that.

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John, that which I was looking for was information about Fauci facilitating development of the binder, and I have in mind that it was a video discussion with Ed Dowd, or possibly Kennedy.

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Even better yet - just read Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's best-selling book on Fauci. Like what, 600 pages worth? It's great. Buy it.

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I'm not amassing and issuing my research on demand, sorry. You will have to do your own. I would suggest reading Celia Farber's work on Fauci from the AIDS debacle first to get a background. Then you can read Steve Kirsch's work exposing the vaccines, and he's just one person. I am amazed if you hang around here you haven't already found dozens of other resources.

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Mary? Idaho from LA?

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I totally agree with your skepticism about Fauci. Lord only knows what the worldwide virus industry is cooking up for us.

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"If the Democratic Party had not gone completely insane for a decade, its many eggheads like Walter Isaacson and Michael Sandel would have been working on these major socio-economic transformations, instead of punking us with drag queens, pointless wars, and Marxian punishments."

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"These two pusillanimous pricks, pretending to be genteel, are the poster boys for a diseased polity."

Just once I'd like to turn a phrase like that all on my own.

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Knowing Bill Shanters background, he sucks at bluffing his way out of why his Democratic Party lost the election; I’m sure the wife he cheated on a lost, when she drowned herself in the backyard pool (fast enough for him to not be able to save her) would confirm that Bill Shanter sucks at bluffing his way out of trouble💀

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He’s just a fat old has been bad actor. Why ask him anything or listen to the drivel old Hollywood farts spew. Hollywood—that bastion of fakes and pedos.

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Guess he thought he was a badass, with his Elvis hairdo, when he tried-but failed-to rescue his wife from drowning💀

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He was cool in his prime. Then he got old and fat, like all of us do. The pathetic thing about Hollywood is they are so self absorbed they don't go away when they get old and fat, unlike we normal folk.

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Why should we normal folk go away just because we're old (fat optional)? Years and experience can as readily bring enlightenment as its opposite. Remember the adage "Too soon old, too late smart." There's something in that.

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I don't disagree with you, but, as people age they tend to become more reclusive.

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Reclusive or cynical?🤔

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"Then he got old and fat, like all of us do."

Just when I thought the black cloud couldn't get any blacker, you just outdid yourself.

You're not black, or coal, or anthracite, or jet....you're obsidian. Peace out.

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😂😂😂

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"Bill Shanters" /sic.

Love it.

Actually, I was really touched when he broke down and cried about his Blue Origin experience. I got to watch that live.

That said, I'll always be in love with Greg Giraldo for roasting the hell out of him (among others). RIP, Greg.

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