Debt Rattle November 9 2022
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We in California had finally had it with our WEF minion Governor Gavin Newsom and made a referendum to throw him out. Poof, nothing burger. I feel like all the prison inmates stood up on their bunks and demanded a vote to change the Prison Warden and were all handed a piece of paper and a pencil. All the “votes” were collected by the laughing prison guards and brought to the Wardens office to “count”. How can anyone really believe that they have any effect in these farces?
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
~ Dalai LamaMarvelous little proverb. I wonder if it’s an old folk proverb.
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
~ Dalai LamaUnfortunately for us, we often end up like that mosquito. Squashed.
The US midterms seem to have deftly circumvented and postponed kinetic ‘blood-in-the-streets’ open revolt for the time being. The new date for the dust up will be announced as long from now as humanly possible, but in the meantime everyone has plenty of time to do what they do best: being hopeful, afraid or unconscious. Only three more wars to go and survivors should be in the clear to get back to hunting and gathering.
Since I have attempted to pass myself off as a poet, I feel obligated to present an example:
Table for One
The world eats me, as words made flesh
Digest themselves. As combines thresh
The grain from stalk, so life by lives
Divides itself with sentient knives.The big and little fish that eat
The smaller of their kind, the meat
That through the slaughterhouses flow,
“All beasts and fowl”: these ones knowThe table spreads around the globe,
That — “mindless” beast or soul in robe —
Are scurried victuals, that all
Must fight to lose, to founder, fall.This need to breathe and procreate,
To relay signals passed by fate,
Makes a communal house for us
In one anothers’ bellies. ThusWomb by womb, we start to crawl.
One by one we join the all.
Through self and love, from soul to rind.
Eat heartily, I do not mind.6-82 Charleston, S.C.
As for mosquitoes and squishes: everyone’s arse is up for kicks. One either does or doesn’t, and the outcome of this does as it will.
@Dr D
To the extent that Umberto Eco misses the mark (although he does pretty good, really) when he DOES miss, it is as if he is saying “When you look out your window and see goose-stepping soldiers parading in shiny high boots, then you have fascism, and when you look out the window and don’t, then you don’t have fascism”
To SOME extent, he takes a particular external stylistic approach and assumes it is the underlying thing. Totalitarians gladly grab whatever gives leverage. So saying they have a taste for grasping a PARTICULAR thing for leverage would be wrong. Is he too naive to say fascism is beside the point? Tradition? You can make ANYTHING tradition with enough repetition.
Maybe a simpler definition would be:
1.) They’re good at gaining control
2.) They’re bad at running anything (and think competence and good stewardship is beneath them?)
3.) First they blame The Bad People for ruining their Brilliant Plans
4.) Eventually – but without TOO much delay or hand-wringing – they say “Fine, we’ll just use slavery/forced labor to make our plans work”
5.) Despite continually finding new enemies to eliminate and conscripting more forced labor, nothing works anyway.
6.) Their security forces realize they are superfluous, given a long enough time frame.It’s interesting how Eco both predicts Wokeism and fails to predict Wokeism at the same time.
I tend to get suspicious of people focusing specifically on fascism. YES 30-s-40s Germany was bad. Obviously. But just to the east you get the same methods being used for 70+ years without getting the same kind of attention. So if the methods are not objectionable, just the doctrine, then what’s his point? And if the methods ARE objectionable, why linger over the STYLE in which the same methods are used? Obsession with “fascism” tends to be a telltale sign of a still-butthurt internationalist socialist movement mad at the breakaway nationalist socialist movement. The nationalist flavor totally lost due to being more incompetent and it’s been over 75 years. I guess ideologies can get PTSD too.
The Babylon Bee: Nation Unsure Whether To Support Party That Runs Brain-Damaged Candidates Or Party That Loses To Brain-Damaged Candidates
@Robin Morrison:
Face-Dress in Vegas? Can’t tell if it’s day or night in there.“Not Yet” post is up, with picture of gardener gazing expectantly at growing Nam-wah banana stalk above him. https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/not-yet
US Nuclear Forces Chief Says ‘the Big One Is Coming’
The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come.
“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said Navy Adm. Charles Richard, the commander of US Strategic command. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”
Richard’s warning came after the US released its new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which reaffirms that the US doctrine allows for the first use of nuclear weapons. Former Russian President Medvedev explains the reason behind the timing of the special-military-operation to eliminate elements hostile to Russian-speakers and Russia. Kiev’s nuclear ambitions spurred Moscow’s military operation
Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine surrendered its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in exchange for promises from the US, Britain and Russia that they would “provide assistance” to the country in case of aggression. The three states also vowed not to attack Ukraine themselves.
However, Russian officials have repeatedly stated that this document was undermined by NATO’s eastward expansion, which threatened Moscow’s vital security interests. Moreover, prior to the start of the Ukraine conflict in late February, Zelenksy signaled that Kiev could give up its decades-old pledge to be a non-nuclear nation and reverse the decision it took to give up its atomic weapons.
https://www.rt.com/russia/566062-medvedev-ukraine-nuclear-weapons/ War as a “lesser good” for the Godly, who prepare themselves to kill or to die for moral principles, to be judged by eternity. “The General” makes the case that only a Godly, morally intact army can excel. Anything else lacks the necessary foundation of certainty of conscience in each soldier. (Did Putin refer to this book?)
While the Moscow military operation was taking place, in the author’s reading schedule it was turn for a book by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov entitled “Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of World History“. The English translation, published in the second decade of the previous century, is entitled “War and Christianity from a Russian perspective“. “Three Conversations” is a philosophical work by Vladimir Solovyov, in which he addresses several important issues, by presenting his ideas in the form of a discussion among five characters.After evacuating all civilians from Kherson 2 days ago, Russian troops are withdrawing to the east side of the Dnieper river. Ukrainian forces have been shelling the city, and the dam above it for weeks. It can’t be a killing-field until there are people in it. Ukrainian forces are not eager to occupy the regional capital city.
Without holding Kherson, how can Russian forces take Odessa? But who wants to be in the way of a flood?
Both sides now appear to be scrambling to bolster manpower in the region, with Ukraine’s military vowing to keep up the pressure after pounding the Russian-held city with artillery for weeks:
A senior adviser to Ukraine’s president said on Wednesday it was too early to talk about a Russian troop pullout from the southern city of Kherson.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-orders-troops-leave-kherson-zelenskys-office-cautions-over-staged-retreat The United States and Russia are expected to meet soon and discuss resuming inspections under the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty that have been paused since before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a daily press briefing, Price said the bilateral consultative commission (BCC), the mechanism for implementation of the last remaining arms control agreement between the world’s two largest nuclear powers, will meet “in the near future.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-us-discuss-first-nuclear-talks-since-ukraine-conflict-kommersant-2022-11-08/ Ugo Bardi and I see this the same way. The defense against lies is the unremitting attempt to fully and completely understand reality in our own way, in our own living minds. Easy answers tend to be lies, calculated to serve some interest, which pays to make them available to you.
How to Beat Propaganda: the Grokking Strategy
We can describe this attitude by the term “grokking,” invented by sci-fi author Robert Anson Heinlein to indicate the kind of in-depth understanding that professionals have of their field. In Heinlein’s fictional Mars, “to grok” also means “to drink.” You assimilate knowledge just like you assimilate the water you drink. It is strictly related to the concept of “empathy” as discussed by Chuck Pezeshky in his blog. (It is also part of the concept of “virtual holobiont,” but let me skip that, here).
The “grokking-style” learning is based on the idea that you don’t trust any source just because it is “authoritative.”
https://www.senecaeffect.com/2022/11/how-to-beat-propaganda-grokking-strategy.htmlAnother Michael Hudson interview transcript, from which I excerpt this pearl of wisdom:
So there are two economic philosophies and I began the book by contrasting the dynamics of industrial capitalism with finance capitalism. And industrial capitalism in the United States, Germany, England, and every country where it took off, was to promote a public investment in basic infrastructure monopolies in transportation, communication, education, healthcare.
The idea is that if the government would provide these basic services and basic human rights at subsidized rates – or freely, as in the case of education and healthcare – then employers would not have to pay labor a high enough basic wage to make labor pay for healthcare – as in the United States where 18% of GDP is for healthcare – or to pay for education, the 1.7 trillion that goes for student debt in the United States, not mentioning the education that is not debt-financed.
Finance capitalism basically sought to break away all of the public infrastructure. Most financial fortunes and financial fortunes in history were made just in the way that Zola had described, by prying thefts from the public domain.
But the financial capitalism doesn’t say… You don’t have to steal it; you actually make it your policy, giving away the financial domain in the way that President Yeltsin gave away all of Russia’s natural resources, public utilities, electric companies, anything that yields an economic rent that can be just easy income without any investment. And you financialize it.
You’ve had, for the last – really since the 1980s, but even since World War 1 – this movement to prevent industrial economies from being low cost. But the objective of finance capitalism, contrary to what’s taught in the textbooks, is to make economies high cost, to raise the cost every year.The Real Progressive interview of Michael Hudson (with transcript!)
I will make the case that the next default will be massive devaluation of the $US against gold, allowing all federal debts to be paid-off-in-gold at much reduced real value. Other deeply indebted countries will do the same, maybe first, or at the same time. Suddenly transitioning to Central Bank Digital Currency requires too much trust and agreement in our world. There is too much to read here. This is the nugget. Thanks Ilargi.
Are You Ready for the Coming U.S. Government Default?
The popular American myth is that the U.S. government has never defaulted on its debt. Quite frankly, that’s an unadulterated lie. The U.S. government has (unofficially) defaulted on its debt twice within the last hundred years…
Executive Order 6102 of 1933, which forced all American citizens to turn in gold coins and bars, was, in fact, a default. Gold ownership in the United States, with some small limitations, was illegal for the next 40 years.
Under EO 6102, Americans were compensated $20.67 per troy ounce of gold. They were paid with paper dollars. Immediately following the government’s gold confiscation, the price of gold was raised by the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 to $35 per ounce. Just like that, American citizens were robbed of over 40 percent of their wealth.
The second default occurred in 1971, when President Nixon “temporarily” suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold.
https://economicprism.com/are-you-ready-for-the-coming-u-s-government-default/ But they won’t say how they know these numbers. They may be confirming total sales, then looking at declared purchases, and declaring that central banks quietly bought the rest. That might be right. Somebody appears to have bought the most gold in history this year, and it’s a secret. One presumes they took possession, in the prevailing circumstances.
“Global central bank purchases leapt to almost 400 tonnes in Q3 (+115% q-o-q). This is the largest single quarter of demand from this sector in our records back to 2000 and almost double the previous record of 241t in Q3 2018.
It also marks the eighth consecutive quarter of net purchases and lifts the y-t-d total to 673 tonnes, higher than any other full year total since 1967.”
Specifically, the World Gold Council claims that Q3 2022 central bank gold demand was 399.3 tonnes, which is a massive 340% higher than Q3 2021.
https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/gold-establishment-supports-central-bank-secrecy-instead-of-exposing-it/#comments Peter Schiff has good reason to push gold. Still, he makes a good case that something has fundamentally changed in the way gold “markets” are managed, to allow a $50 increase in the price of an ounce of gold Friday, then another $40 on Monday, when it had never been allowed to rise more than $20 (thanks Dr.D) before. This could be a signal that gold is the ordained next-bubble.
As above, that would allow global central banks to get out of debt by massively devaluing against gold, then settling under a new global gold regime.
Peter Schiff: The Gold Train Has Left the Station
https://schiffgold.com/peters-podcast/peter-schiff-the-gold-train-has-left-the-station/Charles Hugh Smith: The Unintended Consequences of Unintended Consequences
Decades of central bank distortions and regulatory / market-share capture by cartels and monopolies have completely gutted “markets,” destroying their self-correcting dynamics.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-unintended-consequences-of.html The post-mortem analysis of midterm election results won’t be fully settled until the December 6 runoff election for US Senate seat in Georgia, but it appears that Republicans will take a narrow lead in the House, while the Senate is a toss-up, favoring the Democrats, since VP Kamala Harris can cast a tie-breaking vote.
My view is that there will be another 2 years of gridlock, as the rest of the world, outside of NATO and other vassal-states, moves rapidly forward to bypass the $US in global trade. There is the splitting into 2 blocs, as Michael Hudson describes above, but the declining bloc is self-cannibalizing.
There cannot be a power/leadership transition in the US/NATO/$US bloc until the current power elites capitulate in ultimate despair.
The owners may kill a lot of their herds before they despair like that. It seems like a best-case-scenario that this bottom could be reached in 2024, blame dumped on “Joe Biden”, and some transitional-figure elected to walk the USA through chapter-11 bankruptcy.
Power elites could really wait another 4 years, until 2028 to give-up-all-hope. That would imply horrific war in those years.
I sincerely suggest that we turn our efforts and best-intentions towards hitting bottom by 2024.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/comprehending_the_underwhelming_performance_of_the_gop.html Ben Davidson is a brilliant scientist and author of the textbook on Space Weather.
From 2:30 he explains that all of the space agencies have clammed-up on magnetic field strength data in recent years.
We are mainly looking at 6 year old data, which was showing rapid weakening of our protective fields. Thanks Red.
If you mimic the trees, shrubs and herbs in a mature old-growth forest near you, or one that previously existed where you live, you can nurture that mix, planted fairly densely, for 3 years and it should self-sustain. This is significantly expensive, and in 100 years it will just look like something to log, if it is big enough.
It’s not financially feasible, except as a gift to life, with an uncertain future.
Imagining a Mini-Forest’s Potential: The Miyawaki Method
How to make a mini forest with Miyawaki method
https://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/how-to-make-mini-forest-miyawaki-method-34867Before the advent of railways in England, those who wanted to move large quantities of raw materials and goods funded the construction of a huge system of canals that connected the numerous slow-moving rivers that cross the land.
Barges were pulled by horses which moved along a towpath, towing a line attached to a barge. The horses had absolutely no choice i the matter and had to tow the line.
Toeing the line, on the other hand, meant to prepared for a race.
It’s weird how the English language has got so distorted and how the meanings of words and phrases has got utterly disconnected via misunderstanding, misspelling and misuse.
One of my favourites is the combination soft/hard -which are clearly opposites.
But softly/hardly???
She spoke softly. She spoke hardly???
She hardly spoke.
From the linked item above:
‘Every institution, with the exception of the National Rifle Association and the 700 Club, now fall under the insidious sway of liberal ideology. How such a shocking thing came to pass in God’s Country is another question, but the reality remains: a battle is currently raging – call it a bloodless civil war – between the red-blooded American people, armed with nothing more than the Constitution and 6 million firearms, and ‘The Godforsaken System.’ Thus far, thanks to the power of censorship, deception and outright criminality, which defines the modus operandi of the Deep State, the latter is winning hands down.’
Liberal??
There’s another word that has had its meaning utterly twisted.
There is nothing unusual about ‘Amerika’; Britian has been ruled by a succession of gangs of criminals for a thousand years, with possibly the exception of just one short-lived period, the Interegnum (the period in English history from the execution of Charles I in 1649 to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660) when Oliver Cromwell was nominally in charge, though I doubt he held much sway in the City of London, the real seat of power.
NZ has been ruled by a succession of gangs of criminals since 1852, when the various regional companies got together and agreed that it would be easier to do business if they had a national system of theft.
Ditto Canada and Australia, just different time frames.
With all that is going on in Ukraine and Taiwan, the criminals must be working up to a new ‘coalition of the willing’, to defend their utterly corrupt system. They will fail, of course.
Exponential growth -of population, of energy use, of extraction of resources, of extermination of nature- on a finite planet only works for a relatively short time.
Luddite: a person who irrationally opposes progress.
Luddite: a person who opposed the dehumanisation of life and the ravaging of nature in the early nineteenth century.
The Empire of Lies prefers the first definition, of course.
By the way, forget about blue and red. I’m pretty sure black will decide the fate of the US if Russia doesn’t.
I acquiesce.
After observing for 30+ years “liberal” bullies attacking normal, peaceful hetero-family based humanity, crippling productive, stable homogeneous societies at every turn, the non-stop increase of in-your-face organized criminality at EVERY level of U$ .GOV (whom indubitably harms, intimidates, gaslights any & all whom advocate restoration of normalcy, prudence & the-rule-of-law), + NOW the total enterprise of depraved, degenerate, deficient & dissembling “leaders” (The Dreadful) selected for “positions-of-power” over (well essentially), all of humanity ~ I surrender. 😕
I stand in awe of the sheer idiocy of The West, who have blundered into maladroit future where the innocent are fed to an Imperial nightmare (once again), due to the dearth of their Spiritual Awareness.
I will, as has been my practice & course for almost a decade, continue to pray & meditate that all of The Infinite’s children come to know the Healing, Creative & Loving Power of the Universe, but I will no longer contradict The EG0ic Madness that the majority have feted as their fate, I acquiesce.
All blessings,
Gary
I don’t know, myself.
It’s good to see Mr. House around, and to see flora’s recent comment over at NC.
I might not remember all of the details, but the part of Stranger in a Strange Land that stands out in my memory is when Michael Valentine Smith is in the zoo and sees the monkeys beat upon one another. He suddenly bursts into laughter, and tears, and as the story continues, he explains he now groks people, what Jubal means when he describes “Man” as the one who laughs. He laughs and cries and begins feeling more himself among the little nest and the rest of humanity, because he now knows why humans laugh. They laugh because of the hurt, the cruelty, everywhere and repeated from one onto another. One monkey bashes another monkey, who hurts and needs to beat another smaller monkey, who has no monkey to beat —and Michael sees this as the root of all comedy.
Maybe this is why some people feel the need to spread pain and suffering onto others in the form of “humorous put downs,” insults told as jokes, as attempts to elicit laughter while also attempting humiliation. If you can make yourself laugh while you are trying to pull someone’s soul apart, you do not have to really own the cruelty. This is one stage on the way towards total indifference to the harm one causes: witness the commentary about being the mosquito. On the one hand, it’s commonplace to smash them and keep going, so the joke is shifting back on the recognition how much trouble one person can cause. On the other hand, the Buddhist Lama who values the subjectivity of a mosquito’s suffering situates her extinction of that suffering with respect to his own suffering at being bitten or annoyed through the night, so the joke goes to the heart of one’s own fixation on one’s own suffering. On the third hand, the transhumanist sees no value in a mosquito besides being another vector for antifertility vaccines for throttling the growth of populations causing damage to world resources, so the hidden joke is that no one survives the long night anyway. So, on the fourth hand, the chaotician remarks that telling jokes about mosquitos, like telling jokes about annoying people on the Internet, all comes back to what you let cause your suffering, as the more you suffer another, the greater they need to overcome the hurdle in mocking your suffering, and invariably the jokes get worse, less humorous, and all we’re left with is the naked cruelty of wanting to smash and squish another living being.
Recently I’ve been looking for a few more recordings of Palestrina’s Pope Marcellus Mass. I like Oxford Camerata / Summerly very much, but the sound is mid-rangey, and also has the “Naxos blur” (my term). Pro Cantione Antiqua / Bruno Turner has been a very pleasant surprise, even if the sound is similar to the previously-mentioned one. Earthy, soulful, joyous.. for those who like this kind of music. Not a “churchy” feeling to this one..
One on Archiv with the Westminster Cathedral Choir / Simon Preston should arrive soon, and I’m looking forward to hearing it, too.
Veracious Poet said
Truly surrealistic…a brain damaged person, who can hardly read/think, beat Dr. Oz in the home of the Continental Congress
Brain damaged candidate versus the Israel candidate … Dr Oz was not popular with anybody, especially with the grass roots Trump supporters.
jb-hb said
OF COURSE Americans love runaway inflation, not being able to afford a home, unemployment, weird fascist medical regimes that destroy lives, families, societies and cancel everything that is fun, demented presidents, brain-damaged senators, the threat of nuclear war, the inability to speak freely, sending billions and billions of dollars overseas while not spending billions to rebuild the small businesses that were destroyed by the policies they love, not spending billions to stop repeated shipments of enough fentanyl to kill the entire country, not spending billions to fix the mounting homeless or crime problems, not spending billions to fix the crumbling infrastructure.
You can bet that a very large number of swing voters will have refused to vote Republican because the GOP candidate was for the USA leaving Ukraine. People are simply that stupid. They would rather live in poverty than abandon a war set up by their politicians that has destroyed half of Ukraine: the will vote for the same politicians again. Read the message boards, you will discover that people would not even consider a candidate who wanted peace instead of defending Ukraine. People are really, really dumb and at some stage you simply have to accept that fact and change your view of the world accordingly.
Veracious Poet said
I will, as has been my practice & course for almost a decade, continue to pray & meditate that all of The Infinite’s children come to know the Healing, Creative & Loving Power of the Universe
Continue to do nothing then?
D Benton Smith said
The US midterms seem to have deftly circumvented and postponed kinetic ‘blood-in-the-streets’ open revolt for the time being.
The American people collude with their government in using the totally corrupt elections as an excuse to get on with business as usual. As with justice, elections have to be and be seen to be fair, but they are not fair in most countries. That the policians and their owners would corrupt the FBI, DoJ etc yet not corrupt the voting system seems to be an impossibility. That they would leave the voting system in such a dire state further emphasises that belief. I have no proof other than the fact that they cannot prove it was a fair election, and yes, the emphasis is on them proving it. But many American people will happily label you as a looney conspiracy theorist if you question the results. Interestingly most of those people are on the traditional left wing, the people who believe themselves to be morally superior, more caring, more human than the traditional right wing. They use their emotions to decide who they will vote for, they use their emotions to decide what policy to support, their emotions only exit the picture if the policy negatively impacts their own comfort. Mass self-deluded amorality with the people and their fleeing, transient pseudo-morality controlled by TV.
“You can bet that a very large number of swing voters will have refused to vote Republican because the GOP candidate was for the USA leaving Ukraine. People are simply that stupid.”
Intrinsic to the Ukraine news are the Billions continually being added to that go over there. While these swing voters can check their own household and then step outside and take stock of their neighborhood with their own eyeballs.
Did Carter do well during hostilities with Iran and a more hostile attitude towards the USSR?
And Biden did better in the midterms than both Obama and Clinton?
I would take the other side of that particular bet.
As though eleck-shuns are anything other than a distraction, a misplaced hope, and a snare:
“We’ll get ’em Next Time!”ok
aspnaz, you seem to have a peculiar habit of doing a quote of my posts, as if you are replying to me, while pretending what I said was never said. sort of refuting-by-not-refuting?
I’ve noticed that each time you do it, my post PREVIOUS TO yours anticipated your fake-reply and already spoke to it. If I were replying in any detail, I could simply cut and paste my previous posts as a reply back to your quote “responding” to me. Which proves you are not conversing. Not a conversation. What is it you ARE doing?
“The American people collude with their government in using the totally corrupt elections as an excuse to get on with business as usual.”
I like the sentence above. It reminds me of a thought I had today:
Do the right thing now while you can (and the need is apparent: you may not get another chance).
***
Elections are not a ruse. They’re a legitimate form of consensus assessment that people unfortunately expect to work all by themselves, with or without people bothering to vote much less supervise to make sure the results are counted honestly. And so they become exercises in corruption.
But then, buying is how we get everything except air to breathe, gravitational attraction, and solar radiation. Other than grinding out mostly meaningless toil for a few increasingly meaningless dollars, we prefer not to get involved in reality beyond earning and spending money. We vote with our dollars, I suppose. From a staunch paleo-conservative view, that’s how it should be. Universal suffrage is bad for a healthy aristocracy. Pay-to-play is the essence of capitalism, which we long ago conflated with democracy. After all, I trust a dollar more than a politician’s promise or the will of our benighted electorate.
If we charged people to vote we might get more results. People don’t believe in anything they don’t pay for, if said pay is only watching countless mind-harming commercials. Maybe if we put ballots on the backs of cereal boxes, we’d be more involved with these mysterious parades called “elections”, and they might begin to mean something congruent with their claimed purpose.
Not that I believe in democracy as some proper form of government. Nor monarchy or what-have-you. I view humans as being incapable of governing ourselves rationally, fairly, and beneficially. Ultimately, large-scale governance comes from our inability to produce surplus without then fighting each other in groups over said surplus.
The concept of the Individual has been reduced to the grinding abrasion of grains of sand upon each other. Standing alone on one’s convictions has become almost unimaginable to most people.
The Apple in the Garden; Pandora’s Box… our older myths seem to reflect an understanding that we’re kinda messed up. It’s not our fault; it’s our nature, they say. I agree.
Not Just Yet, Please: I prefer indefinitely forestalled consequences for my sins.
@Polemos: I’m mosquito-macho-man, so I didn’t use mosquito repellant while trekking through Thailand, so I came down with malaria in Laos…
There are different kinds of mosquitoes in our grand world.“Face-Dress in Vegas? Can’t tell if it’s day or night in there.”
It’s daytime in some lurid casino in rural Oregon. I don’t gamble but my wife does. I walk around and freak out at the whole thing until security gets nervous, and then I commandeer them and make them listen to me babble.
You can smoke tobacco and drink booze in there, but you can’t smoke weed, which is what such places are obviously designed for. Can we get anything right? *sigh*
Doug Casey on the World Economic Forum’s Plan for Mankind and What Comes Next
Doug Casey on the World Economic Forum’s Plan for Mankind and What Comes Next
September 30
“I want the Kyiv government and their real bosses in the west to hear me … Residents of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson are becoming our citizens forever.”
November 9
Moment Surovikin and Shoygu admit defeat in the Kherson direction and announce the withdrawal of troops. pic.twitter.com/10UZgVuIcm
— Dmitri (@wartranslated) November 9, 2022
It's interesting to just observe their faces as they discuss the news. pic.twitter.com/3HY8xpdaAN
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) November 9, 2022
"We're ready for negotiations, taking into consideration the realities formed at a current moment" – Maria Zakharova, head of press department at Russian ministry of foreign affairs, said today.
In these realities it's necessary to discuss a trial in the Hague, not negotiations. pic.twitter.com/GjXnbBjwlp
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) November 9, 2022
Another odd development. Not quite as odd as the ruddy face of the Darya Dugina in the open coffin, even though it had been announced only the day before that after the explosion the victim’s body had been almost completely burned beyond recognition.
Stremousov did not have any real power or influence. But he was probably the most outspoken and most enthusiastic representative of Russia's occupation, and constantly posted online. He visited Kherson villages and persuaded locals to back Russia https://t.co/4hMNWyTVZU
— Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) November 9, 2022
Stremousov did not have any real power or influence. But he was probably the most outspoken and most enthusiastic representative of Russia's occupation, and constantly posted online. He visited Kherson villages and persuaded locals to back Russia https://t.co/4hMNWyTVZU
— Matthew Luxmoore (@mjluxmoore) November 9, 2022
Biden, Putin, Xi and WEF are united on one thing: Lula. Why are they are all so happy with the Brazil election?
The Times They Are A-Changin’, … it’s true!
The shrinking of the middle class is accompanied by an increase in the share of adults in the upper-income tier which increased from 14% in 1971 to 21% in 2021. At the same time, there was an increase in the share who are in the lower-income tier, from 25% to 29%. These changes have occurred gradually, as the share of adults in the middle class decreased in each decade from 1971 to 2011, but then held steady through 2021. […]
… The reality is that middle-class America continues to shrink as the rich-get-richer and the poor-get-poorer. The rich can invest, save and use very little debt to sustain their living standard, while the poor rely on debt, making long-term prosperity an impossible goal. […]
There Really Is No Middle Class Any Longer
https://realinvestmentadvice.com/there-really-is-no-middle-class-any-longer/F.S.
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