241 thoughts on “The Reality Jubilee”

1. The issue of usury is probably the single easiest litmus test to use to tell if a conservative is actually a Christian. Lots of GOPe politicians completely give away their position without even knowing it, though most don’t care.

   There’s no reason for any conservative to support any woke corporation now, but banking was never acceptable ever. You might as well support casinos…

2. Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » The Reality Jubilee

3. Lol, I paid off my student loans totalling $15,000 back in 1994 and haven’t looked back since then. Unlike now, at least I got a good college education out of it and am still making money because of it. And I paid off every cent of it myself. I say screw the loosers who think their debts should be forgiven.

   The colleges of today are on their deathbed, mainly because people have realized that it is now all one big scam that will not guarantee a good living after graduation. The Democratic Communists will attempt to keep their mind hive institutions alive, but it is all coming to a collapse that will mirror the Soviet Union Level Extinction Event that America is undergoing right now. When the money becomes butt-wiping material, the colleges will be liquidated in mass, thank God.

   Just be patient. Their end will be most sweet, indeed. The weeping, wailing, and knashing of teeth of all of the Communists who infest our former institutions of higher learning will be a wonder, as will be that of Federal workers who will get similar treatment. It is coming, and sooner rather than later I suspect.

4. UPenn lowers its med school entry standards to reaffirm its commitment to producing dangerously incompetent vibrant doctors:

   https://www.zerohedge.com/political/penn-medical-school-expands-minority-candidate-program-does-not-require-mcat

   • Further underscores the idea that one needs to stay as far away from vibrant witch doctors as humanly possible – your life depends on it.

     • Nuggras, first and foremost.

   • A shame to see the reputation of the Penn medical community imperiled by this sort of stuff. I enjoy the services of two medical specialists in the Penn medical system, and am extremely grateful for their expertise.

     • I’m extremely grateful for the entire medical profession injecting the population with an untested rna therapy for a mild cold and making everyone wear masks.

       Without their expertise who knows what the levels of myocarditis and cancer would be in the young.

5. I think this kookery is going to get a LOT of public blowback that the regime is not expecting. You’re also going to see massive lawsuits targeting the regime on Equal Protection grounds. They are not going back in time to pay off the loans of people who already paid off their loans. The shit is going to hit the fan with voters.

   The opposition controls the high ground here. Lawful debt payers are being forced to subsidize free loaders. Worse, the Government is actively discriminating against people who paid their own way by giving college for free to stupid people.

   I don’t think this is going to well for the regime at all, and in an attempt to appease Grandpa Simpson and the Starbucks barista, they are going to anger millions and millions of people. This is not a winning issue once people realize how criminally negligent and catastrophically stupid it is.

   • Not to take the wind out of your sails, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Remember that pedestrian bridge that collapsed in FL around four years ago? You know the one that was designed exclusively by “strong, smart, female hispanics” from an all-female, all hispanic firm which then collapsed on a busy freeway, killing something like 19 people?
     The report afterwards conducted by the state engineering board stated that no one with a basic understanding of structural engineering would have ever used such a design. That’s when the story went away and to the best of my knowledge no criminal charges, or lawsuits were ever filed. It would have been nice to see these babes paraded around on live TV as they were led away in cuffs, but again, crickets.

     • How could it ever had gotten approved? Speaking of the bridge

       I am building a non-residential steel barn on my property in Florida and the county inspectors are up my butt

       Sounds to me like the inspectors let it slide under pressure from above. Tragic

     • I agree with both comments above. Yes, the inequity of only paying off some existing student loan holders, while shafting the responsible students who worked their ass off and paid off those loans early, is going to have mixed results. It will likely garner lots of votes from the slackers while pissing off the productive. But they must have already determined that the slackers outnumber the hard workers by a huge margin.

       And yes, there will not be a civil or conventional redress of this inequity, just a lot of political bluster and faux rage to blow off steam, but at the end of the day, nothing remedial will have occurred.

       Nothing changes until the environment changes, but the extraordinary debt/money supply explosion is going to accelerate the day of reckoning. My greatest fear is that this kind of collapse is going to produce a melee of repressed anger and retribution in which the plebs mostly turn on each other rather than the real villains. Which is exactly the end game that the Cloud People are working toward. All you armchair generals out there in internet land may want to put on your thinking caps and start working on that problem now rather than identify the next gazzillionth malfeasance to put on the list.

       • They already have the slacker vote. This is just gonna piss everyone else off.

         • And that is the point.

           Its passive aggressive as a govt policy.

     • That’s just not the same. First of all, this loan thing is about MONEY, and stealing MONEY from people really pisses them off. Then you have the problem of massively discriminating against citizens and the core of that massive discrimination involves MONEY. Trillions of dollars of it.

       And that’s before people start showing up at Universities to demand their money back – FULL REFUNDS, with lawsuits. Why? Because the university runs the Stafford Loan program for the government. The schools have defrauded borrowers. As has the US Government.

       I totally get what you’re saying about a stupid person -an unqualified individual – designing a faulty bridge. But it affected almost nobody.

       This student loan catastrophe affects almost everyone and it affects them negatively and harshly and it f$$ks them over with money.

       And money gets people’s attention.

       • This is the kind of repressed anger that has been building for over a decade. The pressure cooker will eventually explode as the heat is continually turned up. We are already seeing many examples in viral videos of people going ape-shit on others for no apparent reason, just striking out in anger randomly. When you can’t get your mitts on the assholes responsible for causing the root problems, the tendency is to lash out at whoever is convenient.

         We should strive to focus this anger where it belongs and teach people how to be effective without getting blocked or caught.

         • Interesting. We need a Hoffman-like “Steal This Book” for DR radicals.

           Is there one?

6. Zerohedge must be reading these comments because they just posted a story about the University of Texas system growing its endowment to $42.9 billion, surpassing Yale and closing on Harvard, who are expected to see endowment losses this year:

   https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/u-texas-endowment-blows-past-yale-challenges-harvard-richest-nation-thanks-oil-investments

   Note that Texas’ excellent performance is due to their avoidance of ESG junk.

7. Modern society, even a good one, is just too fucking complex for people. All these inhuman mass systems for educating and everything else that are so easily corrupted.

   All these systems are just time wasters and bypassers of common sense.
   Common sense gets boys working and forming families EARLY; not sitting in the classroom of some blue hair. Apprenticeship is the way to go based on proclivity and talents. LEARN BY DOING! Formal education wraps up at 15 years old. Girls get knocked up at 18. THE END!

8. Biden et Co. will bribe young voters by signing a modest student debt jubilee and dangling the carrot of future debt relief. These voters will have to vote for Biden or else no future relief for you! I believe they’re indoctrinated and desparate enough to exchange their vote for additional gibs-me. Inflation serves as a self-chaining machine for producing Dem voters and keeping the party in power.

   • Democratic voters don’t need to be bribed. They do what the screen says no matter what it says.

     No “leftist” policy—nor any other ruling-class act—is done to help, sway, or bribe voters. It’s to immiserate the average man.

     The average man today is a non college graduate who makes just enough money to pay federal income tax.

9. That this presents an opportunity for the GOP to drive a stake through the heart of their most entrenched enemy (academia), yet they continue to, at most, drone on about paying back your debt (see Larry Hogan’s cringe-inducing performance on FNC’s Special Report two nights ago) proves Michael Anton’s point that Conservative Inc is the Washington Generals, playing to support the other team.

   Mr. Z … today’s entry is some of your finest work.

   • Lol.

     The GOPs most entrenched enemy is you.

   • Don’t underestimate the personal corruption of GOPe with regards to the college debt politicking. A few geeks may remember the comical Obama-era dysfunctions around an e-brand called Conservative Review (Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin). That was a stalking horse of one Cary Katz, a Nevada billionaire who’d founded the College Loan Corporation and spread the money around in donations to lots of conservamative electoral aspirants. Dick DeVos’s wife, Trump’s Ed secretary, had some oblique investment in a mega-collection agency called “Performant Recovery,” no joke. Of course the Obama crowd made hay about her much more direct connection to “for-profit colleges”, which despite the demonstrated practical problem with that transfer-state cancer still had an air of snobbery to my ear (Sam Harris recently called Trump University by its existence vastly evil beyond any of Hunter Biden’s picaresque deeds). But if we started busting Washington grifters for operating rent-seeker edu-biz LLCs as a piggy bank we’d never stop— Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders are plugged into that demimonde, to name two famous entrepreneurs.

   • The GOP isn’t doing anything about voter fraud, the weaponization of the FBI and DoJ or Biden’s Ukraine death wish. Why should they care about this?

10. Among the many reasons there are so many federal employees now looms large otherwise unemployable holders of graduate degrees. Dey has to go do work someplace. The $1.6 trillion debt forgiveness is only part of the gibs involved, perhaps a small part.

    • Absolutely, and also the reason so many are minorities. The only way there is a minority “middle class” is public sector employment—Stae, Local, Fed’s. So the White race gets a double whammy: They are excluded from any number of these jobs through AA quotas, while having to pay taxes to pay the salary of those minorities employed (not to mention the efficiency penalty for under performance of these folk).

      • Is there another example historically where a nation has installed voluntarily an alien majority government admin over themselves?

        • Allegedly, the Slavs of Kievan Rus’ invited the Nordic Varangians to rule over them in the 9th century.

          About 20 years ago somebody conducted a poll in Sierra Leone, the result of which was that approximately 90% of that country’s residents would welcome a return of British rule. The Limeys, as far as I know, have yet to retake Sierra Leone. They prefer to import the Leonians.

          But, no, there is no instance of which I’m aware in which a group of people installed LESS COMPETENT aliens to rule them.

          • The Brits would welcome a return of British Rule as well.

        • Can we say definitively at this stage in the game that it has been voluntary?

          Seems more to me it has snuck up on us — faster than we were ready and equipped for

          But then I say that and I look back to the 1980s and 1990s when every white tradesmen and vast numbers of middle and upper classes were onto the score and upped and left for Idaho or Nevada etc.

          Rather, the rest of the country is finally learning what California learned 20+ years ago. And like I say, what’s surprised me the most in all of this is how easily the illegals slipped into the South and that southerners never gave any pushback like they did with yankees. The yankees were always cold-shouldered, shunned, picked on. You would think the same would apply to anyone coming in and taking over.

          • We were on the Ole Miss campus 14 odd years ago and I was shocked to see the entire landscaping crew were beaners – in Mississippi of all places. I figured they’d mostly be joggers, then hurriedly figured again…

        • This is a great question.

          I live in the suburbs of a major southern city. You can imagine that the city proper has a majority black population, but the school district I live in is about 85% white, 10% black, and 5% Mexican.

          I recently took my son to middle school orientation, and I swear to you that the school seems whiter than the demographics I just listed would indicate. It seems more like 90%+ white, and my son’s yearbook photos seem to reflect that as well.

          Yet, when you go down to the school board office, out of the dozen or so people in the building it’s mostly black women, a white male superintendent, and a token white woman or two.

          The middle school principal was a white woman last year but we got a white male this year. However, each grade 6-8 has an assistant principal who does the heavy lifting and the discipline. I swear to you that each grade has a black man or woman as the assistant principal. A school of probably 600 students, 550 or so who are white, are being policed by an alien race who undoubtedly do not have the interests of the white students at heart. Even the ones who make their best effort to be fair are going to side with black kids in any kind of dispute that involves claims of racism.

          I’m 100% certain that the school board hires these black principals on purpose, for the same reason that the Republican Party signals their moral legitimacy by trotting out a “based black guy” to make their arguments for them. If all disciplinary actions in the school are being conducted by blacks, how can anyone accuse the school system of being racist?

          Guess what, invariably every year there is still some sort of incident where the superintendent sends out some kind of apology and promise to be more diverse. Invariably.

          • The interesting assumption in that comment is the idea of “how can anyone accuse the school of being racist” given the situation you outline. It reads as an explanation as to the facts.

            If you re-read the comment and switch around black and white due to media conditioning even for a ot on this side it does not compute as an argument.

            Whites spend so much time on their knees for imaginary things created by a matrix of lies they willingly consume.

          • Trust me, Trumpton, I’m fully aware of the ridiculousness of the assumptions they’re making. In their minds, three white principals in a school full of blacks would be Jim Crow on steroids. This just won’t fly in 2022.

          • @memebro

            yeah I understand.

            Everyone seems to know “it won’t fly in 2022”,

            why is this? I mean really, what percentage really think and how much is make believe based on media repetition?

            We are living in a dreamworld created minute by minute around us that overwhelms the real.

            Seems likely the matrix movie was created as a huge joke on normie.

          • Memebro: Homeschool your children.

        • Well, how do you feel about Napoleon?

      • Mainmost among those minorities are nuggras. Most other minority groups are capable of succeeding, to a certain extent, in the private sector.

      • Don’t worry, they’ll be diversifying into the public sector soon. Laquisha has passed her flying course and will be drivin’ you around the skies.

11. Z hints at the solution. We are in the terminal stages of a democracy. Politicians remain in power to a large extent because they can “buy” votes by giving seemingly “free” stuff to the electorate. The game will continue as long as the play money is accepted in real world transactions. At some point, says history, this game must end. What comes next is difficult to predict. We are not a third world banana republic that blows up its money every decade or two When a big empire like the USA goes blooey, the government itself is likely to be replaced. By what is anyone’s guess.

    • The game must end? When, how? Saw a video awhile ago from a guy simply sitting down and talking to Argentina citizens about how they survive their long time 50% inflation rate. For example, one woman on pension gets her money on the 1st of the month and spends it that day on everything she needs for the rest of the month—inflation you know…and she still runs out before the next check arrives.

      The remarkable thing was that when asked why there is 50% inflation, the people to a man knew! Too many entitlements that the people demanded: free university, free health care, pensions, welfare, etc. The government printed more and more money to “pay” for these freebies, and the country becomes less productive and poorer and increasingly unable to pay for such.

      They also knew why things would not change—*everyone* was on the dole in one form or another. Sounds familiar, huh?

      • Yep, I’ve always been fascinated by Argentina too. This is a country that has everything and should be up there with the great nations. But they’ve had catastrophic economic problems for nearly 60 years now, and always the same thing: massively overspending governments, a bloated welfare state, and a complete lack of any will to improve things. However, I have a feeling that a similar crack up in the US wouldn’t go the same way. Sure, we have our big share of lazy welfare grifters and leftists (excuse the repetition). However, the US is not a unitary state like Argentina; there are too many other more dynamic groups in the US who will break away and rebuild something new. That’s the theory anyway! Get back to me in 10 years on this one.

12. I support a debt jubilee, but not if the status quo remains intact, which it certainly will. Though their debt is not the only cause of the problem, it certainly is causing (or is a major contributor to the cause) young people to postpone marriage and family formation. Who can afford to get married and have kids when both would-be parents are in debt to their eyeballs in student loans.

    The whole student loan program is one of the most evil things we have ever done. One of the major causes for the rise of credentialism in the first place is the de facto outlawing of IQ testing (IQ tests are inherently racist) by the private sector and implementation of affirmative action. In the 1940s, well under 1/2 of kids even graduated high school. Most companies gave candidates under consideration an IQ test. My own father’s company, though he was a high school graduate, IQ tested him and sent him to college for free in the early 60s.

    • “I support a debt jubilee, but not if the status quo remains intact, which it certainly will. Though their debt is not the only cause of the problem”

      Yep. There was/is a policy with liver transplants that the patient must be free of alcoholism for some period of time (alcoholism being the main culprit in liver failure) before being put on the transplant list. Makes sense huh? No difference with student loan qualification.

      At the very least, we need to go after the academic institutions that milk tuition fees (and therefore the government). The precedent was set years ago with student loans for “for-profits”, like “ABC Beauty Academy”, or “ITT Tech”. The Fed’s made them fess up as to how many grad’s completed training and landed a job in their field. Bad numbers meant no more loans for you. This was accepted by the public, but the non-profit academic institutions were exempted from this reporting and accountability.

      There is no reason why we can’t put the onus on the major academic institutions to track their students. Certainly, they know who doesn’t complete a “4 year degree program”—the majority—and therefore should be penalized for poor recruitment and acceptance standards.

      If I had my choice, I’d kill such generalized subsidizes in favor of limiting student loans to needed academic majors, thereby excluding faux areas of “study”. Hell, I’d forgive the loans upon graduation and a job in the field.

      Of course, this would cut your minority enrollment by 80% and be too obvious. So the best we can do is drop selection criteria “adjustment” back into the lap of the institutions. They will obviously shuffle money around to punish Whites, and continue to lure minorities, but at least they’ll be out of the Fed’s pocket loan-wise.

    • Aside from a handful of subjects and a small minority of students college is a (multiple?) hundred thousand dollar substitute for an hour and a couple pieces of paper spent on raven’s progressive matrices test.

      College better dough cuz that test be racist… wut a real hood jogga know about some nonverbal test of fluid intelligence, gnomesayin?

13. Just curious. Will the Biden people really put the money in the hands of the debtors? One would have thought they’d put it in the hands of the creditors so that some of the student debt can be written off. This will still have some inflationary impact in that the debtors will now have more disposable income since they won’t be paying off so much of the student debt.

    • I really don’t understand how it’s inflationary. Presumably the money they won’t be sending to the bank/government every month is being earned providing goods and services. The inflationary aspect already happened when the new money was created when the loan was made.

      Because they are presumably working and providing goods and services for which they are being paid (that would otherwise be sent in for the loan), this would not be inherently inflationary, at least in my mind.

      • The key to your argument is that you say it’s not “inherently” inflationary. Technically true, but practically false. If they shuffled money around from another part of the budget, or created a new source of income, then it wouldn’t be. For example, if they had said, yes we’re forgiving student debt, but we’re cutting the military budget by that amount over the next 10 years, then sure, no inflationary effect. However, you and I both know they won’t cut money elsewhere. It just deepens future budget deficits by losing a source of income, and thus necessitates more money printing. I don’t want to get bogged down in the weeds with libertarian type economic arguments though. Perhaps the more important piece is what behavior it incentivizes. As z pointed out, school tuition is mushrooming because of government subsidies, which has largely gone to useless administrations, DIE propagandists, and useless classes and majors, all of which hurts society. Furthermore this generation increasingly feels entitled to free money handouts just for existing and shirks all practical responsibilities.

        • I wasn’t thinking of the government side of a scheme like this (it didn’t occur to me) . But you are probably right in that it would be made up for in borrowing by the government. That is inherently inflationary.

          • This “forgiveness” was spoken about long ago precisely as a stimulus to the sluggish economy. About every economist I’ve heard spoke about this forgiveness enthusiastically as a stimulus—both short term and long term.

            The folk coming out of the university and getting their first job, spend money on getting married and starting a home and family, etc.. Traditionally, they take out loans and such and the economy grows. But a staggering student loan debt delay’s this process and the economy slows down with that cohort is delayed in playing “the game”. That’s bad.

            Forgiveness, allows them the extra cash at the end of the month to spend, or more likely, finance new loans for things mentioned above. Economists like that—and especially because the money goes *directly* to the lower end of the population most inclined to spend it.

            The only discussion I heard was that $10k was not enough. But at a certain point, you need to stop because of the *high end* loans were for the professional class (Doctors, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs) who would invariably step into high paying employment allowing both repayment and economic participation—and probably White, so screw them.

        • This is incorrect. Inflation only means creation of new money. Reallocation of money is not inflation. The money paid in wages to workers is noninflationary; 5 dollars goes in to the employer, $5 goes to the employee. Debt is inflationary; magic paper transforms $5 into $5 in payment and $5 in credit or $10 total. Debt forgiveness is in all cases of fiat currency deflationary.
          Your argument that there will be a “substitutionary” hypothetical increase in other inflationary actions is just speculation. The government will continue inflationary measures irrespective of the student loan topic, so this is just handwaiving.

          Also, the idea that the kids will be “blowing the money” assumes a lot that isnt soundly assumed, like that they are not already underwater on their budget. If the receipiebts stop borrowing as much as now, that would be avoidance of inflation, because again debt in a fiat currency is inflationary. And if they pay down their credit cards, thats even deflationary action plus avoidance of inflationary additional debt.
          Sorry, but Greek is wrong on all counts.

14. My newest hire went to MIT. The worlds most expensive human calculator. Zero social skills. Can’t even drink with clients in a hotel bar. Most of life involves soft skills. Social cues. Pleasing people. This is why so many C- frat bros. go on to make more than egg head. If the current education system wasn’t such a racket it would be tossed out the window entirely. What is this 19th Century Prussian system we have anyway? Grade levels based on age? Why are negroes there? Would you put an old plow that hasn’t been used in 200 years in a Chemistry lab? Of course they’re ornamental and designed to be disruptive barriers to good education in this system.

    With the internet everything could be modular and customizable. But that’s not what education is about. Education is the gate keeper of social status rather than a means to form a productive and well rounded person.

    I’ve noticed a college/no college dustup on line from the right. I would say, if your parents can easily pay for it, do it. Otherwise most (not all) college programs are worthless. Also, most end up in careers that don’t even match their degrees. I know a guy who started a mortgage brokerage business with a Theater degree. Ya, that’s about right.

    • It would appear your guy went from Shakespeare to sub-prime pimping.

      Stated otherwise, maybe he tired of playing Salarino and decided Shylock would be a better role?

    • The “don’t go to college, get some skeeells !!” thing will be the new grift

      Why I agree with the sentiment in many ways, a real education in history, arts, languages, science and all the rest is something that lasts a lifetime and can never be replaced by self study. It really does make you a better person, not morally better, but just better because you have exposure to a life outside of your own little bubble and get what’s really going on both within and without.

      Travel doesn’t ever hurt either.

      We want bright young white guys learning these things. We need them. To get what’s going on, you HAVE to get a real education. Yes we also need guys with trades skills, but I learned trade skills on my own. I couldn’t learn literature and history and all of that stuff on my own. Wouldn’t know where to begin.

      So yes, I agree with JW. If you can afford it AND you have the aptitude AND the hunger for knowledge, by all means, please go to college but take it seriously and take tough courses and challenge yourself. We need a youth brigade made up of these sorts of young men to complement the number of men good with their hands. Dare I say, it takes a village?

      • Totally agree. Advising young guys not to go to college if they have the aptitude for it is criminal. Have a plan, take real courses and develop useful skills. Also study Western history and culture (if it’s not a hate Whitey course) so you know who you are and what is worth preserving.

      • Classical liberal arts self education is possible if one is really dedicated. I bought the Harvard Classic on Kindle for $2.99. 50 volumes of curated classic works, important speeches, and historical documents. Plus 20 novels such as Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair and David Copperfield. There are reading plans for guided study. There is no reason that a person can’t make $100k as a plumber and still acquire an education similar to what a “Harvard Man” in the early 1900’s might have received.

        • You don’t just need to read classics from a selected list. There are entire courses online with professors of great skill to discuss/guide the student. I find these refreshing and reminiscent of what I encounter—and more importantly—motivated me as a young student.

      • While I largely agree with your sentiment, most people are not well served going to university. Far too many of our people go to college already.

        Really, we need to IQ test anyone wanting to go to university and severely limit the courses being taught therein. This includes anyone who can afford it. If we send people to college who are too dumb and/or who aren’t very serious about it, even if they can afford it, the colleges will (really, have) react. It needs to be an elite institution.

        But this is also true of high school. We have turned out many millions of high school graduates and even college graduates with a functional 8th or 9th grade education. Warming seats and filling diversity quotas serve nobody. Really, if nor for the corruption of K-12, we wouldn’t have the college bubble.

        • You don’t need IQ test per se, but entrance testing as in ACT and SAT will do as “proxies” or de facto IQ tests. Indeed, most of the HBD studies use these entrance tests as indicative of IQ and base their studies of student performance and differences on those. That is one of the reasons institutions are moving away from using them.

          The SAT or ACT records for entering students are an increasing liability for colleges and universities. For one, it is an indelible record of student admission bias (lowered standards). And for another, the declining ability of students in the subject areas graduated in (lowered standards).

          These entrance records have been used in suits against the institutions as they carry weight above the other “subjective” measures used for student admission and graduation. As such they must be done away with.

          • AFAIK, the SAT scores are no longer functionally equivalent to an IQ test and haven’t been since some time in the 90s.

            It is also a bit late in the process. Though I don’t know the actual percentages (and they would need to be adjusted), my guess is over 1/2 of high school graduates do not possess a high school education. Back in the 40s and before, graduation rate was about 25%. Obviously, some number of these 75% who left school could have legitimately earned a high school diploma, but for some reason could not stay in high school, be it financial or other hardship (that’s why I say the numbers would need to be adjusted). That number who could attain a high school education is undoubtedly lower given the much larger percentage of Mestizos in the school aged population today (non-White is more than 1/2).

            We now have all of these “credentialed” people who have fake credentials. It starts with fake high school credentials and has moved into graduate level fake credentials.

            Worst, for the smart portion of the population, if you don’t use what you learn, you lose it and very quickly. So all these people who earned degrees and never worked in the field they studied, basically got little to no educational benefit from that time spend in school. The only benefit they got was a piece of paper saying they may possibly be an above average intelligence person. But even a graduate degree is no guarantee.

          • Won’t answer all you comments, just say this. SAT and ACT are still highly correlated with IQ and are some of the best proxies for it. Chicken or egg aside, if you track successful students as to grades and major and time to degree completion, you find a high correlation to IQ and such standardized tests. Not sure what might have changed in the last decade do to pressure from institutions and them dropping such requirements. But it’s hard for me to discount them as early as the 90’s.

      • ” I couldn’t learn literature and history and all of that stuff on my own. Wouldn’t know where to begin.”
        Yes, I see the problem.

        • Are you being a prick?

          • It may be good natured ball busting.

            Thicken that skin Francis!

          • I can bust his balls back?

            He he

        • Yeah, thats the same as everything, from geopolitics to working on cars. “Where do I start” is always the first question.
          Changing spark plugs on a sbc chevy was a daunting task I dared not take on without experienced supervision, the first time I ever worked on a car. But, you dive in and learn. Buy a guide, watch a youtube, ask a friend.

          • I don’t think it’s a fair comparison with learning about a car repair to a field of complex scholarship. I say this because Scholars spend their entire lives on one war or battle, researching it and studying it, or their whole lives on one author. There is essentially an infinite amount of depth.

            I have worked on lots of cars, tractors, etc. the knowledge base between them and, say, the life and works of Beethoven, is night and day.

            So those are the scholars you want teaching you the basics. They’ve done all the hard work and they can get you a foundation for your own learning. Otherwise any young man would be so overwhelmed coming out of high school and thrown into it he’d give up.

          • @falcone

            How much of that is what we would call bollocks. And how much is that you just don’t think about the equivalent?

            How many of the so called scholars are just basic knowledge mechanics of their own subject?

            All knowledge that on the surface is simple has infinite density in that respect. For a car, there is fixing, then there is the metal alloys used, how are these made, what is the mining process, what changes occurred over time, how is the engine designed, what about all the components that make up the engine, the shocks, the chassis and how were they developed over time, what are the alternatives, what is the fluid dynamics in the engine for fuel, how is the mechanical part strength calibrated, how do all the electronics work, how do you design each circuit, etc etc

            The life and works of beethoven for example is trivia about one guys life, no more than any other persons, and for his woks you need to be a decent composer or musician yourself, otherwise you are just arsing on about something you can;t do , but pretend to understand.

            Its not really any different and all knowledge is essentially an autodidact activity once you get started, its just where you draw the line.

          • @falcone

            “I have worked on lots of cars, tractors, etc. the knowledge base between them and, say, the life and works of Beethoven, is night and day. ”

            I completely disagree. Perhaps changing the spark plugs and other maintenance, if that is what you literally mean, I would agree.

            Automotive engineering is an enormous engineering field.

            Building a model T is INFINITELY more complicated than studying an historical figure. It takes THOUSANDS of engineers working 8 hours a day 5 days a week, years to design a new car. A lot of scholarship on historic figures or historic events is guesswork. We have tiny glimpses into their lives or into the event.

            I once watched a Youtube video of a Ray Bradbury interview. He recounted a story about visiting an academic who studied his works and taught his books, particularly Fahrenheit 451 This academic insisted that Bradbury was wrong in what he meant when he wrote the book!!! At least Bradbury was still alive to say “hey, that’s not what I meant” How many of these historic figures, if they could be magically transformed into the 21st century would agree with the “scholarship” about them?

            Beside, what do you really need to know about Beethoven? He was a white male. Probably a racist too.

      • I couldn’t learn literature and history and all of that stuff on my own. Wouldn’t know where to begin.

        Maybe I can’t answer objectively because I did do the college thing, but i learned much more on my own wrt lit and history. Just start with the classics (Homer, Shakes). For history there are any number of resources, and most of what is in our history books is propaganda anyway. There is no scarcity of resources to help you understand the more esoteric stuff. Then just go from there wherever your interests take you. What you will get is an unfiltered education, and you will learn to evaluate, rather than just uncritically accept, what so-and-so says about X thing.

        • Yep.

          Most formal education now is essentially a form of vaccination against actual education.

          You sit in class learning many ways to NOT learn anything by reading Homer, Aristotle, Paul, Doestovesky or anyone else. You must be taught to ward off learning with the mantra that these are cis white males and etc…

          Now there COULD be humanities education of tremendous quality and benefit to truly aristocratic young men… but this does not exist. It’s no good telling guys to go to college and learn about genderqueer body positivity in Herodotus if they want classical knowledge. This is the educational version of a boomer telling a zoomer to give the boss a firm.handshake and ask for the job.

          For now the best educated young people are uncredentialed autodidacts with a spirit for the subject and the will to learn it on their own, even given the disadvantages

    • JR wirth:

      If he wasn’t a minority, it is damn hard to gain acceptance, and then graduate from MIT. The course are STEM and very very hard.

      He may not have social skills, but I would speculate, he has other talents (in knowledge of very practical STEM) and also a likely strong work ethic (to get through some really gnarly courses) that you may not fully appreciate.

      What if he is shy? What if he spent his entire childhood studying his ass off to get into MIT so he is not comfortable wining and dining clients?

      • Certain kind of guy thinks pumping hands, talking sportsball, and bellowing “how the hell are ya?!?” is pretty much peak performance. Actually knowing anything and behaving like anything but a used car salesman is suspect.

        Luckily the world at large is not quite this way, and there are even outgoing BSer types astute enough to realize the value of having someone even smarter quietly whispering the correct answer to the hard question in their ear.

        Young bright men need to be careful to avoid car salesman types who are threatened and resentful of competency though.

15. Forget Roe v. Wade; you’ll know the Right (for rhetorical convenience) is serious when they start talking about repealing Griggs v. Duke Power. That’s when all this really started. Duke Power gave aptitude tests to potential employees. Blacks didn’t do as well as Whites on these, and since this was 1970, the only possible explanation for that was: rayciss.

    But Duke Power couldn’t just hire any moron, because, you know, he’d end up frying the rest of the power grid as he fried himself. They had to come up with a proxy, so they started requiring a college degree. Not a specific college degree — you don’t need a BS in Electrical Engineering to be a lineman — but any college degree (“or equivalent”), because back then the SAT was basically a straight-up IQ test and good SAT scores were required for college admissions. And the rest, as they say, is history. You probably DO need a BS in Electrical Engineering to be a lineman now, if not a freakin’ PhD, because all degrees have been watered down to the point of meaninglessness.

    Repeal Griggs, and all of a sudden the “economy” takes care of itself.

    • Sorry mistakenly downvoted.
      My late brother in law related a story about an advancement program for mechanically inclined workers at a major auto plant.

      Boiler room operations and related jobs up for bid but you had to take an aptitude test which required taking apart a small motor, writing your initials on all the parts, then reassembling. This was done in small groups , partitioned at individual tables. At the end of time limit most all completed except the magical peoples table. All the parts still laying on table with no hope of reassembly.

      Don’t despair , I’m sure they went into salaried management.

    • A small white pill for you today: A version of this exists today.

      I applied for a LOT of jobs early last year. There were several that required “personality and skills assessments”. This is soft weasel language for: “make sure you aren’t a drama queen / troublemaker and IQ test”.

      The first one is easy enough to lie on as few people are going to admit they are a Karen, sociopath, or chronic HR reporter. The second one simply cannot be faked unless you have someone take it for you. It was an IQ test by any other name.

      So some companies are still smart enough to run this little game but I’m sure they ‘bend’ the rules for minorities and wahmen and only set the bar high for White Males because you simply wouldn’t get many of the former in the door if you didn’t.

    • With the disclaimer that my knowledge of Griggs is limited to its Wikipedia entry 🤣 some minor quibbles with Severian:

      Duke was using high school diploma, not college, as a metric. Griggs invented or formalized the idea of “disparate impact,” which also exists in the 1964 Civil Rights Act [this was a new-to-me revelation.] In layman’s terms, as I [mis-]understand it, Griggs puts the onus of justifying aptitude tests on the employer, as being necessary to perform the prospective job.

      I’m not saying any of this was wise, of course! Yes it was a weakening of employer’s rights. “Disparate impact” is of course a legal fiction, basically saying that tests that inadvertently sort by race are out of bounds (like IQ test), the unspoken admission being that oops, after all the races are not equal in all aspects, and thus we must suppress anything that goes against doctrine.

      Companies can’t refuse to hire a moron just because he’s a moron; they must show that he lacks qualification to perform a specific job. The court at least made some concession to reality, perhaps knowing full well what would happen if the morons were allowed into work where they had real responsibility.

      • The court made exceptions/clarification at that time, but later (minority) judges have not. Case in point, NYC teachers exam’s. Struck down repeatedly as the judge (now on the SCOTUS) could not discern how the test related to the specific skills necessary to perform the job of teaching in the classroom. Finally the revised test became meaningless and was dropped. I believe the State now handles.

        Anyway, I read a commentary a short while ago discussing the history and illustrating questions from the test. I’ve spent some time looking, but can not put my finger on it now. Sorry. I was however immediately surprised at how *good* the test was.

        Questions outlining critical thinking ability and reading skills such as how to judge what an author’s intent was. Or simple logic questions with multiple choice answers. Broad based questions that apply to a variety of instructional situations in a classroom and obviously to the generalized skill of the teacher. But of course that had a disparate impact and minorities could not pass it at the same rate as Whites, so “raycess”.

        The revised test was easier and appeared to have more specificity as to specific coursework, but that too was vetoed by the judge. The third try was not—even with disparate impact, but it was deemed worthless and dropped after a couple of years. Some ungodly amount of minority teachers are still employed with no testing, if I read correctly.

        Does anyone think that AA judges are going to support performance measures that in anyway differentiate between the races?

        • I suspect that this may have been the article to which you refer:

          https://www.amren.com/features/2022/08/yes-we-are-ruled-by-fools/

    • Severian

      With respect to linemen, we had our power go out earlier in the year.(I may have related this already). When the crew came out to asses what happened, what do ya know, all white guys; with beards; under 28.(we got to talkin). Good dudes.

      Next crew out to do repairs was, you guessed it, all white guys. Same stuff.

      Bottom line is, they were hurting for people to apply. They would take anyone. The rub was, you had to be competent.

      • I find it ironic that IQ “tests” are not allowed and called racist when the creation of the IQ test was precisely to create the opposite effect. Prior to the first IQ test, students went to school in France based upon family connections and status. Lower SES folks need not apply, despite your potential ability. It was precisely this prejudice that the French government at the time wanted to eliminate, so they hired Benet to develop an objective test that would avoid such a wasteful selection process.

        • Hot take now is that replacing born aristocrats from families with long traditions of rule… with clever low class strivers and social climbers was generally a mistake.

          Our ancestors believed in things like breeding and hereditary aristocracy for a thousand years. Over here were smart enough to know they were righr about race, sex, religion, etc… why do we still think they were fools in this one area?

          Some individual social mobility is useful and natural but making this the prime principal in place of long term family position is how you get ruled by people looking to fill their sack with our shekels and run.

      • The only people where I work who have bad luck at work and get into accidents ( and die every once in a while) are Linemen. That job , is literally the one job that scares the shit out of me and the money Linemen make is worth every penny. Diversity hires will die by the dozens. It is simply not possible to include them in the Linemen category. And there is no way to automate the job to keep Diversity from killing themselves accidentally.

    • Griggs and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

      Preach it

16. I am impressed with how the Cloud People have managed to limit the debate to being that the only way to provide a debt jubilee is to either tax hard-working Americans or print more money. They present this false dichotomy so that even *here* of all places we have “boomers” being blamed for naively pushing education-at-any-cost and others proudly decrying that only over their dead bodies would they allow some lazy kid to be bailed out with their hard-earned money.

    Meanwhile an entire generation is held in debt slavery with marriage and birthrates in free fall, and no attention is given to levying any kind of a tax on the universities or financial usurers who are worth trillions of dollars combined and have been the ones reaping the benefits from this corrupt scam for decades.

    Stop thinking like a civnat! Stop letting them play divide-and-conquer and start thinking about how we can leverage the power of the state to crush those who are trying to destroy us.

    • Everyone always points out Harvard’s billion-dollar endowment in these discussions, and there’s your answer right there. The Left always wants to raise taxes on eeeevil corporations that don’t pay Their Fair Share ™. Revoke the nonprofit tax exemptions from colleges, and there you go. Put Harvard (et al) on the hook for all the debt they pimped out to their students, and it all goes away tomorrow. Gives those 87,000 new IRS agents something to do, too. Winning!

      • So the odds of all those ex-harvard grads gutting harvard’s endowment are ?

        They destroy everyone else’s antecedents not their own.

        • Yeah they’d never do it, but it’s fun to imagine. It’s the same thing with Twitter. They don’t care about Twitter as an app; they care because it’s *their thing*. It’s central to their identity in a way we cognitively normal people just can’t grasp.

          Same deal with college. It’s sacred to them in a way I just can’t grasp, despite having spent most of my professional life thus far in the ivory tower. It’s like you win at life if you went to college or something. Which college? Doesn’t matter (not really). Studying what? Doesn’t matter. Just go, because somehow that makes you a better, purer person. It’s weird…. and I wish some Elon Musk type would propose something like confiscating their endowments, just to watch the freakout.

          • The fact that all these endowments are explicitly tax free foundations should be an easy target for the populist politicians.

            Just point out the $50 billion number plus tax free and it should be a slam dunk to get some of that Education and fairness act going.

            Yet I have never seen it mentioned anywhere, ever.

          • I think that’s a big part of the lethargy in the system because if “college” is reformed in some way that means that the people who have already gone to college are fake in some way (and it doesn’t help that is true) so the current system must be maintained at all costs.
            Reminds me of rigidity of the late French system of nobility where it was hopelessly broken, but the identity of the elites was so tied to it that they couldn’t do anything to reform it.

          • Trumpton. Someone look this up, but I belief there are regulations that such endowments are *not* tax exempt if they do not attempt to spend down there money. I believe a 5% yearly is in effect?

        • You likely are right but possibly not. If you had told me SALT, which doesn’t allow liberal White upper middle class types in hyperexpensive ‘hoods to write off their taxes, would survive a year let alone years, I would have laughed at you.

          Again, the odds are with you but just the odds.

          • *property taxes

      • Billion?

        Harvard’s sitting pretty with a $53 billion dollar endowment these days.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment

        • Every single student could attend havad for free and it wouldn’t put a dent in that endowment fund. And what’s tuition, 50-100k/year?

17. Americans will police their thoughts, worship blacks and foreigners, allow their homes to be destroyed, become debt slaves, be surveilled, wear masks, get shot up with poison, and submit to taxation to pay for it all to become members of the outer party of a system that’s eating the outer party before it collapses.

    Good God, Americans are pathetic!

    • Oh yeah, and send their sons to fight unjust forever wars in their name, kill the unborn to please Moloch, Gaia, or whatever false god, etc. There’s no end to it!

    • Extending the above media hypnosis angle.

      I made a comment months ago that Ukraine was the start of world war gay and oddly there is a recent piece in the Saker (found via VoxDay’s blog) that lays an interesting hypothesis that Ukraine is in fact heavily tied into this as a religious war against the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox church under Putin and the move back towards traditionalism and away form the degenerate, nihilistic self-negation crap in the west.

      Specifically the correlation of the coup in 2014 and other stuff that kicked off quite shortly after Russia passed the anti-peversion laws to protect children in mid 2013.

      https://thesaker.is/the-conflict-between-the-west-and-russia-is-a-religious-one/

      Sounds plausible and more probable as this stuff progresses. Its, as the Russian soldiers say, a war not on Ukraine but one for the survival of Russia against globohomo.

      The west never even saw it and lost without waking up.

    • USA! USA! USA! said the White sportsball crowd every time we bombed a Third World country on behalf of the MIC bottom line.

18. Btw, as to specifically student loan forgiveness, sure it’s stupid, but as someone once said, we’re in the looting stage of empire so complaining about what people are stealing kind of misses the point.

    • The only way to win in this late stage is to loot your enemies. In this case, do student loan forgiveness but seize University endowments, allow bankruptcy of loans, and force colleges to have skin in the game in the loan business.

    • Maybe it was Greggory Hood who compared it to vultures picking away at a carcass. It’s obvious in so many aspects, but where do the scavengers go when the rotten flesh is gone?

      • “…but where do the scavengers go when the rotten flesh is gone?”

        TPTB hope that “87,000 IRS agents” will help them answer that question.

        OTOH, they’d be lucky to find 87 competent people to hire for their financial Stasi squads. Incompetence and low IQ, that’s what the “pool” of potential employees holds. Had this “IRS” job checked out – a whopping $30k a year to be an enemy of the people.

      • I liken them to a colony of bacteria feasting on the flesh of a murdered corpse. They don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand that, no matter how endless the bounty looks relative to their own microscopic role in the predation, the corpse will eventually be eaten and inevitable ecological dieback will manifest upon them. If they weren’t stupid, they would probably still choose to be a bacterium rather than part of the victim’s diminishing remains.

        It’s the kick-the-can-down-the-road ethos of our alien ruling class: rape and steal everything in sight, and hope you die of natural causes with a glass of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other, before the entire grift collapses. Our bacteria are simply aping their ostensible betters in the ruling class. Collapse is the cure.

        • Or antibiotics of one form or another.

      • America is a corpse being consumed by maggots. Liberals are rooting for the maggots. Conservatives are rooting for the corpse.

      • The scavengers eventually have to kill fresh meat when all the carrion is gone. Whites will be stripmined of assets. That’s the point of the lethal IRS army: this is not going to be your father’s tax collection gripes. Those 401ks? Gone.

        As Z wrote yesterday, the long-dead constitution is a total joke now. A president, by law, cannot appropriate money, which is what this is, but John Roberts waits in the wings to declare this a tax.

      • “There is a lot of ruin in a nation” and that quote is especially true for the US. There is this idea by many that the scavengers are picking away at some small roadkill that will soon be consumed but that analogy is not accurate.

        They are picking away at the corpse of a beached whale and the looting can continue multi-generationally as it did in Rome. The “any day now” collapse crowd has been predicting this for 20 years.

        There may be a slowly, then all at once, moment but it’s far away still unless a bolt from the blue alters the present timeline.

        • Agree. And even “collapse” doesn’t have to mean what people think it means. We could just become Brazil of the North.

          I’m assuming that if I’m lucky, I’ll see big cracks but not the fall in my lifetime.

      • Don’t be a carcass

        We have a choice to become one or not imo

19. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/tsunami-shutoffs-20-million-us-homes-are-behind-energy-bills

    You guys beginning to see a pattern here? They’re not going to stop handing these people money, so hyperinflation is going to be the final outcome. Forgive 10 grand here, forgive 3k in electric bills there, bailout some billionaires when the market tanks. Everybody is getting something except the middle except for squeezed

    • Thank god Covid was about a super deadly virus and not economic collapse, i was almost worried for a second 😉

    • In December 2021 natural gas was ~$3.76 cubic foot. Now it is $9.36. Wait until Russia shuts down gas to EU for “pipeline maintenance” and the US starts exporting all the LNG it can to make up for it.

      On the bright side, Zman will get a good laugh at the locals in Lagos.

      • The current EU equivalent price is around $80.

      • Not sure we can export LNG in those quantities. All I’ve read is wrt to offloading ports and lack of appropriate ships to meet demand. However, still a win for us when folks get pinched in the pocketbook.

    • and who is getting the $3k from the electric bill? its not the public utilities, its the folks in the natural gas business . the electric company is just the collection agency. the owners of energy companies are reaping the big dough by limiting the supply.

    • Looks like it’s $3,000 in “utility bills”, for a woman living in a studio apartment, which means she hasn’t paid those bills for, what? A year?

20. I’m down for making college debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, but only if EVERY SINGLE CREDIT and EVERY SINGLE DEGREE awarded from that accrued debt is EXPUNGED from the college transcript.

    Inasmuch as there is “collateral” for a college loan, it’s the “education”, but especially the degree. Just like a car loan or a house loan, the bank must forgive debt in BK, but gets the car or the house back.

    Same for student loan debt. Repossess the degree, forever.

    • I wonder how many would take that deal if you offered it?

      Its not like you are repossessing any knowledge, just the certificate.

      • I think Karl Denninger pitched that idea and it sounds something a normie would cook up. Does he really expect the army of black female college clerks to go about deleting people from the college systems based on what some East Indian dudes in D.C. told them to do in a report?

        • Of course it won’t happen. Neither will the repeal of the 19th Amendment or the 17th Amendment.

          It’s demonstrative because it ultimate shows what a racket colleges are: they aren’t distributors of useful knowledge, they’re propaganda incubators and debt-slave factories.

      • Ah…but there’s the rub.

        If you “have the knowledge”, you don’t need a college degree in the first place.

        Companies could just screen for it.

        Except Griggs v Duke Power company said that prescreening prospective candidates with knowledge tests was discriminatory and illegal…which created the whole college degree as a substitute/proxy.

        Now we have the current mess where employee tests are illegal, college degrees are worthless, and crushing debt is built on lies.

        • How does the screening thing being illegal work?

          Perhaps I am misunderstanding the scope.

          Pretty much all programming jobs for example have testing for writing code as part of the hiring process.

          How is that not covered?

          • If you believe La Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.):

            “The Supreme Court ruled that the company’s employment requirements did not pertain to applicants’ ability to perform the job, and so were unintentionally discriminating against black employees.”

            Looking at the Facts section of the case it showed that originally AAs were assigned to the Labor department of the company. In the mid 1950s the company required a high school diploma for all departments except the Labor department. It also points out the company would pay 2/3rds of the cost of getting training and a diploma.

            When the Civil Rights Act was implemented, per Wiki: “Duke Power added two employment tests, which would allow employees without high-school diplomas to transfer to higher-paying departments. The Bennett Mechanical Comprehension Test was a test of mechanical aptitude, and the Wonderlic Cognitive Ability Test was an IQ test measuring general intelligence.”

            The results? “Blacks were almost ten times less likely than whites to meet these new employment and transfer requirements. According to the 1960 Census, while 34% of white males in North Carolina had high-school diplomas, only 18% of blacks did. The disparities of aptitude tests were far greater; with the cutoffs set at the median for high-school graduates, 58% of whites passed, compared to 6% of blacks.”

            So to answer your question, you CAN a test someone for specific tasks they would execute in their day to day tasks if you can prove that yes, this IS something they’d be doing at work. Per Wiki: “Griggs v. Duke Power Co. also held that the employer had the burden of producing and proving the business necessity of a test.”

            Where Duke Power fell afoul of the Robed Geniuses was: “On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job performance ability.”

            So you can’t give someone a general IQ or Logic test to see if they might be smart enough to do the job you want to hire them for.

          • @mmack

            Ok. The judges sound retarded (I know they did it intentionally). Its obvious why for a general admin you should have used IQ test and numeracy.

            You need to be this tall for the ride.

            They should have just used job specific comprehension examples for english, customer examples of dispute resolution and accounting tests that are part of the general tasks.

      • In most areas, the degree/certificate is what matters, not the knowledge. A doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer, etc. can’t get licensed without the degree.

        • Great gig to get legislation passed so you can use licensing to limit competition to yourself.

          • Why, yes, isn’t it just?

            Of course, back in the dim distant past, one could “read law”, usually mentored by a practicing attorney, and yourself become a practicing attorney. This was how Lincoln got his start in the practice of the law (later on life proving to be a disappointment as a tyrant, but…). And as statutes multipled like Topsy, leading to increased specialization and, with the corresponding rise of the government bureaucracy tasked with formulation of rules and interpretations of the purported intents of statutes, Administrative Law became a whole other thing, in response regularized curricula were established in schools.of law. Then there came the logical next step of using degrees and bar exams to limit competition.
            Legislative bodies came to be comprised largely of lawyers, and so…

    • The banks will end up with an extraordinary number of “underwater lesbian feminist man hating studies” degrees. Oh what a shame…

      • Banks mainly got out of the student loan market in 08. Which is funny if you look at a chart of student loan growth.

    • I disagree. Let whoever made the loan eat it. It will force the lenders to be more selective, and in turn, force the universities to be more selective.

    • it was until W bush passed “Bankruptcy reform act “

    • What percentage of the debtors have earned a degree vs having dropped out of the institution before degree award/completion. Heck, even when I was a wee lad, it was so common we had a name for them, ABD’s—all but dissertation! Lots of graduate students could take courses, but never find a graduate thesis advisor or submit an acceptable dissertation (research) proposal. Hell, as an undergraduate, I roomed with a guy who had almost 200 units, but no degree!.

21. Debt will come down. Global debt to GDP is around 370%. And we’re going into recession which will crank up government debt eve more.

    Granted, for 40 years, people have been saying that the debt load is unsustainable, only to be proven wrong. So, why is this time different?

    Well, it’s exactly because this time isn’t different that the debt will become an issue. Debt always becomes an issue under these circumstances.

    Up to 2020, we were in an environment where interest rates were falling and inflation was never an issue. Both of those have reversed. That means debt becomes relevant again. It’s not different this time. The past 40 years were different, and that environment is gone.

    The question becomes how and when the debt will be reduced to more sustainable levels: inflation or deflation. Governments will try inflation, but it’s hard to say if they’ll succeed.

    What’s interesting is that you can already see the limits that inflation is imposing on government spending. Even many Dems like Larry Summers are warning against the student debt idea. The West Virginia senator stopped the Build Bank Better deal.

    Eve when they can get the extra spending through, it causes problems quickly and not 20 years down the road. These are all signs that borrow and spend era is coming to a close.

    • Build Back Better was not stopped. It was delayed jiggered with and renamed The Inflation Reduction Act. We still got bent over and fucked sans lube.

      • Partially true, but my point is that the borrowing and spending is no longer a free ride. Inflation ended that game.

        Unlike the past 40 years, if the govt start deficit spending big time, it shows up very quickly in inflation. That wasn’t the case from the early 1980s to 2020. The game has changed.

        If the Dems want some stupid welfare program or the GOP (or Dems) want a war, they’ll trigger inflation, which will put immediate pressure on them.

        • It’s a free ride for them .we will pay in the end, but they spend without consequences.

          • Partially true. But my point remains that people will notice when inflation spikes and they’ll know why it spiked, just as we’re seeing now.

            The number one issue with voters and the public in general is inflation. Main Street inflation is caused by either bank lending or federal deficit spending. The banks are not lending much, so right now, federal deficit spending is the inflation trigger.

            Govts can spend but they will cause inflation within a year or so. We’re no longer in the situation where stupid govt moves cause problems decades down the road.

    • We can set up a pawn shop with Russia and put Alaska into hock for pennies on the dollar

      That might keep the lights on long enough til we come up with a better plan, but we’re probably going to lose Alaska.

      • Probably the only way to get rid of Murkowski.

    • I’m no economist, but there is a difference this time as I see it. In my memory, we fought inflation before with interest rate raises and strangled it. However, the government now owes so much money that a significant rise in interest—without confiscatory taxes—for long enough will cause the entire budget to be paying either entitlements or interest in the dept. That sounds to me like uncharted territory.

      More scary, as mentioned, the confiscation of 401k’s in exchange for Treasuries (IOU’s). Has precedent in other countries. One goes where the money is to quote an old bank robber. Boomers are the richest generation on record, with an estimated $42T or more now to be passed on to their “undeserving” offspring. But what do I know.

      • That’s my point. Inflation is checkmating borrowing and spending. The Fed doesn’t print money; it prints bank reserves. Not the same thing.

        Only banks and deficit spending prints money. The banks aren’t lending much, so they’re not causing inflation. That leaves deficit spending. Before inflation was an issue, the govt could deficit spend and not create near-term issues. That’s not the case anymore.

        The govt can crank up deficit spending in recessions, which are deflationary by nature, and not create inflation, but they can’t crank up deficits in normal times. Also, the deficits increase debt, which makes them more vulnerable to interest rates. Again, checkmate.

        But don’t expect the blow up to start in the U.S. These things always start on the periphery. Watch Japan, Europe and China or the EMs to see if the debt/inflation issues causing systemic problems.

        • “The Fed doesn’t print money; it prints bank reserves.”

          It does neither. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing, ran by the Treasury Department does the actual printing.

          • And dinosaurs roam the earth.

22. I was tied down financially for over a decade because of a college education that got me diddly-squat, and now my hard-earned tax dollars are going to go towards bailing out Gender Studies majors? Lovely.

    • Yes, but the Gender Studies major wasn’t willingly being irresponsible. There are about 2 generations of college students who were positively encouraged to “get your degree” and “get a good job”. I myself was told that it didn’t matter what your degree was in, just get one, they all translate, you need that piece of paper, etc. Imagine being told at 18 years old that it’s in your best interest to spend $80K on that Tesla and not the 1998 Dodge for $5000. Only since 2010 and after have people woken up to the college grift. Foreigners and dumb chicks are the only ones keeping student enrollment alive.

      • The only students who have a legitimate complaint are those who were pushed to go and never should have been in college in the first place based on their academic ability. I would exclude those with the ability who dropped out due to partying, lack of focus, etc.

        You could also make an argument for those who were pushed into post graduate programs where the advanced degree obtained does very little to enhance the student’s earnings. This is where a lot of the debt is at too. I would argue that this group should have known better, but a government that wanted to get a handle on the student debt problem would be telling the universities to knock this off. Intentionally recruiting more students into programs where they are essentially training to be college professors than there are total professor jobs in the country is fraud and it should be treated as such.

      • The government has already forgiven some student loan debt that was for sketchy “training.” And the numbers aren’t small either. About 200,000 people attended ITT Technical Institute and about $4 billion in loans forgiven. I’d gladly see additional loans forgiven if it would force “respectable” universities to admit they lied or committed fraud when granting those useless degrees. Just because you have a Master’s in Transgender Gerbil Grievance Studies from Harvard or Yale doesn’t make you highly valuable.

        • Lawrence Tribe, professor at Harvard Law, had a message on Twitter praising the decision for all the good things it would do for his former students. If you graduated from Harvard Law and are only making $125k a year you would have to be a total moron. Not sure if Tribe is just stupid or there are Harvard Law grads in that income bracket.

        • Gerbils as a race have legitimately severe grievances against the LGBTP community. Dogs too, judging by how those with homosexual owners seem to be mysteriously coming down with monkeypox.

23. Agree on the summary paragraph. College/University is bloated by all measures. Too many students, too many degrees, too many administrators, too expensive, too many institutions.

    Wiping out some amount of debt makes sense of and only if we (not sure who that is) admit the error of “our” ways and reduces all aspects of colleges, mentioned above. Young people were duped and are living with that. Hopefully they are taking their lumps and paying their debts (I am). However, many will be collared by the debt for decades because of the scam.

    Obviously economics are impacted, but in clown world it’s hard to say to what degree. Things never really play out as they should.

    Also, I under stand many disagree with this view and that’s fine. I don’t totally love the idea myself.

    • Having a loan forgiveness program while doing nothing to reign in the cost of attendance makes the problem worse. Now it is an expectation going forward for future students. This will drive costs even higher and attract even worse students who have no business in college.

      Look at the HBCUs, by the late Obama years, most of them were in financial trouble. Decades of having higher quality schools scoop up black students who are capable of college work left them to recruit kids who didn’t even belong in high school. They all have abysmal graduation rates. Trump bailed them out and now Biden has done even more to keep them going, when in reality most of them should close. Their students are getting buries in debt they can’t repay and being black they are angry about and demanding the whole balance gets wiped out. This is going to spread across higher education.

      • Actually there is a silver lining, at least as far as (unhappy) reality’s point of view:

        Public subsidy of higher education is a bad idea.

        The intellectual inferiority of Blacks compared to nearly everybody else is made manifest. That Talented Tenth that, in more segregated times, could excel relative to others at the HBCU, is going to be a Mediocre Middler at a top-notch formerly all-white University.

        As another writer (Sailer?) said, that talented young black may indeed have been 95th percentile on math/science on his SAT/ACT and Valedictorian at George Floyd High, but even if he gets a full ride at MIT, he’s going to be very out of his element in the freshman physics or math classes where most of the other students are 99th percentile. Thus the much higher drop out rates of Blacks in college.

        Jesus said you would know the truth and it would set you free. He DIDN’T say it would make one happy. 😐

    • “Wiping out some amount of debt makes sense if and only if we (not sure who that is) admit the error of “our” ways and reduces all aspects of colleges, mentioned above.”

      If one class of citizens gets handed the freebie [i.e. debt cancellation], whereas another class of citizens gets nothing [because they busted their posteriors to pay off their debt, or they were veterans on the GI Bill], then how are you gonna square that disparity with “equal protection of the laws”?

      For “the equal protection of the laws” to apply, the gubmint would have to search through roughly a century’s worth of college edumakashuns, trying to find folks who had gone into debt for college [but then paid it off], and likely those records don’t exist anymore.

      Heck, even the Boomers probably can’t remember what they paid [albeit a pittance] for college.

    • Fuck I had some typos in there. Goes to show you that college doesn’t produce geniuses.

      • Its’ probably likely most of the readership here is college grads and there not bothered by typos’. I to, have a degree.

        • Sorry, I can’t help but notice. But that’s just me.

24. Let’s face it, for decades, college has been the last big, largely carefree fling before having to go to work for the rest of your life. Outside of a few pursuits, it’s really a waste of time (and has been for years), particularly in our current woke, anti-White, negro worshipping culture.

    The further question is when is all this insane, endless money printing going to crash the system? I get the idea that if (when) the US craters, a decent part of the world is going down with it, but it’s beyond ludicrous speed that any of this debt will ever be repaid. Forty years ago, speaking terms of millions and billions of dollars or debt was the norm. Now, trillions gets thrown around like no big deal. Any bets as to when we start seeing and hearing quadrillions spoken of? Honk, honk…

    • When the dollar loses reserve status, no sooner and no later. I think the Ukraine will give that idea a large shove into the limelight in the upcoming months. The world is splitting into two currency blocks. Those who consume and create debt and those who create the products and dig up the materials for those who consume and set prices. I view the Ukraine in that light. A rebellion against the system.

      • It appears to be on purpose on both sides. They are well aware this is coming, and soon.

        You can see the cutting of SWIFT, withdrawal of mastercard/visa from Russia, paypal stopping cross-border payments, Russia MIR card roll out in India and Turkey, integration of Russian SWIFT equivalent into China and spread of unionpay into the mid-east, plus lots of other partitions.

        I expect currency restrictions on cross border transfer across the blocks quite soon. Back to pre-Betton woods.

    • Hmppfpfpffffff.

      When I went, I was always swamped with assignments and cramming for tests. If you are out partying every night, that is probably a good indicator that you are enrolled in a mickey mouse program…

    • Isn’t is also kind of an effect of easy come, easy go?

      If you can print money out of thin air, can anyone really be surprised if it soon loses its meaning to where no one takes it seriously and doesn’t feel obligated to pay it back with their labor?

      “It’s all just make-believe, and you want me to suffer for it? Don’t think so, but you can so be my guest”

      How long before this mentality sinks in and takes over? Before the split between the conception of money as having some intrinsic if not a moral value and the complete dismissal of it as nothing more than a figment of one’s imagination?

      I was hearing some time ago that Zuckerberg lost $30 billion overnight because his stock price collapsed. I am sitting there asking “How can anyone lose $30 billion overnight? It would be the heist of the century. Oh I know how, because he never had it to begin with”

      At some point even the dimmest will figure it out that our money is largely meaningless and any old-fashioned moral compunction one has to be a good boy and pay it back no longer applies.

25. The irony of it all, is that if colleges did what they say they did, which is to give students access to a successful and prosperous life, there wouldn’t be $1.6 trillion in outstanding debt, as the students would be able to pay it back. Debt jubilees were, historically, used to wipe the slate clean also with the tacit admission that some lenders got too big for their britches and need to be brought in line. With that, I am actually in favor of a college debt jubilee, provided it was paired with the total destruction of the current college financing/loan scheme. This would also destroy the way these colleges operate, which is long overdue. Without the endless federal cash, colleges could not jack up prices, admit unqualified 18 year olds, and hand them a useless degree four years later in a know-nothing major.

    It isn’t going to happen, of course. The entire system is working as intended. Those idiot college grads are excellent commissars and bureaucrats for the GAE, and colleges can even turn around and hire the surplus to do make-work jobs at inflated salaries. This thing “Biden” is floating is essentially a one-time bonus to those commissars, taking a little off the top so they can continue propagandizing the youth and perpetuating the current system.

    • I’d like to see numbers on how many of them haven’t been paying the past two years. Might help explain inflation a bit, even though the economy is GRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEAT!

      • Of maybe the 5 or 10 people I know with student debt, all stopped paying it back during the pandemic, along with their rent

        So your suspicions jibe with my experience.

      • I think things have been sufficiently financialized that no amount of consumer behavior adds up to any macro effect. The Economy™ has no earthly referent.

      • I’m too lazy to look it up, but as one here with student debt, a few of my loans were automatically paused after the pandemic, even without my asking. I believe payment resumes next month. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m perfectly content to pay a 6-7% APR when the inflation rate is well above that…

    • “Just this once”

      Has this ever happened with a government program, ever?

26. Talked to someone last weekend who was getting a PhD. in “Educational Leadership”. In simpler terms, it is a doctorate in University bureaucracy. This isn’t just a boomer thing, but is endemic in all status climbers who truly think a piece of paper gives them wisdom.

    Sadder still, is when she talked about her son, who was diagnosed by education professionals with ADHD, when it was clear talking to her for two minutes the poor kid was just bored out of his mind and needed to run around more. The kid is going to be either chemically or psychologically lobotomized by the system.

27. Today’s post is another anecdote for why I think the collapse is the cure. It really is too easy for corrupt politicians to bribe their way to reelection via printed fake money and kicking the can down the road until inflation becomes hyperinflation. But we can’t change that macro-dynamic, so fretting about it is a waste of time. What can we do?

    We can survive the collapse by being smarter. Get to a safe haven and let the idiots die in the big city food riots. There will be chaos and LEOs everywhere will be overwhelmed and unable to serve as effective jackboots protecting the Citadel. The nobody operating from the fog, while being innovative, focused, and spontaneous, can then make a difference. This is the strategy that the Cloud People fear the most because it works and its definitive.

    Don’t fight back as a cog in the pitchfork mob. Be the hyper-sonic missile that no one sees coming.

    • I advocate for a good 100,000 or so of people like us quietly moving into the burbs of DC.

      They will never know what hit them when that time comes

      • Silly idea. You wouldn’t be able to organize. If you did try to organize, you would find tons of Federal Agents in your group, and you’d be rounded up one by one.

        Since you wouldn’t be organized, you would all simply be eaten by niggers when the collapse came.

28. To the Boomers, All Education Is GOOD Education. You will not convince them otherwise – especially guys Biden’s age. I had that dog fight in my home years ago. My daughter dropped the sciences at university because she decided to take fine arts at some no name school that had sprung up. I begged her not to – I told her she’d be better off taking a year off and working.

    My elderly in-laws invited themselves into the debate and haughtily informed that my kid had to follow her dreams and the money would follow that. I got shouted down, and scolded for not supporting my kid… and four years later, my daughter was a rancid, angry lesbian with a useless degree and a pile of debt… which I passed over to the in-laws. No way was I gonna pay it, or put up with her sexuality and antics. I was promptly cancelled and banished from the hive.

    Screw ‘em. Those kids know exactly what they are doing when they sign up for those degrees and debts. Their parents do too. Make them pay it. Repayment of debt is a fundamental building block of civilization and our economy. It SHOULD hurt to be deliberately stupid.

    • Oh the old “follow your bliss crowd”…..

      But bliss isn’t accepted at the bank, to paraphrase a certain someone

      • Kinda reminiscent of that senile geezer pelosi during the run up to obombacare. “See, now you won’t have to go flip burgers with your worthless, debt laden degree just to get “healthcare”. Now uncle brown sugar has your back so you can truly live your dreams of finger painting or underwater basket weaving or some other esoteric pursuit.” F ‘em all…

    • Well, for boomers, the money DID follow. Think about the case of some art major boomer in, I don’t know, the early 1970s. Her debt load was way, way lower of course, if she had any. She wasn’t exposed to rancid gender and gay ideologies, so she probably didn’t come out of school as some disgruntled lesbian. She, in fact, probably met her husband in school. He had a job that supported her, their future kids, and could service her debt (and his). She could sell art on the side and maybe make a bit of cash, but whether or not she did it really did not matter. The money just wasn’t an issue.

      Boomers are literally incapable of understanding the world. For them it is perpetually 1970, they have all the answers, and they are out there changing the world. It is maddening, it drives me nuts that they simply fail to understand just how drastically the world has changed, in many ways because of the way they decided to live. They are so blinkered and solipsistic, they don’t get it, but they are also not going to change. We have no choice but to wait for them to die off and start to clean up the mess.

      • Blaming stuff on generations is futile dude. It always starts somewhere, would you have been any different if you were in those circumstances?

        This is the problem:

        https://youtu.be/kmV0ZOJhimY

        • It’s almost impossible to distinguish if the people are a product of the times or the times are a product of the people.

          C’est la vie.

          • Just came across this today and found it to be very interesting:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-sD_BqMUb4

        • All I will say is this… if your Boomer parents are trying to impose on you and interfere in your family decisions and battles – get them to back the hell off. If they get their feelings hurt – that’s too damn bad.

          With my former hive, you HAVE to accept Clown World. (Globohomo TV says so). You HAVE to be jabbed and boosted (same reason). You HAVE to support the ‘Kraine. If there is a divorce in the family it is automatically the man’s fault. These idiots still vote and will wield authority if you let them. Look at Biden, Pelosi, Mitch McConnell… they know what’s good for you, so shut up and do as you’re told.

          Look at how Hillary Clinton acted…they are not used to being told “no”. These people shouldn’t be heading up families, never mind nations.

          I am comfortable seeing them made to answer for their stupidity too.

      • “For them it is perpetually 1970, they have all the answers, and they are out there changing the world.”

        In defense of the Boomers, the big “rogue wave” which their existence pushed through the demographic numbers did indeed create the real estate boom that lasted from roughly 1970 to 2008 [with Bill Clinton & Alan Greenspan & their puppetmasters being the primary beneficiaries of the boom].

        The big problem was that the Boomers failed to breed at replacement-level fertility-rates, and so, to keep the market stable, The Puppetmasters used Hart-Celler and Simpson-Mazzoli to import infinite mud people in order to prevent real estate prices from collapsing.

        It was an artificially imported reserve army of demand-ers which they used to prop up the value of supply.

      • My take on this generational situation was always that the millennials were going to have it very rough during their 30s and 40s but that when the boomers start dying off in large numbers the world will suddenly become their oyster.

        All these houses will come available. Who is going to buy them? Inheritances here and there. Dad’s nice collector car. Entire kitchens. More importantly, all the best jobs finally open up. Etc etc.

        Point being, just hang tight and keep yourself afloat because good days are coming. Now it won’t be like it was for the boomers whose younger years were amazing, it will be a situation where your middle and older years are the amazing years. And people are living longer anyway, provided you dont get hooked on drugs. So just dont do anything stupid in the meantime and keep healthy and start preparing.

        My Gen X advice

        • ” Who is going to buy them”

          Blackrock with 0% loans from the fed who will then rent them to those who once wanted to own a home?

          • I know I know, Blackrock, but they will never be everything, so for any younger guy out there listening, your time is coming. Yes, your glorious youthful future has been postponed, but good times are coming. A lot of very wealthy millennials are going to be made in what’s coming if they play their cards right and keep thinking forward and rationally.

          • And those “good jobs”? If the Bolsheviks continue to have a free hand, those will no longer exist. The good jobs would only exist if the financialization of fucking everything had been nipped in the bud, and its kissing cousin, the gutting of the industrial economy, done down by leveraged buyouts and outsourcing. Those things being gone, it is a risible notion that reality-based good jobs will magically emerge out of the Trotskyite triumph. Sure, there will be a little carrion lying around, but after that is picked over, what then?

        • I think there is an implicit assumption that *all* or most boomers are rich. Nothing I see printed with respect to wealth distribution indicates this to me. The boomer generation was about 70M (IIRC). The top 10% of the population controls 80% of the wealth. Hard to believe, but look it up. Wealth = house, land, cash, 401k’s and other liquid investments.

          10% of the population is about 35M (counting IA’s). So half the boomers—at least—are in the bottom 20% of the wealth holders, while the other 10% of the population. has it all—and they are certainly not all boomers.

          You can further look up the wealth estimates for the remaining population quintiles and play around with the numbers, but out side of the top 10-20%, there is not much to inherit from these so called “rich” boomers who are the majority of the cohort.

          Yes, there will be houses to sell, and the market will adjust for the supply increase, but they probably won’t do much for most folk who now barely afford rent—with roommates.

        • We get…what, 2 million immigrants a year, legal and illegal? And that’s just the ones we know about. And that number is only going to go up. All those houses and jobs won’t be available.

    • “My elderly in-laws invited themselves into the debate and haughtily informed that my kid had to follow her dreams and the money would follow that. I got shouted down, and scolded for not supporting my kid… and four years later, my daughter was a rancid, angry lesbian with a useless degree and a pile of debt… which I passed over to the in-laws.”

      Bro.

      SMDHing.

      Bro.

      If I were to poast my true thoughts right now, then within about five minutes, I’d have a team of glowies using demolition charges to blow open my front door and red-dot me for a “Vicki Weaver” treatment of my skull.

      Bro.

    • Glen: There’s a homesteader with a YT channel I very occasionally skim, and the merchandise he pushes includes a t-shirt featuring his oft-uttered phrase “Stupid should hurt.” I agree with the sentiment.

      https://an-american-homestead.creator-spring.com/listing/stupid-should-hurt-homestead?product=369

      • That is the largest part of the problem – stupid doesn’t hurt for those in power. And it should. A lot..

    • glen, nobody has ever “shouted me down” around my kids . there are worse things than a little time downtown …

      • Good for you, M.

        I was still a Yesterday Man when all this went down 10 years ago. We didn’t really have dissidents yet, or had invented terms like social justice warrior, virtue signalling or really understand the behaviour patterns of those people yet. From my perspective, everyone went nuts at once and I did not handle it well.

        • “there are worse things than a little time downtown …”

          Again, my thoughts on this topic aren’t really thoughts at all; they’re deeply primitive instinctual reactions along the lines of Second-Manassas/Argonne/Normandy/Iwo-Jima.

    • I sometimes think the Founders erred when they made bankruptcy possible. As bad as the debtor’s prison and the workhouse of England may have seemed to them and certainly in our easy-money modern times, even those are quite tame compared to the brutality of ancient times. In his account of the origin of morality, Nietzsche recounts some of them. I suspect the (relative) euphemism “taking it out of your hide” had its origins there. In some times and places, the creditor was literally allowed to slice off parts of the debtor’s body.

29. “The madness of college financial aid is obvious when you look at the rise in tuition costs over the last thirty years.”

    Oh Z, I’d kick that back to, oh, the 1970s. A quick personal example:

    I went to Directional State U exactly ten years after my next eldest brother went to State Technical College. My late mother tracked my tuition, room & board, and book expenses to the penny and showed me four & 1/2 years of college cost her just shy of $29K.

    Cleaning out our family home before she sold it I found my brother’s tuition bills. My brother didn’t live on campus so it’s not 100% apples to apples, but one year of my tuition and board expenses would’ve paid for all four years of my brother’s college tuition.

    Of course now what my late mother paid for my degree covers one year of tuition at Directional State U. Don’t know if room and board is included.

    “One reason for that is the dilution of it by handing them out to anyone who qualifies for debt.”

    A week or so back as I made breakfast for us The Lovely 🥰 Mrs. and I heard a story on how some colleges have done away with SAT and ACT requirements for enrollment. She asked me “So what now, any mouth breather will be allowed in?”

    I replied “If you can stand upright, fog a mirror, and sign a check to the Bursar’s Office, you’re in.” 👍🏻

    • “Of course now what my late mother paid for my degree covers one year of tuition at Directional State U. Don’t know if room and board is included.”

      Like any ponzi scheme, those who get in first get in the cheapest! 😉

      But seriously though, if you stop and think for a few moments on it, you’ll see our entire economy is a ponzi scheme. Otherwise we wouldn’t fear deflation so much.

      Housing, education, health care, asset prices…… all a giant ponzi scheme

    • How else are the nogs going to be allowed through the gate?

      • About time someone said it. To me, the strongest force destroying the value of college degrees is the 85ers being let in to some of the most exclusive universities in the country. It’s the exclusivity that makes a degree worthwhile, what good is it if anyone can qualify, even the 13/85ers. Of course, they will all just fail out anyway, but they’re still being let in initially.

30. Anyone else finding it convenient for the government that the increase in interest rates at the hands of the fed is putting the brakes on the great migration out of places like NY state down to Florida or the southeast? If you can’t sell your house in NY, if the price you were planning on getting is a pipe dream now, you are stuck my friend. Sorry. Yeah, so you are still on the hook for those massive state taxes. But no worries, things will improve in five years when you are in a wheelchair.

    Meanwhile the news comes out that the census bureau falsified estimates or somehow managed to screw things up to where blue states got more electoral votes than they should have — at the expense of red states.

    Coincidences?

    • When you are ruled by mendacious and ill-intentioned schemers who have attained control of crucial chokepoints, there are no coincidences, merely examples of them flexing in your face.

31. America’s decline: Slowly at first then all of a sudden.

    • I think it’s already here — just that most people inside America aren’t seeing it but the outside world sees it.

      Everyone else is busy setting themselves up in alternative systems because they see America is finished as the lone super power.

      But I’m reasonably confident that when Russia’s victory is undeniable, that that event combined with our afghan withdrawal debacle will be those twin pebbles that cause the avalanche.

      • No one will notice.

        By the time Russia completes its mission the entire west will be partitioned off from the rest of the world in a green/media/totalitarian new iron curtain.

        You ain’t gonna be worried about the Russia debacle as you will be wondering which bit of furniture to burn on the fire pit in the middle of your living room and whether the water ration is due.

        Maybe later in the states, but Europe is about 4 months away from this.

        • Quick question. Which forms of wood burn best and most efficiently. I have an oak bookcase but it seems some of my furniture is mostly composite wood. Still good to burn?

          • I won’t spoil it as you are going to find out for yourself.

          • Hickory makes for the best BBQ

            Texans and their mesquite…. HA !!!

            But I would hold onto the oak as long as possible. Sturdy wood, functional for something like a guillotine. Burn the pine instead.

          • Texans and their mesquite…. HA !!!

            Thems fightin’ words.

          • Falcone and c matt,

            You know, considering how much opprobrium is directed towards “grillers”, it’s funny to see you having a (albeit tongue in cheek) stand off concerning the superior grilling technique. As Alannis might say, ironic…

        • Yes, the digital CBDC slave system is probably closer to implementation in the West than any of us realize.

          • Yes, the timing and details of implementation is likely under discussion at Jackson Hole.

            The cartels are probably working out how the disappearance of physical greenbacks in their cash business can be worked around. Maybe all of those cartel members entering the US through the southern border will somehow play into this as CBDC digital mules? Above my pay grade, but I am sure that they are on it. Maybe meth and fetanyl manufacture will be moved to the US, too. They’d probably welcome getting rid of the hassle of moving drugs and physical currency across borders. Amd in a country in collapse, how easy would it be to corrupt and intimidate policing authorities? Fun times to come.

        • The only reason for the delay in the States is TPTB became inexplicably afraid of the populace due to energy and food inflation. My guess is after winter, when it gets hotter than hell, Americans will discover the joys of sleeping on the porch, followed by cold months of roachnuts roasting on the fiery table.

          An alternative explanation is TPTB here are watching how the Euros react to a return to the Bronze Age. Based on a recent visit by and conversation with friends from Lisbon, it may not be the usual zombie walk because anger is rising over talk about winter warming stations, and of course Portugal is not all that cold. We’ll see.

          • TPTB aren’t worried about Portugal.

            Percentage-wise Portugal is the second most jabbed nation in Europe.

            Thus, they’re too busy dropping like flies to worry about freezing to death.

          • This pair is Exhibit A re Jabfest, WGH, but they aren’t mad due to people keeling over but over the pre-emptive hectoring and scaremongering.

        • [Story told me by a German teacher in Germany, ca. 1984] Near the end of the war, Germans were reduced to burning heirloom furniture like a schrank (wardrobe), to stay alive*. Teacher commented that the few surviving specimens were valued similarly to a new Porsche.

          So yeah, burn the Ikea stuff first. Save the antiques for last. 🙁

          *One might wonder what they did for food. That’s a question I’d prefer to not delve into at this time 😀

32. Not only is college a racket that most students should not be in, but can we take this a step further and talk about the High School racket? Private schools in my area are now around 15k a student, and public High School cost even more per student than that, which shows up in everyone’s property taxes.

    Basically every intelligent person who actually belongs in college ends up getting 30 or so college credits by the time they leave High School is the opportunity presents itself, which essentially makes High School equivalent to the first year of college. One of my cousins accrued an astounding 90 college credits, the first three he received when he was in only the 6th Grade. While he’s bright, he’s not genius level stuff either. It’s just not that hard anymore

    We probably hit the sweet spot in the 1960’s for reasonable educational attainment, give or take that 5-10 percent who fell through the cracks and could have attained more if the opportunity presented itself. Now we’re just wasting a person’s time where they could get decent skills. There was an article that stated education just shows an employer the person can tolerate incredible boredom, and I’m inclined to agree.

    https://www.infoplease.com/us/education/educational-attainment-sex-1910-2020

    • The entire US educational system from head start to grad school is one of the largest and most complex socialistic failures ever. There’s no reason public funds should be involved in education at all. Financing for education should come directly from employers. Large corporations should screen elementary students and select those they feel have the most potential for slots at institutions they direct and finance and whose graduates then go to work in their businesses. Smaller businesses would form associations to achieve a similar result. This is how union apprenticeship programs work.
      Business association educational programs that make their graduates better and more productive and compensated would themselves be more successful, at no expense to the public or the students themselves. The socialistic US educational system is one of the most shameful aspects of the country, not only from a financial perspective but in the products that it produces, its grads, which are inferior.

      • The Western educational system is simply one giant NPC farm.

      • Mikey, I’ve got to argue or clarify that point a bit. Yes, on the whole our school graduates are inferior as are many of our schools that “instruct” them. But “as a whole” is not the way to judge us against other countries not caught up in our current insanity. We still have some of the finest institutions that produce some of the finest graduates of any country—even while producing AA type grad’s to please the ideologues.

        Even looking at country by country comparisons, when you stratify be race, as to tease out Whites, we hold our own. But, you are correct, the US educational “system” is undoubtedly the greatest waste of any country’s limited resources that can be referenced on the planet. As far as corporate involvement, look up Kettering University in MI. They do it right, at least at the University level. I’ve been there and was much impressed.

        • finest institutions that produce some of the finest graduates of any country

          Why should our grads be compared to grads from other countries? How about comparing them to what we actually need? It’s not actually my opinion but if the education of an American is to enable it to be employable then the onus is on the employers, not the students. In a free enterprise system the taxpayers don’t pay for the buildings and equipment of businesses, or at least that wasn’t the case in the past. Now that the public is financing the construction of silicon chip fabs maybe that theory is out the window. Even so, federally guaranteed student loans have done one thing, increase the numbers of college administrators and their salaries. Michael Drake, former president of Ohio State Univ., is now the boss at the University of California system where his pay is $890,000 per annum. Ohio State’s new president, Kristina M. Johnson, will be paid a base salary of $900,000 with an eligibility for $225,000 in performance bonuses. Keep in mind that these positions aren’t in the private sector, where CEOs are expected to oversee increasing profits. These executives can only authorize expending money and raising tuition.

          • That’s exactly what I said. Those that seek immediate employment in a “trade” should go to a school specializing in that trade or in the trades.

            Those who seek a fun 4 years in a faux major need to go elsewhere, but not college. That leaves STEM. As I said, for the most part we have some of the best Universities in the world in those areas and when looked at broken down by race, we are competitive. Corporations are welcome—and do—work with universities to collaborate on curriculum and apprenticeships, really work-study. This is why I mentioned Kettering as an example.

            You don’t like CEO, or University president salaries fine. But that’s not my issue.

    • Well, employers are also to blame for this racket. Many demand degrees for positions that simply don’t require it. They also like to outsource the initial training costs on to the employee. Gone are the apprentice system and Bell Labs days which created the Empire State Building and put man on the moon. Now we get tranny story hour.

      • Caplin discusses such in his recent book, “The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money”

        What do employers think they are getting with a required degree? Little more it seems than a complacent student (future employee) who can sit through enough mind numbing classes for enough time (4+ years) to obtain a degree.

        Caplan finds that about all a student learns and retains is some smallish numeric and writing skills. The employer obviously expects to train the student in what skills the employer needs, but rather not invest the time in a student who won’t sit still and listen or show up fo work after training.

      • My company constantly sends out emails telling me how I’m the worst person ever because I’m straight and white. It is embarrassing. I have gotten better at ignoring it. “As long as the check clears every 2 weeks” is what I keep telling myself. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t wearing me down though. It has built up a lot of hate in me. More than I care to admit.

33. My father was a member of the state college board. When the administration wanted to raise tuition they would justify it by saying the students could just get bigger loans. Also they would slap fees on the students as a way to hide tuition increases.

    • I drove through my old university campus several months ago for the first time since I graduated back in the seventies. The changes were astounding. The buildings were actually beautiful, for the most part…none of the drecky modern stuff that was all the rage when I was a student. The football stadium was now a monstrosity capable of containing 100,000. And it was slap in the middle of the campus like a showy diamond ring. Maturing trees everywhere offered shady walkways. As you left the campus, you passed hundreds of support businesses which could not exist without the money that poured in from the students. The whole thing imparted the impression of a giant echo chamber of delusion, of a fantasy world that could only exist on that campus. It really was a Disney World of “academic” pursuits. A giant sandbox for young adults.

      • You touch on part of the reason to keep air going into the bubble. Much as Obamacare was a workaround to keep the healthcare bubble going this debt-forgiveness scheme is a way to keep all the ancillary businesses who are now dependent on this cash flow afloat.

    • Even worse at my university. They raise tuition fees, but always the Legislature or the Board asks, “What about our poor minorities?” The university always response by saying, “We will withhold such and such percent of the tuition raise for poor and minority grants.” Last I paid attention, the university was setting aside 31% of tuition for grants to the poor and minority (read non-White) applicants.

      So one day I was talking with a neighbor who just was about to start his two kids at the university and complaining about the cost. He of course was anxious to quiz me for an inside view of things. I congratulated him on not only sending his two kids to university, but also funding the tuition of one of our Hispanic community as well. He was initially perplexed, but when I did the math for him he went from perplexed to infuriated. It was a good day’s work. 😉

34. Something similar was always my issue with school vouchers. Because I knew the schools would just raise the price of tuition by the amount of the voucher. The brilliant minds populating the comment sections of conservative inc could never figure it out and would always jump down my throat for being a commie…..

    Go figure.

    • Conservative Inc. loved vouchers because it was a cost free way of opposing the Left. They could pretend to oppose the education establishment without incurring the wrath of the Left. As you point out, vouchers would just make private education more expensive for the people they claim to represent.

      • The people who run the education racket hate vouchers. There was a rumor late in Obama’s second term he was going to force it on them because of how pathetic the public schools had already become by that point. It is a worthless idea that would do nothing to solve the problem, which is probably why Conservatism, Inc. supports it. In some cases, charter schools do have higher discipline standards that is about the only benefit.

        • Vouchers would lead to hundreds of shady “private” learning academies popping up overnight like weeds, all “free” or the price of tuition set to the amount of the voucher

          It would be educational shyster nirvana

          Meanwhile the decent established private schools would just jack up their tuition at the amount of the voucher to keep out the “bad students”

          • Heh, reminds me of those commercials they used to run where it’d be some Mexican guy talking about the great job he had from “learning computers” at one of those fake colleges.

      • I loved it when Republican voters rebelled against the GOP when it supported public school choice. Joe Normie didn’t pay through the nose to live on a white neighborhood just so D’Quan could go to his kids’ high school.

      • Around ten years ago a rep from the state GOP came by my home with one of those “We’d like your input on what should be in the platform of the party for the next election” or some such thing and I nearly gave the guy a coronary when the subject of school vouchers came up.
        He gave me the spiel about “getting decent kids out of the clutch of failing schools” bit and I told him that that was the standard party line that has no bearing in reality. Curious, he asked me to explain further and I told him that under no circumstances would I ever support school vouchers, for two very important reasons:
        1) It’s yet another subsidy that my children – because they are white – will NEVER qualify for. The second I introduced race into the conversation, he became visibly uncomfortable. Good.
        2) This is a pretty nice area and we’d like to keep it that way. Having said that, school vouchers will mean that the inner-city feral negroes that this idea is really aimed at will be moving to this area, which means that it will turn into Mogadishu within the next five years after that and under no circumstances will I put my children’s lives in danger by exposing them to those sub-human creatures.
        At this point he started shuffling his papers and said – in a bit of a stuttering voice – “I can see you have a rather strong opinion on this subject, perhaps someone could come back at a later time.” I interrupted him by asking why this didn’t bother him or make him uncomfortable. After all didn’t he have children? Would you want them subjected to what I just spoke about? He kind of meekly responded, “My kids go to a private school.” I said, “Of course they do, so this is a problem that some one like you would never have to consider, but it’s ok to have my kids deal with this issue?” he just said, you have a good day sir and started to leave. My parting words were, “You know I’m right about this. Deny it all you want, but deep down, you know you agree with me.” He just waved and left. Hopefully a seed was planted.

      • zman: Vouchers would also enable Jontavious to join Kaylie at private skoo. Conservatards love posturing as racial egalitarians. The last Christian school my younger son attended shut down a few years after we pulled him out – they let in too many noggers and Kaylie’s momma – making all sorts of excuses other than real one that Jontavious was hitting on her daughter – pulled her out.

      • Vouchers would probably work well if schools were allowed complete discretion on what students they would enroll as well as what price to charge. Of course that would require discarding Brown vs. Board and much other intrusive regulation. In other words, I would advocate reducing public education almost entirely to the bare bones: Provide a fixed amount of funding, per year, per student. Let the parents decide where and how to educate their kid. Beyond that, the State should be totally hands-off. Perhaps with small exceptions, like the right to test a student yearly. If he wasn’t meeting a common standard, then the State would have the right to intervene and send the student to a state school, which would probably be bottom tier.

        Just imagine how it might work. Snooty private schools might indeed charge over and above the subsidy, to keep out the riffraff. But they wouldn’t have to — recall, the school would have absolute right to accept or reject anyone as they saw fit.

        How would this affect poorer families? Students who were actually capable, and even better, had parents who cared, could seek a practical education. Evangelicals could teach their spawn that Jay-sus Christ is the only Son of God Almightah, and perhaps a bit of secular learnin’ on the side as well. The unchurched could opt for a “classical” education as their means allowed.

        Conversely, dumb ghetto Blacks could send their niglets to pretend schools that taught fantasy history, how the White Devil was the cause of all the race’s ills, and so forth. White Progressives could attend academies of self-hate indoctrination.

        Rural area? No suitable school available? Perhaps individual tutors could be hired. There’d be a lot of public school teachers looking for work, so it wouldn’t be out of the question. Those who could home-school could use the funds towards that end.

        Of course, all the above is just a flight of fancy. But it’s fun to speculate, what would happen if the government provided merely the funding for education — and stopped at that, letting the free market supply the rest of the equation. It seems clear that the main reason public education (primary and higher) are so screwed up is precisely that government is so heavily involved.

      • No, vouchers don’t work that way wrt to education. The schools are in competition with one another. And there are plenty of them. Yes, some may indeed raise tuition and some families might have to pay more to meet the need of getting their child educated, however the number of parents leaving the public school system because of vouchers increases year by year, while public school attendance declines.

        This is the whole point of vouchers and one metric used to measure their success (does it kill the public school system). If schools simple raised their tuition to match the voucher, then parents who could not afford the tuition before, can not afford the tuition now and there would be a zero growth in the charter system enrollment. This is not the case. Charter schools are booked years out.

        This year the vouchers here are now for everybody and amount to $7500. Whereas the public school cost is estimated at $12k per child—excluding capital facility costs! Any parent not able to meet the tuition for any alternate school is welcome back to their local public school, which is free.

        Eventually the plan will be to expand the voucher system to all schools, public and private. The money will follow the student, but the choice is up to the parent as to who will best educate their child.

        What will keep cost in line is competition and parental choice.

        • I don’t see that playing out in real life

          Only so much land, only so many classrooms, if all of a sudden everyone has a voucher for the two or three neighborhood private schools, there would be no way to accommodate them. Plus, all the parents whose kids are already there and established would raise hell if they start getting squeezed out by newbies.

          Invariably what would happen, is like I say, shysters would start filling in the void with fly by night private learning academies. Putting it nicely. Because you are not dealing with kids and parents who have their shit together, for the most part, you are dealing with Mexicans or blacks who have these dreams of seeing their kids get a diploma that they never got, and they’re going to want to get their kids into the name brand private school they always dreamed about driving by seeing those wealthy white kids in uniforms.

          Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t believe the different social racial classes should be put into the same school except in unique circumstances where the kid is exceptionally bright. It’s not fair to them otherwise, and not fair to me and mine. Why give young people the illusion that just because they went to school with rich kids they would always be one with them? Life never works that way. In fact every middle class kid I know who went to our rich little prep school is highly disillusioned because they were filled with youthful hopes and dreams then had them shattered by reality. It’s a form of cruelty, but maybe I’m going too far off on a a tangent.

          People should stick to their own. If the middle class kid can make something of himself and get his kids into a great prep school then bless him, but these things should be aspirational. Not a given. You want it? Earn it. Or go to public school and leave me alone, rhetorically speaking.

    • It would also ruin private education. No doubt the vouchers would come with strings attached, and Darjavius cannot be expelled for his lack of competency or discipline because you accepted the voucher payment. Private schools would become indistinguishable from their public counterparts.

      • The vouchers here, as of now, have little to no strings attached as you fear them. Obviously, such money is checked against enrollment and such. But some strings, like standardize testing and proficiency levels, have so far been successfully fought against. The teachers’ unions would love to regulate the private schools into bastions of mediocrity as they have in the public system, but so far no success. Time will tell and of course, the demographics here are on the March so the baby is in infancy and can easily be smothered.

        The argument comes back always to one point, who decides what is best for your child…you or the government “experts”.

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