One of the subtexts to the current war in the Ukraine is the fact that the West has been wrong about every aspect of the conflict. None of the predictions about the actual fighting have been correct. Even the propaganda has been hilariously wrong, often making the West look foolish. The economic response, which was supposed to be a fatal blow to Russia, has gone horribly wrong. Europe now faces an unprecedented energy shortage this fall and winter.
The bulk of the blame lies at the feet of the neoconservatives running foreign policy for the Global American Empire. The same cast of characters who were horrifically wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush years have managed to turn a regional issue into a global disaster. London and Brussels, along with the provincials occupying legacy positions in national government share blame as well. They enthusiastically went along with a war plan that had no chance to succeed.
The degree of wrongness is a thing of beauty, when you can look at it from a purely objective point of view. Rolling dice, flipping coins or pulling policy ideas out of a hat would have had a better result. One could be forgiven for thinking that maybe this series of errors is somehow deliberate. Maybe that ridiculous bald guy from the World Economic Forum really is a super villain. The masters of the universe are setting the West ablaze so they can build back better.
The question that should be pondered is why has everything gone so terribly long for the collective West? One reason is competence. The Global American Empire is led by a man who barely knows where he is most of the time. In his prime, Joe Biden was known as an affable moron. In his dotage, he is a confused and incompetent old man unable to perform his duties. His handlers give him stage instructions for basic things like where and when to sit.
Biden is the bit of the iceberg we see. There is a whole apparatus around him that was instrumental in getting him into office. The Washington political community thought a dementia patient was better than Trump. That says nothing about Trump and everything about the people who engineered Biden’s ascension. People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.
Of course, this degree of incompetence is made possible by a political culture that is defensive, isolated and insulated. They picked Biden because he was the safest option to get rid of Trump. Biden’s primary appeal to the political class was that he was a vegetable they could move around however they pleased. Biden and his family were simply happy to fill the role and play their part. He also provided the best chance of liberating the city from the scourge of Trump people.
That decision gets to the insularity of the political class, not just in Washington, but across the collective West. These are people without any understanding of the societies over which they rule. When you look at the resumes of these people, the common feature is no experience in the dreaded private sector. Politics has been their life since they were adults. In fact, we have reached a point where private sector experience raises suspicion in the political class.
These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work. Like the heirs of a family business, the political class has spent their life in a system without ever having to think about how it came into being. The system of power they command is a permanent feature of life. The only variable is who will have control of the institutions of power. That is politics, the game of verbal chess which picks the winners and losers in the system.
Therein lies the other cause of this unfolding disaster. The West is a collection of people who deal in words exclusively. They have never done anything, other than talk about making other people do things. Nancy Pelosi has been in Washington for eighty years and there is no single physical thing she can point to, other than her ten-thousand-dollar freezer, as a product of her political career. When she is dead, the next wave will wash away her footprints in the sand and she will be forgotten.
On the other side of this fight is a different system, one that is the result of people doing things and rising in the ranks as a consequence. Putin is a man who had to navigate a world where failure meant prison or death. When that world collapsed, he had to navigate a world of chaos. When he gained power, he then had to impose order, often taking on powerful oligarchs backed by Western interests. Putin and his ruling circle are a collection of men who do things, not just talk about things.
Six months ago, the West was prepared to give the Russians a good tongue lashing, cancel her from the internet and de-platform her from the financial system. On the other side, the Russians prepared to fight a war against a well-armed and prepared enemy in Ukraine and a well-armed and prepared West on the world stage. One side was ready for a battle of words while the other side was ready for a battle of actions. It turns out that words count for a lot less than actions.
All civilizations have periods of incompetence. The Russians suffered through the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods. The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. The reason Washington is run by fossils is the next in line is much worse than the geezers. Mitch McConnell knows something about running the party. Kevin McCarthy was selected because no one in power worried that he would be a challenge.
The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss. It is why presidents have been increasingly ridiculous since the Cold War. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden are all mileposts in the decline of competence. Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.
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File this under “Threat’s that you don’t need to worry about”
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=700,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/913/204/original/35d9f887653fefb7.png
We may simply be in a post competency world in the US. The rulers see us as useless eaters
They want to reduce our numbers and replace us with Africans and Mexicans. How much competency do you need in the managerial class if you hate the general populace and want them to die? Not much except for police and then only to protect the rulers from the rabble.
As long as Europe stays submissive, the Empire continues continue to grab resources and the military industrial complex is making a lot of money the rulers don’t even care about the competency of the military, intelligence services and foreign services. The only place they are vulnerable is with China pulling other countries away from the unipolar world and the oil industry possible shelving the exclusivity of the petrodollar. But those are probably going to crash after the current crop of grifters is gone.
well , this is an accurate article . that is how civilizations die. Rome struggled on until everyone who could fix an aqueduct died or was killed. then its all down hill with increasing speed. i think our foolish leaders are directed by the bald guys organization. they want us eating bugs , and we will. don’t believe me ? look at this list. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/another-food-processing-plant-shutters-operations-adding-long-list-closures
Z: “These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work. Like the heirs of a family business, the political class has spent their life in a system without ever having to think about how it came into being. The system of power they command is a permanent feature of life. The only variable is who will have control of the institutions of power. That is politics, the game of verbal chess which picks the winners and losers in the system.”
Well said.
“These are people who simply have no idea how things work. They just take for granted that things work.”
When I fly on an airliner I often feel like turning to the person next to me who’s casually reading a magazine. “You know, there are about 178 things that have to go perfectly right, in order for us not to fall out of the sky right now.”
Devil’s Advocate: Competency is not needed or wanted. Any “problem” can be fixed either by low-cost imported Indian or Chinese labor or made unimportant by the Media. Never mind the bugs on the menu, here’s the January 6th newest issue. “Remember when we told you there was no future, well this is it.”
Turkey fell in line, obediently, as it was made clear to Erdogan that he does as he is told or he is removed. The G-7 basically just banned Russian oil exports (as they are the only ones able to insure them). Elections do not matter because either they will be faked or every winning opponent arrested for “insurrection!” Hillary! is back, she’s telling the FT she won’t run (which means she will) and is angling to be the successor within months of Biden hence the CIA/FBI to NYT “leaks” of the Big Guy Voicemails telling son of Big Guy his capers “were ok.”
Disney, Larry Fink of Blackrock, Klaus Schwab of the WEF, and Hillary, full owner of the CIA and FBI, do not need competence as they have POWER and can bleed money and power for a century and still be a colossus. In their view, Putin will be crushed like a bug when not if President Hillary sends in troops to Ukraine and they head straight to Moscow. That’s why the EU leaders were laughing at Putin.
If you look at the bench below Big Guy, its Newsom (spoiled rich kid of one the three families: Pelosi, Brown, Newsom that have run California since 1910), Hillary! (married Bill), Stacey Abrams and AOC (media creatures) and Mayor Butt -plug. At no point was competency desired or needed.
I think we are seeing already the “Revolt of the Admirals” among some oligarchs and defense contractors. You can’t create a Green Aircraft Carrier. Or space program. And per China Starlink and Space-X are dual use: military and civilian.
For companies like GM, Disney, Blackrock, or people like Hillary!, competency is not required. Until very suddenly it is.
The incompetents are coasting on the back of previous competent generations and the remaining competents still manning the necessary positions. But, a large, complex, industrial, high-technology empire, in fact, does need competent people.
We’re in the Trust Fund phase of empire and like all trust fund kids, the money (or competency in this case) runs out.
Also, if you think the G-7 actually put a price cap on Russian oil, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn. You might have noticed the price of oil was basically flat today. First, India and China won’t abide by the price cap and they use their own insurance. Also, the market knows that the G-7 will never enforce this ban because it would destroy their economies in a heartbeat.
We are run by incompetents – even your tribal cousins. It’s just that they inherited a functioning system and institutions. They will grind those systems and institutions into the ground over time. Hell, they already are. But it does take time.
I see this every day in California. Companies that did huge projects in the past now cannot complete very basic projects in L.A.
L.A. is a huge market and they have had to just stop doing work there, In the past even when it became heavily Mexican it had enough reserves of engineers and good people to get jobs done.
What’s left are some aging Boomers who are leaving at an alarming rate a tiny handful of Gen X and Millennials and hundreds of opening that will never be filled.
The obvious solution is to double pay and to make sure they pay solidly middle class wages but they’d rather litigate than that . Frankly it might not work. Good weather or not, its a poor place to live,
Worse you can’t really bring people in from anywhere else. They don’t exist in any numbers anywhere No one wants to commute since the real speed is about 35 .
The rest of the US isn’t quite as bad but Cali is 10% of the population.
As another neat side effect, its not longer the “young” state a few smart people noted in not that many years it will have retirement demography. These days and I live in a high fertility zone you rarely see kids and after a generation,the TFR is the same for everybody.
Even the Mexicans aren’t having them.
It will collapse and join the 3rd world quite quickly but our bubble boys and girls elite won’t be able to react correctly and just as we see with the Russia/Ukraine war will double down.
Worse things we can’t control like a possible Iran /Israel war could leave us with $10 a gallon or more fuel.
we really don’t have a chance and if we had the Caesar so many are hoping for its 2-4 decades of interregnum to fix it.
This is not incompetence. It’s deliberate destruction and murder.
I know it looks like its intentional, but I assure its just plain incompetence says the man and his friends with the sledge hammers standing in the middle of your ruined house.
utter nonsense. have you seen this list? read it and then see what you think https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/another-food-processing-plant-shutters-operations-adding-long-list-closures
“The question that should be pondered is why has everything gone so terribly wrong for the collective West?”
Because men have forgotten God.
Truth itself has been rejected. All the ideas society accepts are built on false premises (and promises) and their true purpose is power over God and truth.
Alternative explanation: The trust and altruism of white men was hijacked by an alien people. Further, the greed of our more individualistic people has been incentivized towards our own displacement. Through their domination of the media they turned our women and our children against us and use blacks as a cudgel to beat us with.
I don’t know how we adjudicate our disagreement. Until recently, the Scaninavian countries were the happiest countries on Earth while being the most irreligious and white. I respect your viewpoint but find it unpersuasive. I hope we can still get along.
As I understand the story of Job, pleasing God is no guarantee of his blessings anyway.
I concur
Non religious Scandinavia minus migrants functions at a very high level and Sweden often has a higher White TFR than the US with longer lifespans as well
You do not need nor require religion if the people don’t need it, The US though was founded by religious nutters and grifters kept somewhat in check by the Frontier, Christianity and occasional well directed violence
The checks and balances seem to be gone so the natural outcome of what we had degrading to its natural low level is clown world
You don’t need religion.. If you are a Scandinavian and only worry about material things.
Scandinavians are biologically adapted to very harsh climates, which select for people with high morals and pathological altruism. Besides they are ethnically homogenous. You cannot copy this in USA to people of English, Irish, German and Italian descent.
In addition, life in Scandinavia is lonely, socialistic and inhuman. Watch on Youtube “the Swedish theory of love”
In addition, they are being conquered by Muslims. If they were a society with Christianity as official religion, they could say that Muslims are not allowed. (Hungary did something similar and is Muslin free) Scandinavians cannot do that. In some way, a religion comes in handy.
In addition, lack of religion produces low birthrates and Muslim have high birthrates.
Muslim birth rates aren’t especially high in Europe as most “Muslims” turn quite secular pretty fast. That is why elites push more immigration to replace loses.
Like the US migrant inflows are the issue less child bearing.
Also at no point did I say that the US could do what Scandinavia did .
And while the life may be lonely and unpleasant, the reality is so is American life and as noted the proof is in the fertility. The Scandinavians has stable fertility, ours is in decline and not better
Our society doesn’t work and while I am not advocating theirs for the US, it works for them at least as well if not better than ours with less human misery an suffering
Copy of my intervention below, this time (hopefully) posted in more readable format
Based on the current economic and politic turmoil, I cut and pasted from the conspiratorial web, and integrated with a bit of my own, this bit of speculation about what may be the most probable future scenarios:
We have high inflation, and also have a recessionary trend.
In this situation, squeezing credit and raising interest rates would almost certainly not only aggravate the recession, and cause unpredictable social disruption. It would also burst a bubble of debt with catastrophic consequences.
The traditional recipe for getting out of a conjuncture of recession combined with inflation prescribes making massive public infrastructural investments to increase productivity, production, employment and income.
However, these investments should be made in debt, therefore they are of doubtful feasibility for mostly everywhere in the First World. Moreover it is not certain they will work, and in any case it would take years to identify what interventions are needed, make cost-benefit assessments, complete the tendering procedure and start construction sites.
A similar predicament occurred in the months leading up to 9/11, after all fiscal stimulus to a stagnant US economy – just shaken by the dotcom fiasco – had failed. Given the slowness of the Keynesian remedy mentioned above, the lone major public investment rapid enough to be effective was war. In effect, 9/11 triggered this type of investment, which in turn triggered a new real estate and financial bubble destined to burst in 2008. In exactly the same way, in 1940 it was the war that brought the US out of the collapse of 1929.
From the point of view of the oligarchies of the West, and also of the rest of the globe, a valid solution, which could put them all in agreement, would then be the one described by George Orwell in 1984. That fictitious universe was stabilized into a condition of perennial, multiple wars around the world.
This state of things legitimized in the eyes of the populace the everlasting adoption of a war economy, with centralized state management of resources, the possibility of arbitrarily imposed rationing controls, suppression of cash, a strong social regimentation, total control of information, the imposition of a single political thought with criminalization and discrimination of dissenters, such as we already conspicuously have now.
This arrangement would leave no alternatives to common people but to ‘understand’ and therefore accept what the elites want, as well as to prevent and suppress protest and the organization of resistance, including trade union resistance.
Our current reality is in fact already very much dominated by the interlocking interests of Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia: their coming, chronic wars without a decisive outcome will allow the power elites to control all resources and all information, and also to curtail all rights. At the same time, it will be possible for them to assuage and galvanize the population with a propaganda representation of reality, and ad-hoc rewriting of the historical past.
Implementing such a system of social and economic control could make possible what the elites most crave for: avoid an economic and financial collapse, hence also avoid a crisis of popular consensus and obedience. That is, avoid reckoning.
On the internal front, the management of the pandemics and vaccination campaigns seems to be aimed at the gradual replacement of the current consumerism-based economy, in need of vast absorption of raw materials and energy, with a system based on the chronic consume of drugs and vaccines.
The latter system will be far more sustainable in terms of raw resources, and will be capable to absorb a large part of the disposable income of the great majority of the population.
To achieve this, the population should be made drug-dependent and vaccine-dependent through battering media manipulation. People will therefore become immuno-suppressed and as such distracted from socio-economic problems and incapable of rebellion, as they will shift their focus on health issues.
At the same time, a society supervised and regulated by means of social scores or obedience is in development in the West, akin to the one already widely implemented in China. There, access to public services and rights is conditional on behavior compliant with state rules set by the owners of institutions. What awaits us is a marked reduction in spontaneity, freedom, in short in man’s unpredictability.
Having reached such a point, the elites would be only one step away from solving the Earth overpopulation problem, because the population would now be for all effects under zootechnical management.
This train of speculation would be in line with the interests of the dominant oligarchies, and with current technological surveillance possibilities, hence should not be discounted as conspiracy theory.
I’m afraid I do not understand why my comment will not published?
You say that the neo-conservatives were to blame for these wars. However, what about the ‘Intelligent Services’ certainly they must share in the blame.
“What about the ‘Intelligent Services’ certainly they must share in the blame.” It’s all the same freakin thing man. It’s not like there’s a spoon upstairs. And a fork downstairs. It’s all a spork.
I need to live long enough to use this in an actual conversation.
Anybody see the press boomlet for Sue Rice? I guess you can tell I don’t buy it (her covertly running the White House on Obama’s behalf — she is a mulatta preppie like himself so maybe benefits from interpersonal/charismatic favoritism at most). It would not faze me if POLITICO announced she’d paid them to run the puff piece, in the way that publication normally receives news via corporate sponsors.
Rice who to any zoomer may seem antediluvian is actually a new-breed post-Hillary/Schumer figure (and 2 gens after Biden/Kerry fossil formation) and middle-of-the-spectrum for the Taleb “IYI” category– not the worst, not basically benign either; and therefore representative of the problem. Though reputed to be uncouth and foul-mouthed a la some Catholic girls’ school alumna of yore she’s a serviceable example of 2022 D.C. respectability and never won’t have a job there, whether in government or some para-government industry like academia or media. If you wondered what her idea of “patriotism” is, that’d answer itself with an involuntary laugh. Her ilk avidly serve competing neo-religions like feminism, civil rights, education/expertise, of course. These other faiths are popular. Maybe driven by economic insecurity, or maybe narcissism (spoiled-brat softness of “kids today,” etc.) — it totally doesn’t matter. It’s an Orkin paradigm where if you see 1 there must be 10,000 nested in the wall. Thus the “eschew The Cathedral, concentrate on your own community” folks are half-right at best. Until the overall scam collapses, it’ll gobble up smaller critters to the point of some biological ceiling (public-choice economics is true and this is why yuppie Leftist professors hate it). Many feds will post this same glowing analysis on any webzone, not out of ideology but because it fits the Wall-Street self-defense method for a rotten edifice. I think you could connect this to their half-baked military envy, too. They have only cargo-cult plans for Iraq or Syria or Ukraine or whereever yet seriously worry at night about the activities and merit badges that comprise a powerful person’s cursus honorum. This attitude happens when you don’t feel you own something.
Based on the current economic and politic turmoil, I cut and pasted from the conspiratorial web, and integrated with a bit of my own, this bit of speculation about what may be the most probable future scenarios:
We have high inflation, and also have a recessionary trend.
In this situation, squeezing credit and raising interest rates would almost certainly not only aggravate the recession, and cause unpredictable social disruption. It would also burst a bubble of debt with catastrophic consequences.
The traditional recipe for getting out of a conjuncture of recession combined with inflation prescribes making massive public infrastructural investments to increase productivity, production, employment and income. However, these investments should be made in debt, therefore they are of doubtful feasibility for mostly everywhere in the First World. Moreover it is not certain they will work, and in any case it would take years to identify what interventions are needed, make cost-benefit assessments, complete the tendering procedure and start construction sites.
A similar predicament occurred in the months leading up to 9/11, after all fiscal stimulus to a stagnant US economy – just shaken by the dotcom fiasco – had failed. Given the slowness of the Keynesian remedy mentioned above, the lone major public investment rapid enough to be effective was war. In effect, 9/11 triggered this type of investment, which in turn triggered a new real estate and financial bubble destined to burst in 2008. In exactly the same way, in 1940 it was the war that brought the US out of the collapse of 1929.
From the point of view of the oligarchies of the West, and also of the rest of the globe, a valid solution, which could put them all in agreement, would then be the one described by George Orwell in 1984. That fictitious universe was stabilized into a condition of perennial, multiple wars around the world. This state of things legitimized in the eyes of the populace the everlasting adoption of a war economy, with centralized state management of resources, the possibility of arbitrarily imposed rationing controls, suppression of cash, a strong social regimentation, total control of information, the imposition of a single political thought with criminalization and discrimination of dissenters, such as we already conspicuously have now. This arrangement would leave no alternatives to common people but to ‘understand’ and therefore accept what the elites want, as well as to prevent and suppress protest and the organization of resistance, including trade union resistance.
Our current reality is in fact already very much dominated by the interlocking interests of Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia: their coming, chronic wars without a decisive outcome will allow the power elites to control all resources and all information, and also to curtail all rights. At the same time, it will be possible for them to assuage and galvanize the population with a propaganda representation of reality, and ad-hoc rewriting of the historical past.
Implementing such a system of social and economic control could make possible what the elites most crave for: avoid an economic and financial collapse, hence also avoid a crisis of popular consensus and obedience. That is, avoid reckoning.
On the internal front, the management of the pandemics and vaccination campaigns seems to be aimed at the gradual replacement of the current consumerism-based economy, in need of vast absorption of raw materials and energy, with a system based on the chronic consume of drugs and vaccines. The latter system will be far more sustainable in terms of raw resources, and will be capable to absorb a large part of the disposable income of the great majority of the population. To achieve this, the population should be made drug-dependent and vaccine-dependent through battering media manipulation. People will therefore become immuno-suppressed and as such distracted from socio-economic problems and incapable of rebellion, as they will shift their focus on health issues.
At the same time, a society supervised and regulated by means of social scores or obedience is in development in the West, akin to the one already widely implemented in China. There, access to public services and rights is conditioned on behavior compliant with state rules set by the owners of institutions. What awaits us is a marked reduction in spontaneity, freedom, in short in man’s unpredictability.
Having reached such a point, the elites would be only one step away from solving the Earth overpopulation problem, because the population would now be for all effects under zootechnical management.
This train of speculation would be in line with the interests of the dominant oligarchies, and with current technological surveillance possibilities, hence should not be discounted as conspiracy theory.
Didn’t read the whole thing, but what I did read was quite good.
Instead of introducing you to the idea of paragraphs, I’ll just slightly refine something you (and many others) have said: IT is not going to war that brings (brought) the economy out of the doldrums; it is putting the economy on a war footing that does it.
Not the same thing.
I thought each time I would finish a sentence and press ‘Enter’, there would be an empty line.
Evidently I went with muscle memory instead and used ctrl+enter without noticing.
Majorian you almost got paragraph separation right. Giant wall of text is still giant.
Yeah, reposted. Still some ctrl+enter new sentence botches, but this time I put spaces between paragraphs.
The difference for the West is that the system has been selecting for bourgeois obsequiousness for a long time. […] The crisis of the West is that it is now run by a managerial class that was selected for being the teacher’s pet, ticking the right box on a form and making sure to never utter a discouraging word around the boss.
So very true, it is infuriating being condescended upon by these middle class macaroni morons. Pol-Pot moment from the Zman. Maybe there’s a chance there was a similar situation in czarist Russia, so that the intelligentsia+bolsheviks were justified in their terror campaigns that led to ultimately crashing the old decrepit system down?
As a guy with a long experience in United Nations organizations (yes, I have worked in Mordor), I can tell you that the most incompetent people work there. They are good at talking, climbing and backstabbing but nothing more. Some parts of the UN run at the level of African governments.
Unfortunately, the words they speak are collected by governments and more efficient organizations so they can do real evil.
My limited interactions with State Department personnel left me with very similar impressions.
Thanks for an excellent piece.
It is also appalling, and an Xray of what our rulers value (and also what they think of us) that their war plan was to deprive Russians of OnlyFans and McDonalds, which would cause them to overthrow the State.
I like Sergei Lavrov’s observation concerning some of his western counterparts: “They must not have done well in school”.
Hell, In our current schools they probably all made straight A’s. American “education” being what it is.
I read something recently that suggested that the Russians were taking a look at their educational system with an eye towards making sure that whatever we are doing wrong, is removed from their system. We are in this, and in so many other ways, an example to the world of the path not to follow.
Two examples of the crisis of competence:
Moderna and Pfizer are tired of manipulating their shot data so they are lobbying the FDA to dump clinical trials altogether:
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/who-fda-gates-future-framework-covid-vaccines/
Macron caught on a hot mic telling Biden that Saudi and UAE have no ability to raise their oil production capacity:
https://mobile.twitter.com/freedomrideblog/status/1541521142707589121
The only competence the people have is driving the collective West into aThelma & Louise style ending.
Yes, they are good at breaking things, because breaking things is easy. But they cannot build anything.
Macron is feeling the heat from an angry populous. He probably staged the whole thing for *his* political effect.
This latest G7 Biden bungle is a good sample of what’s lined up in the wings. They came in with 2 goals: to ban Russian gold sales (purely symbolic) and to cap Russian’s price of oil to EU (minus Bulgaria, CR, Austria and whoever else gets oil by pipeline instead of port shipment). Apparently Yellen’s been tasked with Biden’s childish project of capping maritime oil.
As if Putin needs to sell oil to EU at US-dictated prices! Further, this BS doesn’t go into effect until December, and Putin will probably have mopped up Ukraine by then (maybe taking Odessa with him). What’s the plan when Putin says “no thanks”? Blame Germany for US policy?
In other words, Biden is pledging future foreign policy failure, scheduled for fallout this December.
“Fallout this December”
Governor Lard Ass in Illinois post-poned the (inflation indexed increase passed by Democrat general assembly) gasoline tax increase until after the November election.
Problem solved!
As I’ve said before Europe faces much worse than a rough winter. Come the fall the EU will be finding all sorts of ways to unwind the sanctions. It is not apparent to me why Putin (let’s play the West’s name game) should increase energy supplies. Putin’s St Petersburg speech is an astonishing contrast to the wall of lies that issues from the orifices of the west.
https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/vladimir-putins-st-petersburg-speech
Electricity costs in Germany are three time higher than in the US – 33 cents kwh v 11 c kwh. and will likely double again. We are going to witness the de-industrialization of Europe over the next couple of years.
There is a desperate need in the West for new Elites- ours are just not up to the job and every time they have another opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot, they miss and put another round into the scrotum. An act of mind-numbing stupidity is the decision to prevent the purchase of Russian Gold. Proudly they proclaim Russia is cut off from the two major centers of Gold trading : London and New York/Chicago. The “Gold” traded in the West is almost entirely paper, the Central banks of several countries have been trying for years to get good delivery on gold from London and estimates of the leverage of trades to oz’s range from about ten to one to six hundred to one. The cardinal virtue of gold is that it is a “financial asset” with no counter-party risk, in the West the vast majority of those who think they own gold own pieces of paper with a pyramid of counter parties often dozens deep before their claim on the physical asset itself can be satisfied. The two biggest Metals ETF’s GLD and SLV changed their prospectus within a couple of years of launch to specify that you could not enforce settlement in Oz’s but only in Dollars.
Meanwhile, the worlds major gold purchasers India and China will continue to buy Russian gold at the real physical market price.
Just as the energy sanctions are going to de-industrialize Europe, the Gold market could well be the thing that brings the financial house of cartels to the ground.
Just how thick are these fuckers?
Think of how retarded the average EU politician is, and then realize half of them are more stupid than that.
I said that and then I read a piece about the head of NATO committing to zero carbon emissions for NATO by 2050 and the push for electric vehicles on the battlefield and that NATO already takes “account of climate change when planning our operations and missions.”
https://www.rt.com/news/558014-stoltenberg-nato-climate-change/
I should have said imagine how retarded Jens Stoltenberg is, and then realize half the EU class is more stupid than he is.
They cannot possibly be that dumb, this is the press running out of things to say and coming up with something by combining current buzzwords. What’s wrong is they are not sufficiently endowed with common sense to realize that reducing co2 is an objective with no priority in the context of war, and that the blunder is hilarious.
I am laughing so hard I am CRYING
What Germany lacks in oil and gas it can make up for in coal production. Most of the gas turbines that generate power are multi-fuel, meaning they can run on gas, oil, or coal. Siemens and Alstom have been building these types of gas turbines for decades. It’s actually not that difficult to convert gas/oil burning turbines into coal-fired air turbines (CAT) and German is legendary for coal production, especially the old east Germany.
Of course the majority of politicians and most of the media on both sides of the Atlantic are ignorant fools who haven’t the faintest idea how power is generated in the first place. And while they parrot each other because they’re too stupid or just too lazy to do their own research, the engineers, technicians and power plant operators are sorting all this out. Trust me – no one will be freezing in Germany this winter because German politicians are terrified of social unrest that that sort of basic public service failure would spark.
The ZMan’s previous discussions about how stupid people are taking over the world, and will eventually end up running it are spot on. It’s inevitable. Do you really think all those dusky people showing up in North America and Europe have a clue about how to keep the lights on and the water (or a country) running.
You only need to look at where they came from to have crystal clear view of what they’re bringing with them when their kids are in charge. And a university degree guarantees nothing as we already know first hand from those “highly educated” morons in their home countries who can’t run an economy or a country let alone keep the trains Europeans built 60-years ago running on time.
Would the Greens allow you all to boot up your coal plants?
Old expression I remember from college, always stuck with me:
The green tree (eco movement) has red (commie) roots
Falcone – not news flash:
‘Unimaginable’: Austria prepares to reopen coal power station. The plant, Austria’s last coal-fueled power station, was closed in 2020 but now the government — nervous that Russia may cut its crucial gas deliveries …etc.
Oddly enough, even the greens don’t like freezing. Although I hear the ones in the UK seem to enjoy it.
Or put another way, they’re watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Yes massive coal mining resumption, with good peace of the Greens Party and of your typical numbed down, politically correct, middle-class German citizen, I suppose.
Since we are here, can I get your point of view of educated German interested in current affairs, about the leading role your country is currently playing in Europe over the economic and political fields?
Economically, unified Germany has absorbed much of Eastern Europe (Visegrad countries), Romania and ex-Jugoslavia as low-tech, cheap labor seats of satellite activities for the the German industrial export-focus conglomerate. Places as far away as Finland, Catalonia, Northern Italy are also part of the complex and Holland as well, the latter also used as point of access to the global maritime trade.
Many of these places adopt the Euro currency at their own detriment, as the way the Eurozone has been structured since its inception, with no fiscal redistribution among European members, allows Germany to run with a cheaper D-Mark, and commit to a boosted up export trade policy. The other, weaker EU economies, on the contrary, are penalized in their exports by an Euro which is too strong.
Germany has no military capability, so how is it that the elites in those other countries have to run artificially downgraded economies, without ever rising the issue? And I am talking of France as well.
Is it because basically all fabulous profits coming from active trading balances accumulated throughout the years by Germany, are only transient in that country, instead end up rerouted into investing in financial products in London and New York?
That is, do the German decision-makers, whoever they might be (politicians? industry leaders?), act as per a political diktat from Washington, akin to the agreement with Saudi Arabia to accept only dollars in exchange for oil?
Seems to me these German elites act as the viceroys of Europe, having to pass up the tribute extracted from all over the EU to their Washington overlords.
Germany has not had a truly independent government since the war IMHO.
Its been occupied by the US to prevent it gaining its own direction.
As the NATO motto is keep America In, Russia out and Germany down.
The NATO motto summarizes the situation quite well, I concur.
Germany has always been the strongest economy and socially, takes better care of it’s workers than any other EU member going back pre WW1. It’s a historical fact. We are, and always will be the strongest European economy. Period.
Even if Audi, Mercedes, Siemens or other major German corporations outsource to Czech, Poland or Hungary, we will still be the best place to live and work.
Poke your head into any Germany company and you’ll find French, Italians, Spanish, Polish, Sweeds, Netherlanders. Pretty much every EU country is well represented in all major German firms, and across all areas including medicine, law, industry, retail and leisure (restaurants, movies, theaters, etc.).
We have the best standard of living, best wages (not including Switzerland…but they’re not really EU anyway) and lowest cost of living and lowest taxes than all the other EU countries. Unlike the French who go on strike as a hobby, you won’t hear about German Deutsche Bahn workers leaving commuters stranded at the rail station because they walked off the job demaning an extra 50-cents an hour.
Now of course Poland, Hungary and the old east block countries are by far the cheapest places to live, but no one’s getting in line for jobs in Bulgaria or Romania.
Germany isn’t perfect for a laundry list of reasons, but evidently we’re doing something right when all our neighbors want to live and work here.
As for our military, why should we waste money supporting our own when we have the US here with all the latest military technology and best trained troops in the world? The German government paid a total of €982.4 million ($1.1 billion) between 2010 and 2019, according to the finance ministry. Honestly, it’s a lot cheaper to keep American troops here than to support our own military and Germans actually are very happy with their US military communities.
Lol you skimped the question, even though it was a technical one about monetary systems (the current Euro opprobrium), so it’s OK.
Now, I do not want to sound blunt, but I can’t resist from quipping that probably other Europeans come to work in Germany because they are left with few alternatives.
Income tax (maximum) rates for the bigger European countries are Spain 47%, France 45%, Germany 45%, Italy 43% so more or less on the same level. UK too a decent income is taxed at about 40%.
Before the Hartz labour reforms (among other things associated with the introduction of the infamously non-protective ‘mini-job’ contracts) in 2002 – same year the Eurozone came into being, what a coincidence – Germany was regarded in the specialized press as ‘the sick economy of Europe’. Due to the costs of assimilating the DDR of course, but also due to the fact that the high value of the national currency constituted an all-natural cap on exports, as it is for all other currencies (except the dollar). Currently the Euro is being kept low by having to factor the lesser economies into its value.
“As for our military, why should we waste money supporting our own when we have the US here with all the latest military technology and best trained troops in the world?”
Because the US military is rotting from the inside out, and as far as your wonderful (truly) economy goes, I follow the old saying: “With the Russians in Frankfurt, the DM (now Euro) is toilet paper”
I believe it was Lynn or possibly Rushton, who did an analysis of the average IQ of a native (Black) South African university student. Somewhere about 100-104. This is nowhere near the ability to take and master higher level STEM studies. I suspect this will be evident in SA when the whites there disappear, or drop below the Critical Fraction.
Thank you for the link to the full text of President Putin’s address.
He doesn’t attempt to gloss over the problems that face the Russian Confederation; rather, he commissions his government, the regional governments, and the private sector to work collaboratively to devise possible solutions that redound to the benefit of the citizenry and the nation. He is frank about Russia being a multiethnic nation, but I don’t think that this means that he wants to institute lower standards (like here), but instead wants to maintain high standards, yet without tossing the less competent or intelligent under the bus, as he clearly feels that this approach leads to social instability. Paranthetically, Russia seems not to be afflicted with the hopeless cases with which we in the US, and increasingly Europe, must deal, so that approach to social solidarity can actually work.
Would that we in the West had leaders such as these…
Oops, should be Russian Federation. Close…
The selection criteria of the ruling class is simple: They don’t want anyone who comes from the dreaded “private sector” and they don’t want anyone who can outshine them.
For the media, as you said Z, it’s pathological lying in support of whatever narrative they try to pass off to the public as the truth.
In the military, there are also selection pressures for the officer class. Once, there was a hidebound group of “ring knockers” who graduated from each service’s academy who used their friendships and connections to rise up the ranks. Many times, those like me that were a product of ROTC or the officer candidate schools were passed over for important jobs by less qualified but well-connected candidates.
While that still is the case, the diversity dictates are also now an issue. The officer class in the U.S. military now selects for slimy operators who will jump up and down like organ grinder monkeys for whatever tune their political masters play. If that means sending mentally ill “trans” lunatics onto ships or into cockpits, they’ll do it without a second thought to what it does to our actual military capabilities. Wonder why planes crash and ships burn or collide with other ships? It’s because our officer class has been purged of the competent who make waves or those like me that appeared to tow the line but secretly resented it and replaced by the politically reliable, who aren’t as competent or are dangerously incompetent.
The reason why our special forces are used so often is they’re the only really reliable troops we have. The regular Army, now weighed down with women and diversity, is borderline useless and would get obliterated by a halfway decent army in a stand-up fight.
My last job in the Reserve was the squadron’s keeper of the tribal knowledge as the ranking officer in the STAN/EVAL department. I had great power as the chief custodian of the squadron’s flying qualifications, acting as both a teacher and an inquisitor. I tested pilots and crew for their knowledge of all-important procedures (everything we did in flight and during emergencies uses some sort of procedure that should be muscle memory and recited without a second thought when queried) and since those are safety related, I had no slack for those who didn’t meet the standard. Failing a check ride flight with me where I drilled a pilot on procedures was a career-killing death knell if they weren’t able to correct their mistakes.
The problem I ran into at the end was the Air Force’s stated goal to make the cockpit more diverse. I was begged, pleaded and cajoled by higher-ups when I failed a female or diverse pilot to “cut them some slack” and other numbskullery. It once happened only with ring knockers, but it started to become more common when it came to making the service “more diverse.”
I told them that a pilot that doesn’t know the proper procedures is a danger to his fellow crew members, any passengers and people on the ground. I also said there is one standard and it doesn’t care about race, gender or politics. It requires knowledge and execution and if you can’t do that, you have no place in the cockpit.
While it didn’t affect my fitness reports with my command, I got tired of being asked to give folks a break. When I had a chance to retire rather than take a promotion, I gleefully hit the exit hatch and went back to my civilian employment full time. I knew things would only get worse because I retired with Trump in office and the diversity lunatics were still pedal to the metal. I can’t imagine what it’s like now.
dr_mantis_toboggan_md: You appear to be one individual to whom I can say, unironically, “Thank you for your service.” Although, to put that in perspective, my husband and I lament that his father’s lifetime military career was ultimately worthless in view of what AINO has become.
I had a good laugh this afternoon. I spotted a Bundeswehr soldier in his issued camouflage uniform on an electric scooter going down the sidewalk. I laughed even louder when I realized he was black. Our military is a laughing stock already, so it’s clear they are in desperate straights if they have to recruit non-Germans like this one.
Years ago a friend of mine who had been an enlisted Marine in the ‘60s, then a Navy and finally Army chaplain (where I met him) said something to me when I was a (not so) young captain. A simple statement, thrown out to me almost casually, struck me like an iron skillet some time later. His words:
“All the good general officers get out of the Army as Lieutenant Colonels …”
The next 20 yrs of my service proved him right.
I retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, so that sounds about right. I do miss flying, but the administrative part of the job when I was on active duty was replete with thousands of useless reports that no one really reads and lots and lots of PowerPoint.
If they wanted to fix the pilot retention issue, they need a way to let pilots fly without having to be paper-pushing dipdunks as a collateral duty. As a Reservist, you show up, log your hours and leave the collateral chores to the active duty component in the squadron.
Our Elites are governed by the principle “I think, therefore it is”
Let there be light
Rather, “I feel this should be, therefore, no matter the feckless stupidity involved, it must be made to be so. Selah!
My image of our government is a woman doing interpretive dance in a burning building.
…and some of the women have male appendages and five o’clock shadows.
Lanky, you nailed it. Just passed that around my circle. Wholehearted agreement.
The modern man cunningly manages not to present his theology directly, but through profane notions that imply it. He avoids announcing his divinity to man, but proposes goals that only a god could achieve or proclaims that the human essence has rights that suppose it to be divine.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
(sorry for my translation: it is the best I could do)
The ruling class has fallen into decadence and incompetence. Covid was a big wake up call, or at least should have been. Had they stuck their fingers in their ears and covered their eyes and mouths, they would have handled it much better. Simply doing nothing and wishing it away would have been a better strategy.
They are even worse equipped to deal with the war in Ukraine. Really, they probably did more than any other group to start it. What is standing between us and a nuclear exchange is the sober men in Russia. Russia is already justified to start sinking US war ships. We are playing word games where if we don’t declare war, we aren’t at war and it would not be fair to sink our ships killing thousands of our navy men. How did this work out with the Lusitania? When you hide munitions on a mail steamship, it doesn’t magically protect you from torpedoes.
“They are even worse equipped to deal with the war in Ukraine. Really, they probably did more than any other group to start it. What is standing between us and a nuclear exchange is the sober men in Russia.”
The problem is with the hysterical, feminized “leaders” in the United States, and that now includes the Pentagon. They easily may bungle us into a nuclear war.
Worse yet, politics necessarily revolves around getting the “woman vote” – hence feminism will never be dropped (until it sinks society). Russia is largely free of this burden. Putin understands all this but it unfortunately doesn’t make having to deal with the hysterical US/West much easier.
The woman vote is dictated by the media conditioning. so it seems a closed circle of providing the opinions you then solicit.
You get the “vote” for policies you seeded as if by magic.
Putin never would have done this with Trump in office. But he already knew Biden was a complete buffoon well before he got into office. Just look at the timing..it’s obvious Putin knew exactly what he was doing.
Europe won’t raise a finger, the Americans won’t do much either. It’s a win-win for Putin and he knows it. Time and the damage to the European economy are all on his side.
They ruling class “elite” profited enormously off of Covid. (Web search “Covid millionaires” and “Covid billionaires.” ) The people in charge only increased their wealth. The same can be said of the proxy war in Ukraine. How many billion$ have been extracted from the taxpayers of the West and funneled into the coffers of the MIC? I don’t doubt that the so-called elite are decadent, but I don’t see them as particularly incompetent in the pursuit of their goals.
Filed under ‘Competence of the Third Triumverate’:
Rice, Jarrett…and that skilled Chicago community organizer…obozo.
There’s no great leader in the wings to take control when things finally turn to chaos. Therefore the chaos soon to be unleashed will choose its own leadership. People of which no one has ever heard. Or should I say men of which no one has ever heard, because we’re heading for an era where the ladies will be shown the door…to the kitchen. They’ll come from doing real things in real industries, many of which will have been government contractors at some point. Maybe even some with a minor stint in government, only to look around and know that they were better than that. Most importantly, they’ll have the skillset that will be the most in-need. They’ll know how to kill and without remorse.
I’d say government subcontractors, perhaps ones specializing in custom fabrication.
The managers and execs in the big MIC shops are nearly as clueless as the Jonestown, DC crowd.
> People forget that the Democratic Party had to rig its own primary to get Biden the nomination. They never stopped to think what this would mean after the election.
Seeing three contenders drop out and support Biden on the same day was more insane than even Trump’s election, with barely a whimper from the radical left. And then Reddit and Twitter went from their guy to Biden on a dime. While it was probably largely bots trying to shift opinion and manufacture consent, the fact that the power players running these things were all in lockstep showed the farce of democracy more than even the most hilariously corrupt elections.
It goes back to morality. Don’t deal with your demons. There are no demons. That’s the crazy talk of spooky people.
If virtue was enough, CivNatery would have us in good shape.
So we end up with morons following retards who kill foreigners, sell out Americans, and oppress the whole world to get rich.
On the bright side, the truly capable in this society have been busy getting stinking rich in technology, commerce, biotechnology and finance. There is plenty of talent in the private sector. So far, they’ve taken the path of least resistance and gone along with some of the crazy woke stuff. Perhaps when things start crumbling around their ears, they may insist upon reforms.
I don’t know why I’m so optimistic this morning…..all the leftist butt-hurt around the Roe/Dobbs decision put a spring in my step.
We’re starting to see the vestiges of a counter elite with the likes of Musk dipping his toes, of course Bezos and Thiel also.
Of course, it’s largely due to the fact they’re nerds whose brains can’t stand the double-speak and just want to go into space and do cool stuff. The technocrats are largely bugs who want to ensure the rest of the world become bugs just like them. Their goal is to crush anyone attempting true greatness to dust.
The pioneer white nerds got their own tools used against them then got cancelled by the ascendent left, which just goes to show these tinkerers need people over them with leadership and power or they’ll just get rolled. The libertarian internet was smashed within less than a generation.
Did the libertarian Internet ever really exist?
I mean, there is evidence that government money was behind most of the Big Tech monsters running amok nowadays.
Every big tech company, from Youtube to Twitter to Facebook, was very libertarian at the start. Whether this was sincere or just an act is a very good question.
Probably about as real as the Libertarian party itself.
You’re a nerd with a passion sincerely pursued. Once you’ve got something going, the bigs come to you with a proposal and a promise to take your passion mainstream. Now you’re corrupted.
It’s called capitalism, and it’s how every modern industry began. Shakespeare had a theater, Disney isn’t even a person anymore, just a poz-spewing global brand. I don’t doubt who wins the marathon, though.
They still are. Big tech says do what feels good. Nothing is wrong, except telling someone else they are wrong. This is libertarianism in a nutshell. They’ve just been guilting into verbalizing what a libertarian ends are.
Thanks Chet. You made my point better than I did. I would just add that the people here who think successful hedge fund managers aren’t smart haven’t met many successful hedge fund managers. The issue obviously is how they are directing their efforts and whether they benefit society.
A circulation of elites that includes Musk & Thiel may be the best that can be hoped for any time soon. I say this disapprovingly, disappointed but realistic. Bezos isn’t going anywhere and still is worse than those two in my opinion, and represents no circulation at all.
Captain Willard: Calling those getting rich in finance and technology “the truly capable” is not how I would describe the hedge fund leaders, day traders, and dot.com bots.
The finance guys are capable at extraction for doing very little work. I worked at hedge fund. Of all my jobs, no one put in fewer hours than hedge fund managers and traders and made more money.
Creating financial markets and then skimming off of them is a skill but a socially destructive one. My favorite failed painter outlawed this and he was correct.
Fascism and communism fell first because they weren’t as good at it imo.
We’ve got cultural destruction, growing economic destruction, a ‘browning’ population, mental patients wielding political power, a husk of a man in the White House, kids learning at the tranny’s feet, and the cracks are finally starting to show.
The money men are EXCELLENT at what they do.
My current position working the skim as a cog at GloboBank is probably the easiest job I have ever had.
Curious to see how the collapse in the global debt market is going to shake out. The S&L, 1998 and 2008 crashes will be nothing compared to what I see coming.
The decline of the West is the history of the rise of the rentiers : The State, The Academy, The Bankers etc.
Overall, a good essay. The main criticism that springs into my mind (“oozes up from the bottom muck” might be more accurate 😀 ) are some open-ended questions like:
Given that our present government(s) select for incompetence, what behind-the-scenes entities most likely profit from this state of affairs? Two ancient investigative rules: Follow the money; Who benefits?
Z implies as much (e.g. the odd selection of Biden and Harris in the 2020 Democratic primary process): the apparent leaders, the Bidens, maybe even the congress critters, are largely puppets and figureheads. Who is it, actually, that pulls their strings and puts the words into their mouths?
I honestly think that we will never really know. Just stay off the radar and keep a target off your back.
If you look at American leadership from the Founding until, say, the late Twenties, it was characterized by mediocrity. Yes, there were impressive and dashing and highly competent individuals here and there–Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and so on–but most leaders simply were figureheads for their respective parties and movements. The federal government was not complex, was relatively tiny, and secondary to most aspects of life.
FDR changed all that with predictable results. Complex systems require highly competent people with good skillsets in narrow areas. Being a democracy, of course, means mediocrity will be the norm under the best case scenario. As things have evolved over the last almost hundred years, though, a caste system has developed that inserts incompetents into positions in a complex system where at least mediocrity is required.
There is a White Pill here, though. As the central government lurches from failure to failure and becomes a bitter joke, local and state governments will become the actual power centers and the dictates and pronouncements from the Imperial Capitol will become ignored with increased frequency. Yes, this means hysterical idiots like AOC will have control over nukes (this is the case now) so the prospect of annihilation will increase, along with total devaluation of the dollar, but everything from the postal system to the military will pose less of a threat and imposition in an increasingly smaller sphere. The first beneficiaries will be the already reluctant reluctant satrapies of the GAE, and in short order lording it over Northern Virginia will become next to impossible.
To play on something you wrote the other day, what if we had a Civil War and no one noticed? That’s what is happening even now. It is de facto, but that’s a feature and not a bug.
Jack – I tried this exact argument last time Zman wrote on this subject and most everyone crapped on me!
But obviously I think you’re correct in that the increasing complexity of centralized systems requires greater skill and makes a constant level of capability among bureaucrats seem inadequate to the task.
Simplification and decentralization is at least a start towards the solution.
Would like to agree with you about state and local takeover of federal functions. I tend to think that the best states are a lot better than the average fed. However, the bulk of the money is with the feds, and they have to agree to “give” it back to the states. Doesn’t happen without a lot of strings. And those strings pretty much guarantee a continuation of the current state of governance.
The Fed printing press and the remaining trust in the USD are the two pillars of their power.
Remove those and they’ve got nothing.
At one point Republicans touted block grants to remove the strings. Of course, the federal GOP lawmakers couldn’t grift as much if there were direct transfers to the individual states.
While every state would take a hit, in some cases a near-fatal one, if federal funds were not available, all of them would survive in some form or another, likely in a coalition. Further, the reality is that the funds WILL dry up. To play on what Geese noted, worthless dollars make everyone poorer and the federal government essentially powerless. So those funds will be essentially meaningless in the near future.
Some think this will give rise to war lords and barter, but something similar to the concept of the failed attempt at crypto currency as a means of exchange, which the feds had to snuff out, will be the more likely outcome. When all the central government can offer is billions of dollars that will be inadequate to pay for a few miles of road, it is game, set, match.
The Black Pill is there will be attempts to strip mine White Heritage America of its assets, but that will prove limited because most of those assets are pegged to dollars. Still, study the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution when thugs ventured outside of the cities to seize food and hard goods. However thuggish, they were men. Compare and contrast.
Let me add, as others have previously noted, the proxy war in Ukraine was a failed attempt to expand the debt-based GAE economy into new areas. Without an increased number of people willing to buy its debt, the GAE cannot go on.
This is a good thread. Nicely done everyone.
One small thing I would add is to remember how addled in debt many municipalities are. They rely on federal funds – at least for the retirement and pension funds. I think the biggest bomb of all is the pension fund ponzi. When the wealth effect dissipates things will get very interesting. Those who are courting and abetting the direct reparations beggards may finally see the light.
It is probably worth looking into an area that is not in huge debt at the local level and that has a population that can rally to self reliance.
I think at some point The Fed will be forced to buy the market, fund the pensions and engage in stimulus to do the, “Energy Transition.” Throwing money at reducing energy density, reliability and making it far more expensive. At the same time stoking a race war, a cold civil war and radically worsening the education system. Think the past 115 years had some bad ideas implemented by incompetents. This crew seems to think that a nosedive with the engines on fire is a joyride that their expert advisors will have no problem landing.
Good thread. Not sure I added anything. But, yeah. We must choose our local jurisdictions wisely.
Jack: I don’t know that having local and state governments becoming “actual power centers” will necessarily be a good thing. The majority of immigrants and women in my DFW ‘burb vote for the holiest person of color they can find. Greg Abbott is always looking for good press but never does anything of any real substance. I have yet to regret having my name removed from the voting rolls.
As the larger institutions people once depended on decay, so too will the smaller ones – i.e. state and local ‘government.’ Because they, too, suffer from a lack of competency. And because most people are utterly unprepared for any sort of self reliance or unplanned event, they will not know what to do when their institutions and rules fail them.
While I like the idea of local and regional power gradually reasserting itself, I think the reality is far more likely to be increasing chaos. Even now, things just barely work. Getting one thing done or one financial conflict resolved can take a week of phone or driving time. The city council can continue to make its rulings, but the real people and real industry that enables real modern life is gradually falling apart. I don’t think regionalism is going to stop that, at least no in the short term.
“The city council can continue to make its rulings, but the real people and real industry that enables real modern life is gradually falling apart. I don’t think regionalism is going to stop that, at least no in the short term.”
I disagree in part. While in the short term the larger urban centers will sink further into dystopia, those even of middling size will stabilize into less grand visions of themselves; I expect public school systems to be a thing of the past in about ten years, for example. Long term, the larger urban centers surrounded by saner, Whiter areas will fall into such chaos that adjacent state and regional governments or whatever form they take either will wall them off or do what everyone knows needs to be done.
If you live in an area already in chaos, it will get worse and you should leave it now. Such places likely will be isolated and run by duly elected warlords in the near future, and some even are now. DFW is one such place, to be certain. I could see Texas itself as a multitude of hostile or allied polities.
I’m not given to White Pills but mostly healthy disintegration is our future.
Jack: I would rather your vision of the future than a gradual breakdown into further local bureaucracy. As far as leaving DFW and Texas, we’re planning on it and working on it. Yes, we realize that sooner is better than later, but there are family and financial concerns involved.
There are a few blogs who increasingly reference the 1860’s little fracas as “The First Civil War”.
Factoids via another publication:
• Despite efforts to curtail purchases of Russian energy exports, soaring oil and gas prices — themselves, a reaction to the invasion — have poured funds into Russian state coffers.
• Russia’s current account surplus tripled to more than $110 billion so far this year, putting it on track for a record.
• The income boom has propped up the country’s currency and stabilized inflation. That, in turn, allowed the central bank to scale back the emergency interest rate hikes it implemented at the beginning of the war.
The G7 continued escalation is a tacit admission that efforts to isolate Russia economically have been insufficient to cut the flow of cash helping to finance Putin’s war. To continue the…punishment of Putin, G7 members are now preparing for gas shortages, what gas there is – is at all time highs, inflation is rampant, an outburst of labor strikes / unrest, and significant food shortages on the horizon.
Problem: the power of magical thinking in the political class doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect.
Solution: add gas to the fire by creating creating more money we don’t have to pour into Ukraine so we can have more death and destruction.
Stupidity on a tower of Babel scale.
Spectacular. Which publication was that, Stranger?
Axios Markets (trends Left, but generally informative)
The guys at at The Duran have been batting 1000 on this war,
Might be an idea to re-watch Mike Judge’s 2006 film, “Idiocracy.” This was one of those “semi-banned films.” But it also troubled viewers because it was too close to today’s reality, rather than five centuries from now.
When the struggle for survival (temporarily) subsides, and nature does not choose for competence and ability, then the population and its leaders become weak, flaccid, stupid, and thoroughly incompetent.
It was absolutely crazy when that movie came out. I mean, they delayed it for a year, trying to bury it, they did absolutely no press tour for it, still I managed to see it in the theater on opening night, a Friday night, walked into the theater there were eight other people in there. We all just literally looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders like this is so bizarre. The theater was packed of course for everything else
But at least the President was black! Oh, wait…
An interesting example of a new category–the anticipatory 7documentary.
> Next up is Kamala Harris, an absurd manifestation of a system that selects against competence.
No, no. She’s extremely competent. She literally slept her way to the top. She is the perfect role-model for the Only Fans Generation.
I guess you could say that Kamala is someone who actually does things. Unfortunately, those things usually require her being on her knees.
Kamala Harris rose to the top in a system where failure meant all her unspeakable acts with Willie Brown were for *nothing*.
San Fran is full of beautiful, intelligent women and she is neither. That Kamala was able to rise to the top through slutty adultery surprises me. Even when she was young, I would have put a bag over her head. She must really be uninhibited and adventurous.
She was willing to sleep with Willie Brown. How many beautiful, intelligent women could stoop so low??
Next in line has got to be a rock.
We had Trump the animal, Biden the vegetable…
During the Democrat primaries, when Tulsi Gabbard participated in the debates, she was clearly the most impressive and competent among the large group running for president. The contrast was striking. Mayor Buttboy was bland, Williamson was a weirdo, Biden a confused old guy, and Kamala Harris was exremely unlikeable and a dunce.
To be clear, I’m not heaping glowing praise on Gabbard. I would guess that most of us have met and known individuals more impressive than her. She just stood out as the best of the worst.
Of course it was retarded and will become more retarded each time because their primary intended audience is blacks and college aged girls. 100% chance of retardation.
Yes. And when she qualified for the next round of debates, they changed the rules to exclude her. (The R-team did a similar thing to Ron Paul back in the day, as did the D-team w/ Hilary in ’08.) The inner party chooses the candidates.
Given they are 2 private monopoly organizations they can set the rules to whatever they want.
The questions should be why are you voting for employees of a private monopoly organization to run your life?
I’ve always been fascinated by how incredibly effective neocons are at weaseling into power and how terrible they are at wielding it.
Their natural knack for extracting wealth from a foreign society simply doesn’t translate into maintaining that society, much less improving it. They utterly lack noblesse oblige for others, even those over whom they rule and rely upon for their position.
They truly are an odd people, so talented in many ways and, yet, completely clueless in others.
“Parasite” is a harsh word, but…
Yeah, but parasites usually try to stay in the background, quietly sucking enough blood to survive but not so much as to kill the host.
Our friends are anything but quiet and seem determined to either kill their host or force it to expel them. It’s a very odd evolutionary strategy.
The parasitism they engage in requires being noisy because it’s social parasitism. They are able to latch on to the good impulses of gentiles and siphon that to their own ends. They demand that you be fair to them while favoring their own, give charity to them while they give nothing but to their own, demand sympathy from you while they laugh at your misfortunes. insist on you following your own rules in an orderly fashion while they subvert them.
If they ever get around to updating Nordic paganism for modern times, I recommend adding a bit about these people springing from the dingleberries of Loki.
How is it an “odd evolutionary strategy?”
When a permanent minority, you get your enemies to kill each other.
Be prepared to take some losses, remembering that though each man will die, the tribe is immortal.
Thus you have a demographic obsessed with rape and force-breeding soldiers on one side, and with vulgarity, lust, and prostitution on the other.
Whatever you can stick it into…a scattershot approach. Remember also that homo soldiers were the shock troops, the frontline berserkers in ancient armies.
You’re seeing the strategy and mindset of a different psyche, alien to the white mind.
Oops, *get your enemies to kill each other that you might take and rule their territory
I cannot for the life of me discern any “talent” possessed by the likes of Max Boot.
Every group has their strengths and weaknesses. The group I belong to created Western Civilization. We’re also very high-trust and are prone to suicidal altruism.
Back in the day, we were king of the hill, knew it and acted like it. Now, well easy times have created weak men and women and here we are – on the edge of the abyss.
One of the strengths of the deep state uniparty whatnot is in holding up the high stations of the supposed opposition while also grounding them into the leftist power plant such that their only “wins” were either inert or bipartisan or 100% theatrical. Bi-partisan of course being just gaytalk for anti-heritage American.
The lefts monopoly on credentials of institutions and the institutions themselves captures oppositional talent and yokes them to the machine such that their gifts are corralled for the opposition from day one. Kinda like how the NBA-Nike adopts basketball American eggs out of the ghetto by age 10.
It’s why I have never thought much of the WEF ‘global leaders’ thing. Having been anointed ‘young leader’ and the like myself back in the day by various institutions by nature of simply being a high performer, the entire system is constructed to harvest talent and then sort for the psychopaths, true believers, or opportunists which are slotted into positions of actual power while the rest are paid to occupy positions of pseudo power or administrative title.
There is position and there is power. We have a system in which careers can be made out of positions. Positions in which the power is vested elsewhere. From what I have seen this is how we get both evil genius and retards running the show with mostly retards or well-kept opportunists in the visible ‘positions’.
I believe I know what particular ethnicity you refer to 🙂 While we didn’t specifically cite them, it’s no secret they are found disproportionately in government and other skilled positions. They have a history going back centuries if not millennia, of going from outsider, to necessary evil providing needed skills, to highly successful examples in niches of their host nation; yet often bring disaster upon both themselves and their host. Perhaps these people don’t hold exclusive claim to such an odd tendency. Yet it’s a foible well-attested in world history and even in their own writings.
How did the incompetent conquer the competent?
How did women defeat men?
How did the tribe subdue the whites?
If the competent are so competent, it is a puzzle to explain how they were overthrown.
Affluence that bred complacency and a love of comfort above all else.
The open-hearted gullibility of white men during good times.
Its an underpants gnome argument.
They are so incompetent they dominate all politics, media, corporate, military, judiciary, cultural control in the west and have maintained it for decades.
Its an argument in contradiction to evidence all around.
Just because you get to see the clowns in giant shoes falling over each other in the ring does not mean the circus is not managed competently.
The issue comes down to knowing what is the goal in order to judge whether its incompetence or intent.
Destruction can be achieved via chaos as well as any other means.
There are two ways of advancing the argument about incompetent leaders:
1) The techno-bureaucratic system has an emergent awareness of its own and selects those who furthers its interests — and they are thoroughly incompetent by the indices we humans measure competence, and/or
2) The “leaders” we see are paid actors performing a pantomime, which is meant to distract and obfuscate both from who really calls the shots and unfolding reality.
What I seem to witness is an engineered demolition of the western world.
There are also positions in between obviously.
It does not have to be a giant cnspiracy. It can be quite a small conspiracy if you are in the right positions and all directives are trickle down instructions.
Look at the coof. It does not require every doctor to be in on the fake vex, maybe 10 people in each country in the right positions that set policy and the NPCs just follow the syllabus they are given even unto destruction of themselves.
“Look at the coof. It does not require every doctor to be in on the fake vex, maybe 10 people in each country in the right positions that set policy and the NPCs just follow the syllabus they are given even unto destruction of themselves.”
It does require a gigantic conspiracy. These “10 people in each country in the right positions that set policy” alone indicates that TPTB know what those 10 positions are and have staffed them with the proper puppets. Then, you have to have the media support their pronouncements while blocking any competing information. Plus, the politicians to support vaxes and pass legislation to continue to shear the sheep. Not to mention the ability to force people to stay home, crash the economy, and pass spending bills to provide a pittance to the sheep that they will recoup by driving small companies out of business, crashing supply chains, burning food processing plants down, and add a few more trillions of debt to an already unsustainable one. All at the right time. No chance to it. It is a giant conspiracy.
By giant I suppose I mean everyone.
You are correct. But even then the size is still relatively small if you consider the decision making positions (n a real sense) and the NPC followers of the directives. Even if the numbers can be quite large.
The NPCs can be as incompetent as you want, what does it matter how badly they f things up, as long as they get the general direction.
In fact I suppose the worse the better if your intent is destruction.
Not a conspiracy, rather, an industry.
The old saying about the Bolshevik Revolution was that is was made possible with Latvian bayonets, Jewish brains and Russian stupidity. A similar phenomena has shaken out over the last thirty years. Neocon brains (scheming), Southern patriotism and Northern cupidity.
it’s a consequence of the US having conditions conducive to normies. this crisis of competence is driven by the ascendency of normies.
Accurate. Very accurate
Quite true.
However, the sands are shifting. Identity politics, failed wars, economic limitations, the arrival of other scheming groups, etc. The environment that created the current leadership is gone.
Will be interesting to see how those three groups adapt.
Incompetent versus Competent isn’t like hand-to-hand combat between 2 individuals. The spiteful and the stupid built their control by little increments, acquiring allies along the way, until they surrounded the competent. Then the intelligent people had to fight the corrupted institutions in addition to the malicious fools at the top.
There was a case of a Russian plane that crashed in the early 1990s because the pilot in charge foolishly allowed his son to sit in the pilot’s chair and “fly the plane” for a treat. While the adults were happily chatting, the kid accidentally turned off the automatic pilot and gradually the plane turned until it went into a dive. The g-forces made it impossible for the pilot to get back to the controls until it was too late to save the plane. So it wasn’t a case of a grown man “fighting” a little boy, and why couldn’t he prevail? It was a man fighting the plane, fighting physics, and fighting the Earth itself to try to take back control, and he just couldn’t do it. That’s what it’s like now. We don’t have to just fight Karen, we have to fight the entire school board bureaucracy, and the police bureaucracy, and the military bureaucracy, and everything attached to it now.
Good response but it kinda restates the problem.
I’ll summarize your words as: the competent are not very competent at social group warfare, especially when compared to other groups.
This is Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. This is also why individualism is so dumb.
It is easy. Competence to obtain power and competence to manage things when you are in power are too different skillsets.
Exactly. And these folk thrive due to an electorate too stupid to see through their lies.
it was that same kind of dangerous miscalculation that led to chernobyl going off.
Chernobyl WAS the same sort of incident, and for the same reason: the people involved didn’t think there was any danger in what they were doing. They knew they were breaking the rules, but they thought there were fail safe devices in place, so disaster *could not* happen. They didn’t fully understand the equipment they were working on, and didn’t realize it.
Our situation is similar. The malignant misfits now running the the machinery were allowed in by people who thought, “Oh, what harm can it do?” Humoring the barren harridan with a safety fetish, the truculent foreigner, the sexual deviant with a chip on his shoulder… let the baby have his bottle, just give them what they want to shut them up!
As someone wrote to Mark Steyn in 2008, “We’re rich enough to afford to be stupid.” A few people like us were ringing an alarm bell, but most people went along with jaunty insouciance, sure that the design margin was big enough to absorb the damage done by these worthless parasites. Decades later, we’ve tied down the emergency siren cord, the alarms are shrieking non-stop, the plane is in a nosedive, and the normies are FINALLY starting to wonder what can be done about all this.
Dr. Mabuse: Excellent analogy. And spot on – that is what daily life now feels like – fighting the burkha clad drivers or Karens texting on the interstate, while keeping an eye out for cops looking to ticket a White dupe minimally exceeding the speed limit. Dealing with surly or nonexistent store clerks, trying to find someone who speaks English, and knowing not one of them understands the system they are now helping to crash – who designed it and for whom, and why.
And I’m not even trying to fight anyone or preach to anyone. I’m just trying to attend to what used to be everyday ordinary business, but is now like some extreme challenge reality tv show.
Competence is measured against some standard. If you replace your estimation of competence against theirs, then in makes more sense.
If you want to “fundamentally change America”, replace white people and any remnants of Western Civilization, and achieve a new world order ruled over by elites who eat beef while you eat bugs, then an estimation of their level of competence rises.
I thought like this but some things convinced me that they are really incompetent, in addition to evil
Biden publicly telling that they were going to trash the ruble, for example
Correct. White America needs to wake up and trim down.
How did incompetent (administrators) conquer competent (administrators)? By out-politicking them. It’s neither paradox nor mystery once you define the word competence. Basically, the skill set for administrator differs from the skill set for winning elections, and the electoral system favors the latter skill set. Hope this helps clear up your sophist confusion.
Your last paragraph is the killer. I’ve seen the next generation of “leaders” at close range. The thought of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez keeps me up at night, because based on my very long, very broad experience of college kids, she’s what I call the “Basic College Girl.” They’re ALL like that. Indeed, she’s one of the smart, motivated ones. In their world, she’s a competent go-getter with a lot on the ball…
….and that idiot is going to be La Presidenta por Vida in ten years. Her cabinet is going to be worse, and the generation below her is too stupid to breathe without cue cards. If we survive to 2040, we’re going to be longing for the steely-eyed competence of Joe Biden.
Every time I see Biden, I’m reminded of what Lisa said to Homer when he didn’t want to let Grandpa drive. “Studies have shown that the elderly drive at least as well as sleep-deprived monkeys.” I’m not sure, though, whether Biden or Ocasio-Cortez have quite as much on the ball as sleep-deprived monkeys.
The people who don’t know what they don’t know are the most dangerous. AOC reached her level of incompetence in the private sector as a barista. She had no where left to go except politics. 🙁
These are absolutely the leaders that this cult of child sacrifice and sodomy deserves
how many female presidents are there in South America?
With camel toe possibly in between, God help us.
Wow. AOC in 2040. I can image it quite clearly, Sev.
The country by then reminds me of a old Elmer Fudd cartoon.
He’s tooling around in his old jalopy, sausage patches on the tires, steam coming out of the engine, cracked windshield, bouncing up and down, looking as daffy as the duck he’s after.
Once again, let’s go deeper. How did we get here?
First, start with the charade of a two party system in which you have approximately equal voting blocks. Every election now has a reliable base of over 40% for each candidate and only a small percentage decides each race. Now add in vote bribing aimed at the stupid and the needy, who will gladly sell their vote for a few shekels or alms (hello black community and illegals). But that alone is not good enough. Social media is the crack cocaine of propaganda-based indoctrination that reliably sways the mush-heads that play video games 60 hrs/wk and can’t take their eyes off of their cell phones. But we’re not done yet. Tech oligarchs pour $millions into voter fraud campaigns that send out thousands of mules to drop boxes after midnight and deposit tens of thousands of phony ballots in key districts where the local DA has been paid off. And none of this works unless you own the police. The Stasi will only get involved if you try to interfere with the mules or Antifa goons. But they will work their ass off entrapping average citizens that object to systemic corruption in DC. Last, honest voters now know that the game is rigged, the fix is in, the election outcome is predetermined; so they stay home and boycott the election as the only form of protest that the Stasi will allow. And the vicious cycle kicks into overdrive until the corruption and incompetence get so bad that the house of cards collapses. Only then can a real remedy and rebirth commence.
Somebody please link to the video of the western Powers, trudeau, johnson, that horrible Ursula woman and others, sitting at a round table laughing and mocking Putin while they are falling into the pits that they dug for their enemies. I don’t want to starve to death, I don’t want the country to fall into anarchy, but if my reward is I get to see these people swinging at the end of a noose I’ll take it
I’d only add that the level of infantile discourse in that G7 clip is pretty commonplace among the managers and execs in the MIC.
It’s not any better among the grey/blue collar set either. Conversations are largely endless snark with a sprinkling of references to gross bodily functions.
Well. Competence would begin with spelling it correctly…
“The Crisis Of Competence”
Army cuts high school diploma requirement to boost recruiting
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4074445/posts
Every branch of the military is struggling to make its 2022 recruiting goals, officials say
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4074488/posts
High Skrewl dropouts wielding multi-billion-dollar weapons systems is an excellent recipe for achieving Peak Clownworld.
Also makes one wonder how the technological armamentarium will be kept in good working order when no one can read or do simple math.
Mercenaries.
The hewers of wood and drawers of water, as Marechal Foch put it, will still be recruits. The drone operators, high-tech repairmen and EW specialists will be mercenary white guys. You are already seeing this in Ukraine.
Tend to concur. However, awareness of how mercenaries are treated under the Geneva Convention might impede recruitment efforts, no matter how good pay may be offered. 🙂
The competent woke white merc pool is not all that large.
Uncle Vlad is whittling their numbers down as I write this.
The official figure touted by Russia have surprisingly few American and British merc’s. Poland fields the majority. Not sure those outside of America and Britain can be relied upon for technical understanding of high tech weapons systems rather than ground pounders and door kickers.
Just so. This is a a problem going back perhaps over a century (one of the first wide scale uses of IQ/Competence tests was by the military during WW I). Here’s a link to a slightly older article:
http://observer.com/2018/08/pentagon-most-americans-are-too-fat-stupid-to-enlist-in-the-military/
Roughly 70% of all young adults are too fat (50%), stupid (~20%) and/or criminal (10%) for any branch of the military. And those numbers have doubtlessly deteriorated in the decade(s) since. As I’ve often cynically noted, anyone who has served in the military and/or lower level government jobs knows that hurdle isn’t particularly high for entry, and it’s all the more pity that large fractions of the populace can’t even surmount those obstacles.
On occasions when the military has waived their standards, the results have been disastrous. An example from the 1960s is “McNamara’s Folly.”
If there’s any saving grace here, it’s that to the extent the services get further dumbed down, is it will tend to stymie malevolent government plans.
The ones who would join are too stupid to make it, and the ones who could make it are too smart to join.
Ben supplies the facts and figures, Matt supplies the memorable summation. 😉
Don’t read too much into the IQ tests for WWI. The American Expeditionary Force was all-in on the idea that they could avoid shell shock among their troops if they properly screened recruits for intelligence (among other things), because they mistakenly believed that “propensity to shell shock” and “intelligence” were inversely correlated. They largely thought the same thing going into WWII, but manpower requirements being what they were…
You might want to fix the headline. Good points, though.
It’s spelled “competence”
Sorry, but somebody had to say it.
Let me tell ya, I cam close to hurling my PC out the window this morning. I run spellcheck on the browser and for some reason it thinks competence is spelled “competance” or “competnece”. I then used Word and it started doing the inclusivity check, which makes my blood boil.
Any reason to keep Word? Open source stuff isn’t always great, but I’ve been using LibreOffice for years.
I get it for free, so I use Office. I have used the open source stuff in the past. The Word spellcheck is pretty good. The grammar check is often weird, but I am in the free-love camp when it comes to grammar. What I find infuriating is the inclusiveness crap. There is probably a way to shut it off, but I should not have to do that. Think about the mentality of the people who think this is a good feature.
Writing with no inclusivity check mark would end up being mandatory in every school and every job..
When you see it, yo can say: “Nobody told me”
Wait, your not kidding? omg
It depends on the level of complexity in the document.
LibreOffice and the other free suites maintain good MS Word compatibility with basic business correspondence.
That seems to degrade pretty quickly once you start including graphs and mathematical equations that are required for STEM work.
Intentional or not, I think the spelling error was hilarious.
Brings into question the competence or “compentance” of the current crop of Microsoft programmers.
This is why I will always keep my Microsoft-issued disc of Office 2010, which I purchased for $9.95 through their home use program at work. I suppose sooner or later they’ll come up with a way to nuke it or make it incompatible with the most current version, but the older it gets the less I think they’re worried about it. The online version, which is what I use during the day, is wonky shite.
Inclusivity check? I didn’t think it could get worse than the “this sentence may be in the passive voice” grammar checker that plagued my school essay writing. No wait, “My essays were plagued by the grammar checker, my being accused by it of having used passive voice.”
Sounds like Microsoft has colonized your computer and via that, your blog.
Maybe you can get a government grant to de-colonize them. Strike while the grifters irons are hot!
I remember maybe on the first day of the whole imbroglio in the Ukraine, even before I heard of the escalation, I was confused by something I saw on my homepage. There, on the news section, instead of some ridiculous pop star or an empty suit, was a white man with genuine hardness in his eyes. He looked like he’d been in prison for ten years, yet he was wearing a blue suit and a conservative tie. I hadn’t seen anyone in modern American politics (or modern American anything) who looked like that. I clicked and saw it was Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. We have men who play at being hard in our political class, the Zioclops Nick Fury from the Second Congressional District in Texas, “Working Class Joe” who challenges people who ask him about his crackhead son to pushup contests, flabby Trump who knows how to bloviate and howl (like a creature with a big dewlap and no claws), but we don’t have any men like that Russian guy in public life.
That’s just another way that the Russians stand as a living and constant rebuke to our rulers’ claims of the arc of history bending their way. I watched an American journalist interviewing Peskov, demanding to know why he wouldn’t release some WNBA sasquatch who’d gotten caught with hashish oil in Moscow. “She broke Russian law and she will be punished under Russian law.” It was like watching an adult talking to a child. I think even “Griller Cons” who had “Red Dawn” on a loop in the 80s are rooting for Russia now.
Joey, are you besmirching the benighted Brittney Griner? Please, say it ain’t so.
She may be a WNBA sasquatch to you, but she is a Super Non-Binary Beyond Butch hero to BIPOCs and trans-athletes as well as Ben Shapiro.
OK, Yeti, then.
Brittney Griner with a str@p-on and Ben Shapiro on all fours – now that’s some ghey pr0n I might ackshually watch.
Ben Shapiro isn’t a trans-athlete?
heh. I also recall reading about a separate incident where a Zambian sasquatch twerked at a Russian war memorial and iirc got 3 years in prison. Damn right I am hoping to see Russia triumphant.
If hyperbolic click baiting Zerohedge is to believed, NATO is getting a super boost of equipment and soldiers to the tune of a quarter million men.
This could be the “hard times make hard men” moment. God help us.
Said it during the Russian troop build up on the border, and I’ll say it again here:
Nobody puts a condom on unless they’re ready to f. These ridiculous madmen are really going to do it. They’re going to pull the trigger on a war with Russia.
where will these 250k super soldiers come from? US recruiting is cratering at the same time standards are being reduced. the EU doesn’t have one capable military in all its countries combined.
just like everything the retard lords plan, an army of gen-z soyboys is not going to be winning any wars.
birth rates are cratering all over vaxxlandia; not a good time to get into a massive loss of life event.
Don’t forget about the old theory that the elites actually want depopulation. It all ties in with their Gaia worship. WW3 is an accelerant to that goal, especially if white boy gets killed off in the process.
Yeah, but just think of the pollution all those nuke explosions will create – though it’ll probably take care of global warming. The question they have to axe themselves is: will gaia be happy or mad?
The same has been said of Russia v. Ukraine: they’re old people’s homes with TFRs well below replacement. Demographically, this war makes no sense.
That isn’t the calculus. [insert favorite conspiracy here]
Personally, I think the West is in the throes of a nihilistic death cult. War with anyone won’t touch our elites in any way, other than to pad their bank accounts.
“Personally, I think the West is in the throes of a nihilistic death cult. War with anyone won’t touch our elites in any way, other than to pad their bank accounts.”
Agreed. I think it’s a consequence of massive wealth centralization. When the arrogant cannot feasibly have MORE, the only way to fuel that arrogance is for everybody else to have LESS.
I don’t like the idea of making wealth into a crime… but I don’t see billionaires pushing against the Narrative, either. Mike Lindell and Elon Musk come closest in USA and nobody would call them altruists or idealists.
We’re already in a ground war with Russia. Now they’re openly upping the ante; they’ve the troops to do it if it’s Eastern Europe.
Taiwan, if we’re dumb enough to contest it, will be a naval war.
The US Navy hasn’t fought a peer, or near peer competitor in 75 years. Your guess is as good as mine. But the interior lines, means of production, and fighting spirit vastly favor China.
Those NATO spokesdroids are just flapping their gums.
In the real world, one cannot simply print up some armored brigades and heavy artillery like a pallet of euros.
It’s bizarre to watch these creatures proclaim otherwise.
Joey Junger: Oh gawd, have you seen the comments at the Daily Mail when they report on her woes? “Bet she misses ‘murrrica now.” “Guess she’ll regret kneeling for the anthem.” If they weren’t so utterly civnat clueless they’d be hilarious in their symbolic patriotism to a dead letter.
And the photos of that thing – sasquatch is so very apt – towering brown thing with wild eyes and dreads and tats being led by normal-appearing White Russian men and women. Perfect symbol of primitive strutting AINO versus competent and proud Russia.
My goodness, I just had the misfortune of reading the Fox News article and I think I lost 3-4 IQ points reading the comments. “Her wife” this, “Muh Constitution” that. The best/worst ones are those that cluck about the fact that she was all worried about rights for her fellow deviants in America but Russia! is so much worse.
We joke about it now but it won’t be long before the human ballast of American normie-cons begin bragging about how Dems are the real transphobes.
I truly am rooting for Russia in all this. What was our country has become the enemy we supposedly vanquished when the Cold War ended. I still can’t believe that I have changed that much. Although maybe I haven’t changed and the country has.
It’s not you, it’s the country. And despite the decline that’s been obvious to most since 9/11, the pace & breadth of degradation over the past 5-6 years has become staggering.
The ‘decline in competence’ may be most evident in government, but IMO it is being felt in all realms. And whether it is the result of mal-education, mal-parenting, or some Darwinian result of lower IQ persons giving birth, while higher IQ persons get grad degree, fancy credentialed career instead of passing on their genes, the results are coming in and they are stark. And negative.
What, now, is a ‘restaurant’? A magnet for illegal immigrants? A place where one can get bad food, and bad service for high prices? Where I live, going out to eat is an exercise in futility.
Customer service? Really, shouldn’t there be another term created, for current year? I just called to check on an order to be told I was “number 263 in the” while said company’s Chat was down due to “unexpected circumstances..” Even giant companies like Xfinity can’t keep their service up, and regularly have unexpected outages. Good luck reaching them.
It goes on and is beyond the scope of an internet post unless you want to go all autist and present a wall of words.
It is turning up all over the place. It takes six months to see the dentist because there is a shortage of hygienists.
Not in north-central rural Ohio.
This. Most of the doom-and-gloom opinions on the internet are shaped by lived experiences in urbanized, “vibrant”, blue hell-holes. Crime. Empty shelves at the supermarkets. Hair care products locked in drug stores. Pantifa. Mask/vaxx mandates. Unaffordable housing.
Most of the USA is still normal.
While I’m as pessimistic as most of us here are, allow me to offer a snapshot of my local town and how it (hopefully!) presents a worse-than-actual reality view of my local populace:
Monday about 2:00 PM, I went shopping at one of the better groceries here in ex-urban central Florida city. As I tend to notice such things, I saw a disproportionate number of mothers with biracial children (two or three, and this in the local upscale store, not the Save-a-Lot). Too, outside there was a somewhat unusual duo of a homely white-ish female and a black male, each pushing a baby carriage with one or more children in it. I witnessed this last pair while entering the store, as well as after I left. They were clearly not shopping, but wandering aimlessly as is typical of the homeless. Perhaps I’m wrong, but in general, people don’t take the baby for a stroll mid-day on a hot, muggy Southern summer afternoon.
While my city doesn’t have the problem on a scale of LA or some Left Coast city, the poor are not unknown here and there is seen the occasional tent pitched off the highway.
Now, the “statistical” wisdom: I was aware that what I saw was not representative of the overall population. The scene, if you will, self-selected to highlight the non-working members of society (to include the retired, of which there are many, this being “God’s Waiting Room,” as wags term it.)
In sum, perhaps an overly jaundiced slice of my local reality. Even so, it’s depressing that this is probably typical, even of smaller cities, in vast majority White areas 🙁
Mr. Generic: DFW is urbanized and all too vibrant, but I wouldn’t yet call all its ‘burbs “blue hell-holes.” And while shelves are not empty, I noticed about 10 years ago when they started locking up or chaining retail products. At the same time, there was a massive increase in the number of non-White drivers of insanely expensive sports cars on the road. And the remaining White public school population appears increasingly unaware that it’s constantly shrinking as it pals around with its Han and pajeet besties.
No, most of the US is not normal. You are fortunate that where you live remains so.
I don’t get the downvotes for your comment. I concur.
Went away from where I live (and described), to a region, same state, 250 miles outside the urbanite zone of my residence the other day.
Nice people, good food, good service and lower prices the norm. Had 3 eggs and rye toast, with coffee, $4.20. Waitress, perfect example of how older women with a life of smiles in the rearview are – plus fast to refill our coffees, noticed we were first time customers.
No traffic – where I live 1/8 of a second after the light turns green, “honkkkk!” People racing around like mad, still plenty of masktards. Everything expensive, beyond expensive.
During rush hour, best stay off the local roads now. The once empty highway is now packed, and the angry commuters have spilled over to the local roads, surely aided by that ‘be evil’ company’s ‘maps’ app – and they don’t seem to understand stop signs, or the concept of double yellow lines. Or your right to exist.
So yeah, I see the difference, regionally – and when my time comes plan to leave the suburbanites to their full diapers.
it seems like the lack of staff is directly tied to a lack of decent pay. maybe combined with forcing people to work under shitty conditions (to compensate for being understaffed).
It is a great puzzle. The great resignation, as it is being called, requires an explanation for how these quitters are paying their bills. Disability claims have been in decline https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html Boomer retirement is one possibility.
boomer retirement, people cashing out of their homes during insane R.E. market, and I think extended families are conglomerating back into a single home.
There’s a ton of millennials (yes, in their 30’s) moving back home and even more Gen Z who simply haven’t moved out. Why work when you’ve never had to work before, and Boomer parents will stock the fridge for everyone?
Once you accept the puzzle is answered by just less people, its no longer a puzzle.
A lot of it is interstate migration. The competent people are flocking to places like Texas, the Ozarks, Tennessee, and Florida.
It’s still possible to make decent income with little capital trading momentum/volatility on a variety of financial instruments.
No reason not to because they are going to crash everything to zero, rendering any fiat-denominated capital worthless.
I have seen no plausible explanation offered. You have to wonder if there is a massive underground economy or secret government bennies because no other explanation suffices. Whate KvH pointed out is true, but there are tons of work-aged people without family support or assets to sell who are humming right along, too.
Another potential source of funds could be people taking loans against their 401k to play the extend and pretend game with their credit cards. I imagine that some people were taking home equity loans as well. I’m not sure where to find reliable stats for either of those.
Businesses have been raising pay significantly and can’t get qualified applicants. In the Zman’s example dental hygienists are very well paid. More and more people don’t want to put up with all the nonsense that goes along with showing up to work everyday. Lots of people retired somewhat earlier than they expected after Covid started. A significant number of women decided to stay home with their kids or pursue more flexible work options. An added pressure on all this is that the public schools are turning out a generation of imbeciles incapable of doing skilled worked. I don’t know how all these people are supporting themselves, but raising wages doesn’t solve a worker shortage anymore.
There are no sober, practical minded men (let alone females) running the show anywhere – the hive mind rules. Their blatherings on any subject are as predictable as the rising of the sun. I’m not sure what it’s going take to get things back on track, but it needs to happen sooner rather than later – economic implosion and/or WWIII are right around the corner.
And civil war-that is also around the corner and IMHO more likely than WW3