One of the great unnoticed things about the current crisis is that the rules that everyone said were inviolable no longer seem to apply. This is most obvious in the economic realm where nothing makes any sense. Things that were said to be impossible a generation ago are now the default. Similarly, politics is now operating by a set of rules that no one can explain. Things that were considered outside of the realm of the possible are the new normal.
Way back in the before times, when Covid got going, the world literally shut itself down in response to the virus. In America, over twenty-five million people were laid off and tens of millions more were sent home to work. The official unemployment rate peaked at thirteen percent and was then restated to be just under seven percent. What the actual unemployment rate was at the peak is unknown. Regardless, it was an unprecedented attack on the economy that should have been devastating.
According to official statistics, the economy shrugged it off. The official figures say the economy contracted by 3.4% in 2020 but all of the decline was contained in the third quarter of the year. The fourth quarter began a massive rebound. The official numbers say the economy grew by 5.7% in 2021. That more than made up for the decline in the prior year due to Covid. It turns out you can literally shut down an economy and nothing serious will happen. No wonder people want to stay home.
It is not just in America where the laws of economics have been suspended. In Europe they are allegedly facing an energy shortage. Since forever we have been told that steep increases in energy prices trigger recession. Germany is literally facing the prospect of having no gas and no one seems to notice. The massive disruptions to the flow of energy into the EU has thus done little to upset the economy. According to the old rules, this should not be possible.
It is possible that the media is simply lying to us. Maybe people are seething at the suffering that has been inflicted upon them. The official media, controlled as it is by state actors, is ignoring this in favor of happy talk. It could also mean that all of those economic rules were just made up. No on really knows why the economy does what it does but like court magicians, economist pretend to know in order to provide authority to the ruling class. The whole thing is a put-on.
It is also possible that we live in a simulation. What we think of as reality is just a bit of software that the creators can tweak as they please. Those old rules had to be abandoned because the system got a computer virus. In order to keep the simulation from crashing entirely they changed the code. It is a temporary patch to the system until the next upgrade. Maybe that is why big events from the past, like the lockdowns, suddenly feel like distant memories. We rebooted.
Politics has the same weirdness. Everyone reading this is absolutely certain that we did not arrest people for speech. That was written down somewhere and everyone agreed that you could say what you like with some very narrow limits. Yet Douglas Mackey faces a decade in jail for making fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. Maybe like the economic rules, there was a patch done to the software, a hard reboot and we are suddenly operating under a totally new set of rules.
This confusion is obvious with the political actors. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New Jersey. All of a sudden, the people dedicating their lives to suppressing speech were bemoaning this attack on free speech. In Britain, Boris Johnson has people thrown in dungeons for using the wrong pronouns, but he was out there decrying this attack on our sacred liberty. Maybe the software engineers forgot the update these guy’s code during the last service pack.
Even taking a step back and looking at things in the most general sense, the rules no longer seem to apply. Politics used to be defined by the three big human motivations, money, power and sex. How does drag queen story hour fit in here? Who is benefitting from this lunacy? The point of this assault on the children seems to be the promotion of general mayhem, which used to be the opposite of what rulers sought. The old rules said order was the goal of the people in charge.
Of course, we know that a tenet of the new religion states that only through mass confusion can we transcend this world. They believe if they get everyone into a state of agitation that we somehow break free from our old thinking. This lets us adopt a new model of thinking which is the passage to the glorious future. The endless “subverting expectations” is a deliberate effort to make everyone crazy. It is hard to accept, but this does explain why the rulers now prefer chaos.
That does not explain why the system trundles on, despite violating all of the rules we have been told are inviolable. We have double-digit inflation, periodic food shortages and record high gas prices. The whiplash effect is now emerging, where price hikes are followed by demand destruction, which collapses prices, only to see demand return and drive prices back up again. In other words, we are seeing stagflation in the economy but no one seems to notice or care all that much.
Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. Maybe it takes us a while to recognize reality after a long absence. Perhaps what lies ahead is a mass recognition of reality and a sudden return of the old rules. Maybe the people running the simulation get bored and shut us down. At this point, given the general weirdness we are seeing, we cannot safely assume anything. For now, at least, we are in a new world with new rules and a new sense of reality.
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We are in the midst of an incremental, compartmentalized, fracturing, mimeticizing, demystifying shift from 3rd to 4th stage precession of simulacra, as Jean Baudrillard would say. Foucault is the most overrated French theorist, who committed deliberate sexual suicide by barebacking in SF gay bathhouses during the early AIDS years; Baudrillard on the other hand is the most underrated and certainly the most humorous of those Intellectual Frogs spawned in 1960s Paris. We now exist in a digitized order of cascading signs pointing to nothing, ‘Reality’ in the Classical sense is being supplanted by a totalitarian kingdom of images detached from… Read more »
you are trying ti imanetize the eusthecion . the silloque of your ideas confounds the internal metaphysics of the sonet .
It must be snowing in hell !
A comercial for the uss liberty on fox
Justice for liberty.org
During Tucker
What happend to the cringe starving old jews? lmao.
Currently watching Tucker.
He’s talking about the camel jockey who wrote a book about the elimination of white people.
And the guest brought on to comment on it?
Pedro Gonzalez
A Mystery Spic brought on to comment on an anti white book.
Huh?!
You can’t make this shit up.
Spaniards (and their new world descendents) are white you extremely well informed person you. Pedro Gonzalez is absolutely solid and unlike everyone here he operates under his own face and name. Now hes git a national platform… how about you?
Tucker also mentioned, with regard to Jeffery Epstein, that Epstein was associated with an intelligence agency.
Now if only Tucker was allowed to say which intelligence agency.
As if we don’t know.
He said intelligence agencies, plural.
Pedro looks white. He acts white. If his DNA isn’t European, I’d be surprised. Happily for him, he has a magical hispanic name that allows him to say forbidden things out loud.
I’ve been following him for a while. He’s doing some great work, particularly on calling attention to how trans activists are grooming kids and breaking up families.
He’s using his diverse name for good, not evil, which is a lot better than members of a different tribe who anglo up their names in order to blend in and bash YT.
If you don’t know who Pedro Gonzalez is, then you need to widen your dissident reading. And yes, he’s done the DNA tests and is over 90% Castilian Spanish.
I think it’s very unkind to lob such epithets at a man who comports himself with the professionalism and class that Mr. Gonzalez exhibits. He is a great white advocate. It’s easy to bring on a white person railing about anti white racism. When it is evident to people that decent non-whites or part-whites like Gonzalez are outraged by this kind of thing, it is very meaningful.
You should look into Gonzalez and where he works. He’s associate editor of Chronicles magazine, which has opposed the neocons for many years, and used to feature Sam Francis and many other great thinkers. Pedro is on our side.
Z, you’ve written about the post-scarcity world in the past. I think we’re seeing a glimpse of what happens when people are AWARE they live in a post scarcity world.
The homeless “problem” is mainly people dropping out of normal society because you can live pretty okay, not great, but survive…and free needles!
Millions of people were shocked by the shortages, but nobody is suffering.
The knee-jerk response to homelessness is always to blame it on high housing prices. But when you look at it, affordable areas have very few homeless while wealthy areas have tons. So stands to reason, as you say, they decide to be homeless because they can drop out of society and get by, and they get by because wealthy areas also mean lots of handouts. I know of a younger guy who said he can make more money panhandling in Studio City than he can at a regular job. He was pulling in $400 a day on average standing around… Read more »
Most of the studies I’ve heard about on the homeless sort them into single males, and somewhat intact families that lived on the edge, and feel,off. Then there are the less frequent single females and fatherless families—usually mothers/children running away from abuse. The families are usually taken care of and housed. They seem salvageable. There are facilities even in this poorish berg. Single males however are quite often mentally ill and/or drug addicted. Those play the system, at least until they break down from their addiction. Heard more than one give account of how they game the system. Many for… Read more »
eventually these leeches will be euthanized, which is what they deserve.
whether its the WEF , CCP, or someone else, It is undeniable that some organized direction is are work in the us and European governments . they are completely independent of public opinion. impervious to being voted out, just like Hugo Chavez and his successor mudoro in Venezuela . they us dominion voting machines we do. as for what they want, isn’t it clear as crystal? really? they want people of European descent disempowered , eliminated and sterilized so they don’t reproduce. they are wrecking the economies of all the western countries deliberately. the trans stuff is to sterilize their… Read more »
The German Governments response to a quadrupling of LN Gas prices (last time I looked, probably higher now) has been to propose a new tax on Gas.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/germans-face-higher-bills-tax-aids-natural-gas-88394619
Cold and starving isn’t enough. They want them poor and dead.
The West, especially Europe, is suffering from an astonishing case of Normalcy Bias. The Germans don’t seem to realize that they are staring de-industrialization in the face, that it can’t be prevented and there’s no going back. I see no alternative there short of violent popular uprisings.
Just before we left Spain last week, the government decreed that no business could set their thermostat below 27 Celsius (~ 81F) when it was damn near 100F where we were – and they don’t even use Russian gas (or very little). Wait until the heinies can’t run their thermos above 15C this winter…
At least with the cold you can toss on another blanket. With the heat, there is a hard limit.
The normalcy bias thing is odd, and not unprecedented. Say what you will about the holohoax, but there were a lot of “extrajudicial eliminations” by all armies in WW2: but the victims by and large did what they were told. The Polish Jews went in the ghettos, the Polish offficers marched into the forest ahead of the nkvd, the German civilians reported to the French typhus death camps by the hundreds of thousands… It seems you can genocide millions by just ordering them to die, and they will. What’s freezing and going hungry without protest compared to being marched up… Read more »
People are still shellshocked from 2020. Not just the COVID response, but the George Floyd Memorial Riots and the fake election hoax. I noticed that normies do not really like to walk about how they got by that year, almost like old people who lived during the Depression. They just wanted to put it behind them and trudge on. Of course this means that the government is even more disconnected from the people, but that is by design. The government hired psychiatrists and ad-men to design the “COVID response” who said that people needed to be kept in a state… Read more »
I don’t find any of it confusing. This is a deliberate effort by an organized group with people who fill most of the key government roles in most Western countries. It’s not a “conspiracy” any more than the Democratic Party is a conspiracy. It’s a public, organized movement. They have position papers, they fund training for future leaders. It’s a conspiracy like Microsoft is a conspiracy: it’s a giant global organization that produces a product. In this case, the product is the leaders and government policies of tomorrow. Check out this column by Parag Khanna in Time. Khanna is a… Read more »
controlled opposition is all about giving you the wrong shaped puzzle for the pieces you can see staring up at you on the table.
It works nearly all of the time.
He openly advocates taking over Russia and settling ‘climate-displaced’ populations there. The way the powers-that-be use this as an excuse for conquering entire nations is astonishing. “The fate of the territory presently known as “Russia” is crucial. Moscow’s politics today suggest an isolationist nationalism, but geography paints a different picture—especially Russia’s proximity to the most populous, young, resource-hungry, and climate-stressed regions of the planet: Asia. Russia’s aggressive lashing out at the West will only increase its dependence on the East to import goods and export raw materials. Its mineral-rich terrain is also Eurasia’s central crossroads. Imagine if we were to… Read more »
“He openly advocates taking over Russia and settling ‘climate-displaced’ populations there. The way the powers-that-be use this as an excuse for conquering entire nations is astonishing.”
Because conquering Russia worked out SO WELL for the Corsican General and Emperor in the 19th Century and the Austrian Dictator in the 20th Century, we should try it too. 🤦🏻♂️
Funny thing about conquering Russia::The Russians don’t like if you try it.
I think there is a fair argument the Austrian Architect was not trying to conquer Russia, but make a pre-emptive defense against Russian aggression. Hmm . . . that sounds familiar.
Things in my neck neck of the woods aren’t crashing but they aren’t normal, either. The big money carries on like boom times. There’s definitely a disconnect or decoupling that’s occurred. I’m patient. Like the people I knew who lost their houses in ‘06, it’ll work its way up.
The Titanic is sinking and the band keeps playing on, whats not to understand? This is what i would expect an intense period of collapse to look like, Chaos is just beginning, you ain’t seen nothing yet. “Our entire economic system now rests on an outrageous fiction, that the debts incurred on the nation since the 20th Century are “money-good”, that they can be paid, and that they are binding on current and even future generations. This is a sickening idea, for to the young and those unborn it is odious debt and is not in any way binding on… Read more »
Who, exactly, is this Pedro Gonzalez character? Where did he come from? Why is Newsweek allowing him to Sam Francis-post there?
Undoubtedly someone who is being funded by someone. He’s getting far too much press in mainstream outlets for an anonymous dissident. I haven’t read many of his articles, but I assume there’s a knife ready to go in someone’s back somewhere.
His biography is pretty much daring you to notice that someone created him:
https://wealthyspy.com/pedro-gonzalez/
The rarely spotted (outside cartel leadership) “glowbeaner.”
I think Glen Greenwald somehow brought him into the picture
He’s associate editor of Chronicles. Paul Gottfried (editor) is Pedro’s boss. Chronicles used to be run by Thomas Fleming, and featured Sam Francis every issue. The flagship magazine for the dissident right from way back, and an enemy of neoconservatism.
Who’s behind “the promotion of General Mayhem”?
Probably the same ones who were behind the promotion of Col. Perez.
(Fans of Joe McCarthy will remember the rallying cry “Who promoted Perez?”)
Went to the same military academy as General Butt Naked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Butt_Naked
I guess there are still some immutable truths (reality) the tards haven’t tried to convince us are untrue; you know, like we need air to live, water is wet, snow is cold, fire is hot, gravity will result in death if you jump off a 20 story building, earth rotates around its axis every 24 hours etc., etc. Never say never however. The economy is completely weirded out. Intuitively, one would think things should be the exact opposite of what they are, but people are out and about, driving, flying, traveling, spending money everywhere. It’s all rather remarkable to say… Read more »
Pssst! Can you keep a secret? It’s a con. Of course it’s a con. Everyone knows it’s a con, but it can only continue on if nobody exposes the fact. A simulation? A con? How would you bet? What’s the value of a slip of paper that says “In God We Trust” when we know longer trust in God. Or gold? Or oil? Or sun beams? Don Quixote, a noble fool, chasing windmills. It’s an impossible dream. Bernie Madoff was a con. The Federal Reserve is a con. One day these confidence men will be found out. We are the… Read more »
On dissolution of society: solve et coagula. Alchemy was not about gold – the alchemical process was about society. They are certainly well into the dissolve phases.
Observing recent market (for lack of a better term) activity, it appears the regime has realized they need stocks up and gas down for the midterms.
Time to sit back, relax, and watch the magic happen!
“No on really knows why the economy does what it does but like court magicians, economist pretend to know in order to provide authority to the ruling class.” BINGO!!!! They never see anything coming before it happens. The great recession started in the 3rd quarter of 2007, and as late as June 2008, nobody could see the recession coming, despite the fact that it had already begun in earnest. Nobody saw the collapse coming. Nobody saw the bank failures coming (Peter Schiff had been saying the same thing since 2001, just that I could find on Youtube). “Macro-Economics” is just… Read more »
Biggest bonus I ever earned: December 2007.
End of June 2008: laid off.
My industry went from $230 billion of debt issuance in 2007 to effectively zero in 2008, 2009 and 2010. We all saw it coming, yet everyone was still surprised.
Lucky for me, I can look forward to Social Security and Medicare to take care of me in my old age.
As Chuck Prince of Citi said when asked why they kept on with the CDO and MBS stuff long after it was clearly unsustainable, “As long as the music’s playing, you have to get up and dance.”
Ed Dutton’s recent video on the Trump raid points out average IQ has dropped to the level of 1700. It’s down 20 points in the West since 1880. The collapse is occurring, in slow motion. In California, where I exist, rents are double what they were a decade ago, factoring inflation, and despite an exodus of millions of people. Most of increase occurred before 2019. I could go on. But people still struggle on at a lower level. For now.
I do wonder if the decline in tobacco consumption since the 50s is tied to decline in white populations specifically, given the correlation between nicotine and inhibition of mental decline.
It seems to overlap somewhat.
Or an increase in weed
It always struck me as perhaps more than coincidental that the discovery of tobacco and importation into Europe correlated with the rise of the renaissance and the decline since the 50s-70s seems tied into the stalling of industrial progress.
It would be interesting if Europeans have some genetic trait that this affects, but its also could be one of those pirates with temperature correlations.
That wouldn’t surprise me.
Dope is everywhere all the time after legalization.
When I drive to visit my folks 90% of the billboards on the highway are for dope stores.
The gas stations on the Indian rez all sell it, and there are always three or four additional dope stores around the stations.
“average IQ has dropped to the level of 1700”
Did you mean 170?
Year 1700 IQs. If average IQ was 170 we would be inundated with genius, pretty obvious that is not the case, LOL!
There are hordes of (mostly white) homeless crack junkies everywhere, shitting and pissing on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store. Yet, I’ve never interacted with one. I don’t know where they’re from, how they get to that point, what people like that would have done in society before they became homeless junkies. They’re like aliens to me, I literally don’t know anybody who is like that or ended up like that in my personal life. On the other end, people who are well set up are making obscene amounts of money, on housing, on fat contracts, etc. Boomers… Read more »
It’s fentanyl, it’s everywhere, and more than any other factor, it’s driving the “homeless” problem nationwide.
Zero political will anywhere to do anything about it, even in conservative states.
“Homeless” sounds a sympathetic situation ….”we must build homes!” vs:
“Junkies crapping in streets and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down for their next fix while living in your public areas and park spaces”
Calling them “homeless” is a cancer that has neutralized the police.
Europe and Asia don’t have this particular problem. It’s fixable, there’s just no political will to do so.
Well, that and the US Supreme Court has outlawed fixing the homeless problem. You have a constitutional right to drop a deuce on the public streets. Says so right there in article 2, section 5. If you cant see that in your copy of the constitution, ur a racist.
Vagrants and other poor have always been a feature of our societies. In the distant past, they were simply dealt with a bit more harshly. They were herded to certain marginal areas and were strongly discouraged from being in more civilized parts of town. In saner (?) times, a bum might well end up doing thirty days for vagrancy, working at the county farm or perhaps just sitting in a city jail. The truly mentally ill or dangerous were housed in asylums. The past few generations saw the expansion of civil rights and many such enforcement powers became out of… Read more »
Every one of these scenarios is just a papering over of problems with trillions and trillions in new debt. Italy was about to blow…again… a couple months ago. Then the ECB decided to create a dew debt facility while at the same time raising rates. It stabilized things in the short run. The Fed credited something like $6 Trillion over the entire Covid period. When all currencies on earth are floating and based on credit, you can do things like this. Keep in mind that the EU had strict debt covenants in its first couple years. Like a bunch of… Read more »
” There is no “bond market” anymore. They should call it, “backstopped debt pool.”
Excellent point.
“My biggest worry is that they will take us to WW3 to paper over the crash. Desperate, vacuous politicians with their necks on the line would do that. This could all end with a billion dead people.”
The crash already happened, it was covered by covid in 2020. They won’t do world war 3 because of nukes. So the idea is to control demolition the economy for the “environment” so they don’t lose control of the levers of power. Everything “they” do is to avoid accountability
I will say there are some interesting counter-currents in media versus the Ruling Class desire to act out their HATE HATE HATE of the people. Discovery / Warner’s slashing of their woke film and tv production, in the desperate need to make money to pay off their debt, is interesting. As is the “friendly threat” of Daniel Loeb and Thirdpoint to Disney, buying a stake, and wanting “changes” to increase profitability and such as Disney shares dropped 33% over the year despite subscriber growth. The CW network was sold, to affiliate group Nexstar, and that CEO’s press conference was …… Read more »
Posibility the media is lying ? Lol Economy IDK what to think, my oldest son has an mba and some education in economics said something that rang true. The legal system, the government, finacial systems, the ” economy” over many decades became so Byzantine that it became impossible for anyone to comprehend & is unpredictable. Trying to recognize trends and adjusting for them is pretty much all anyone can do. Imo the whole shooting match is set up, rightfully so, to benifit “the rich” That is a truth that never has & never will change. So try to get rich.… Read more »
“Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New Jersey. All of a sudden, the people dedicating their lives to suppressing speech were bemoaning this attack on free speech”. Actually, and sadly ironically, he was attacked in Chautauqua, NY, the birthplace of the public “cultural enrichment” seminar movement started in the (old style) Progressive Era in Chautauqua and emulated nationwide. It was the TED Talk before TED talks, if you will. This heinous attack puts a “bookend” on the outmoded American tradition of reasonable White people gathering in public to discuss ideas. Our future is swarthy mobs shouting down/attacking speakers and… Read more »
Captain Willard: Except Rushdie is not White and, if I recall, has decried many things about the Christian West although all the attention has been on his anti-Muslim writings. He has relentlessly pursued and married White women, of course, being true to type. I don’t want Islamic feuds or fatwas in Western lands, but that is easily avoided . . . by deporting both sides.
Yes of course. My point was that the Forum of the Chautauqua was almost as important as Rushdie himself. If white people cannot safely gather to hear whomever we choose, including foreigners of all colors, we’ve lost something important to civilization.
Not sure there is a point that can be substantiated to your addendum about “including foreigners of all colors.” Who we allow into positions of authority is a key and critical issue that cannot be re-conceded to “diversity.” see 2nd Timothy. There is no sensible case for allowing those Not Us to be teachers and lecturers in our lands. If it can be taught, a white christian american man can learn it abroad and teach it to our citizenry, if vetted and approved. “Open to all” is always a lie in subversion of truth and natural order.
Ok, but we have no shortage of *White* speakers being driven from a public platform. Muslims love their violence to be sure, but so does AntiFA. It won’t be long before a physical violent action moves to this level from the street clashes we saw a year ago. Freedom of speech is not really a Leftist thing, when they are in the ascendency. (I was gonna say “FOS is a White thing”, but hell half the violent Leftists are White. 🙁
One of the barbarians, or at least one intent on buggering things up, is in fact a Gates, and he’s one of the world’s wealthiest men! 😀
Nit pick warning : Chautauqua is in New York.
Reality is not weird. If anything it is drearily predictable. The economy is in the toilet, globally, including China with a slow-motion collapse of their non-State economy, likely accelerated by Xi to reduce internal rivals. There is a mortgage payment strike, and the “lie flat” movement of minimal work as the average Chinese figures they will NEVER get ahead as the economy is rigged by Red Princes. Xi figures that’s a nascent Red Guard movement hence Taiwan. It is utterly predictable. There was never any chance that a mixed State Owned Enterprise / Private Enterprise model could succeed. Look at… Read more »
“And they admire China because of the basics of human nature.”
Huh, you know what it is…the elites tolerated republics in the past because they were seen as the only way to be really economically successful. Then they see China rise under a system that appears to enrich the oligarchs while still imposing despotism upon the masses. So they want to become China because it’s the best of both worlds in their minds: a perfect utopia where the elites’ employees work hard to make money for them, but they get to torture them at the same time.
Except the current version of China never would have materialized if the US and the West had not spent the last 50 years shipping all the assets of its entire industrial base to China, while also inviting the Chinese to colonize the research and development establishment that remained in the West and completely loot its intellectual property.
Without this historically unprecedented windfall China would not be anywhere close to the monster we see today.
Wild Geese: Spot on and well said.
Remind me how many firearms Chinks own.
I’ve been waiting for the end of this monetary ponzi scheme for nearly two decades. I thought it was a tiger by the tail that they would not be able to control. The Covid shutdown combined with the plan to dial up the CAGW hysteria over a much longer time scale tells me they have been preparing. In fall of ’19 there was an $800 billion tranche of corporate bonds that needed a rollover. Most of that borrowed money was used for stock buybacks. Interest rates spiked an order of magnitude (5 in terms of basis points), and the government… Read more »
Perihelius Lux: As you note, Managed Decline is real. And even among those who actively notice, there are increasing holes and hidden tactics. It’s up to individuals to extrapolate from seemingly random and isolated events whether there is actually a pattern or what that pattern is.
Two puzzle pieces I had seen no prior news or notice of yet found due to one-off comments at YT channels:
Possible bread shortage in Australia
Power outage in Toronto (due to crane on barge ‘deliberately’? hitting power lines, affecting hospitals and closing banks: https://www.voanews.com/a/downtown-toronto-suffers-power-outage-disrupts-banks-cafes-/6698578.html
Poor old Aussies and Canucks. They really believed that rolling over to Big Gubment and taking their jabs like good little slaves with gain them a few brownie points with the Deep State.
“It turns out you can literally shut down an economy and nothing serious will happen.” Well – you can shut down the unproductive parts of an economy and nothing much will happen. One thing The Shamdemic showed us was just how worthless the employ of millions actually is. On the other hand, I have (as have many here, no doubt) seen countless small businesses struggle and many even go under. I will happily extrapolate these observations – made around London over the period March 2020 to October 2021 – to other parts of England. And most definitely to the US.… Read more »
GB news is the care home of the aging conservative population in the UK.
That is its intention, keep thta tranquilizer dripfeed going.
Yes. But I don’t give two hoot for GB News. I’d not ever watched it before. The salient point is that Mr. Oliver recognises Evil – although from a secular point-of-view. His comment, about engaging in 180 degree turn of viewpoint, from viewing the government as a benefactor, to one that views it as a malefactor, was very nicely put. The video, in my opinion, is even more valuable because it is relatable. It is not high-handed. Individuals perhaps may scoff that he ‘ought to have known all along’, but realizing the extent of your brainwashing and accepting it is… Read more »
Very reasonable.
He seems to be at the early stage of digging out of his current cell in the Château d’If. Good luck to him if its genuine.
I wonder of his Howard Beale moment will arrive before he gets kicked off the air for “safety and community” reasons.
I noticed they already chopped the last para of his latest one when it aired because he mentioned Hunter Biden and Pelosi’s son.
Famous British economist and limey poofter J.M. Keynes predicted that due to industrialization, the work week would be reduced to 15 hours or less. Bull**it Jobs postulated we’re now there; the vast majority of “jobs” today aren’t necessary, only soul sucking busywork. Covid stripped those jobs away for awhile; most people aren’t interested in going back to them after having the blinders taken off. Good right? Not really. Weirdos and globalist pets like Yuval Noah Harari are now openly telling our elite classes that now that automation and computers are everywhere, it’s time for the world to lose a few… Read more »
well, besides being economically unproductive, those few billions exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity. so one way or the other, they will go.
I would love to know what Harari thinks he has achieved that makes his existence essential.
Advanced toadying is an underappreciated skill.
Those holding the gun to the back of your head always see themselves in that way.
Doncherknow that the Koreans are the Choson People? 😀
No one is worried because they intend to collapse all of western economies. Really collapse them. That is the second prong of the mass migration. Make sure you flood the countries so they cannot recover from the collapse (as Europe as done before) because the internal conflict of a dysfunctional huge fraction is just too much. Its why Germany had a massive splurge in mostly young men a few years ago and they made sure they ramped up the mass movement facilitation into Europe just before shutdown and now the US. I am most surprised people can’t see the obvious… Read more »
“As the German fukwit harbeck said in an interview yesterday the German industrial model is broken (he did it) and it isn’t coming back, so get used to it.”
Indeed. I guess one cannot have a German industrial model, if one only imports billions of Turks into said industries.
An interesting ramification of the ‘Turkification’ of The Volk is that, in England, swarthy folks who look Turkish open up kebab shops, and advertise their produce as ‘Authentic German Doner Kebab’.
Lord have mercy!
Fun fact: 25% of Sweden is non-white. Good times coming.
One man’s fun fact is another man’s foreboding fact.
Same problem elsewhere. One needs to look at the demographic of the non-Whites, not just raw numbers. In Germany I’ve read, they about match the current cohort of young, marriage age German White men. This means that no matter what, if they remain and marry—half of Germany is slated to be non-White in 2-3 generations.
Don’t scoff. In the mid-60’s, we were about 90% White in the USA. 3 generations is 75 years and Whites are now one of the oldest cohorts and about at what, 60%? It can happen in a blink of the eye as they say.
Germany has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. They’ve given up.
There is a restaurant chain called GDK, now open in Canada too.
One problem with these erstwhile “elites” is they believe they control events. Problem is you don’t realize you’ve crossed the threshold, until you’ve crossed the threshold. Some of this shit harkens the old “starting a war is like walking blindfolded into a dark room to find a black cat” (attributed to Bismarck)
Exactly. That will be their downfall, because they cannot control the consequences of their actions. There are just too many permutations for them to think about. The bad news is that we will all be collateral damage in their mad schemes.
ok, you collapse the economy of your country. now what happens? how do you remain in charge, and what is left to be in charge of? if all you want to do is reduce the population, why not use direct means as has been done so many times before? anything is possible, but not everything is probable…
Why do suicide cults get together on a hill top and kill themselves? Why do Junkies destroy their own life and their families if given the chance? If you get immediate cash, status and invites to the right parties, top positions and private jets why would you not? Why would you import millions of Africans and third world into your own nation to wreck it and your children’s futures. Why would you enable an campaign fro your own natives to become persecuted and smashed at every opportunity for the benefit of foreigners and ingrates? Its a theory of mind problem… Read more »
I would add that they delayed this until they had moved the industrial base out of Europe to the far east and India. which is where I expect they think they are going to get the fruits of modernity from.
Its why Germany is getting hammered. They already outsourced the anglo industries earlier on.
Agreed. Germany really was the last manufacturing nation left in Europe and it had to be destroyed.
“What is left of your dream?
Just the words on your stone.
A man who learned how to teach
And then forgot how to learn.
Oh yeah.”
— Queen, “White Man” (~1975)
There is a certain amount of recency bias, and a certain amount of skepticism about the claims of coming disasters. The truth is that great disruptions and calamaties are usually complete surprises.
Let’s revisit this topic in February of next year when some of the chickens should have returned to the roost in Europe.
One of my kids works in the LNG shipping/regassification business. The “panic” is almost palpable. Problem is the Korean yards that build these vessels are fully booked for 3 years. FSRUs are almost unobtainium and dockside liquid transfer facilities take several years to build. Horst is going to have a rough winter.
Yes exactly! These geniuses have yet to realize that 9 women cannot have a baby in 1 month. The lack of infrastructure planning in the West is criminal. Unless of course it’s deliberate….
Funny thing is the Polacks came to this realization several years ago and built the port side capacity to take deliveries. The next order problem is increase of exports from the US but regulatory delays/stoppage in exploration/drilling permits. Particularly since gas wells have shorter peak production lifespans. The “best” is yet to come. In the meantime domestically we used to at least enjoy “Henry Hub + delivery” price—now with the spike in exports we’re getting the global price.
Relax.
The Germans are going to solve their energy problems by sourcing hydrogen gas from Canada.
Produced using electricity from fusion reactors!
Nah, Trudeau has a perpetual motion machine. Or a masturbation machine. I forget which one. Either way, it is the way of the future!
This is great information. This is a huge part of how we organize. It can be used for great financial gain. I know I accumulated a lot of coal (met and thermal) in early ’20 that has been re-rated. I think another re-rating is coming as China is being forced by energy reality to end its embargo on Australian coal. There are many such opportunities. The next one is the Green New Deal light that was passed in stealth via the Inflation Reduction Act. They are going to try and spend their way out of this. The Achilles Heel is… Read more »
sounds like a rough *couple* of winters.
SamlAdams: Not just Horst, but also Piers and Joe Sixpack. The price of LNG in the US has risen steadily over the past year, albeit less astronomically than in Europe. Propane tanks larger than the standard 20 lb grillers are difficult to find and enormously expensive. Aside from a few really decrepit ones I’ve seen on Craigslist, I’ve seen new 250 pounders advertised for $1250. Our new property has a 500 lb tank but I’d really like a second one. Long-term stored fuel for oven, dryer, hot water, and whole-house generator.
Huh. I havent seen a shortage of 30-100# DOT tanks. Non dot in place tanks shot up, almost doubled in price.
These larger capacity storage tanks will be handled like large magazines for firearms: you don’t really need them – this is the considered opinion of Those Who Know These Things; “hoarding” (i.e., in this instance, anticipating personally dangerous circumstances) is just another example of White Supremacy; they’re inherently dangerous, but fortunately the Nanny State is there to protect you from yourself, child.
Watch “em work.
All we can know for sure is that it isn’t due to the presence of a deep state, right Z? 😉 We elect clowns now. They dance and caper for the cameras, the media focuses all its attention on them, and old boomers are mesmerized by the TV the same way they were since they were kids. My entire family is still into sportzball – along with the rainbows, the nogger worship, the political correctness. The only thing wrong with the world today are guys like us and Donald Trump. I am told every day by such people that the… Read more »
Had lunch with a bunch of normals yesterday.
They’re going on about NFL training camp and buying boats.
Lunch-hour traffic is even worse than it was pre-lockdown.
so it’s safe to assume they are not feeling any pain from the economy. any ideas as to why they are so far immune? if they are old enough, they might have paid off houses, which makes a huge difference.
We’ve been “assorted” into never knowing anyone truly unlike ourselves.
I’m from the last generation when my profession accommodated local boys made good, so I know fairly equal numbers of ruined men and indestructible professional-class golems. For the latter, life has never been better—in no small part because every day they have new ruins to piss on.
kvh- Interesting question. I will attempt to provide more details. We all work in the MIC, so that provides a certain level of stability. Two of these folks probably have paid off homes. On the other hand I think they both have kids in college. Boat guy has no wife or kids. He does have a house and a rental property that probably covers one mortgage payment. I don’t think either are paid off. He also has a loaded 2021 GMC Sierra pickup. The final fellow has a house, ex-wife, and some kids. Also has a boat, truck, and other… Read more »
Wild Geese: Had a rare dinner out with friends a week ago. As is usual in our DFW ‘burbs, you’d never know there was any economic uncertainty – roads and restaurants packed with lots of new cars and lots of diverse denizens – while our quiet conversation (continued later in a private home) focused on our mutual plans and relocation properties. Those of us who take notice truly are a people apart.
It’s mind blowing just mingling amongst normies who carry on as if nothing is happening. Everyone buying newer, bigger cars, planning spiffy exotic vaycays, and gagging over the latest celeb news.
Dunno. How do you think a society that’s about to shake itself apart should behave? Saw a video of a guy who got stabbed in the neck. The strike was crazy quick – like a short jab, almost. Bang, then the action of the fighters moves off-camera. The video stays on the guy who got hit while the stops in his tracks, holds his hand to his neck, and looks around for some help. It’s an arterial wound and a genuinely shocking amount of blood is pouring on the floor, but he just stands there looking around. Not reacting at… Read more »
I saw that vid.
That clip is an object lesson as to why you don’t go after a guy with a blade.
That was the exact advice of an ex-Airborne guy that gave me some amazingly practical training on knife use many decades ago. A knife fight was a last resort after you’ve exhausted every other last resort.
Wild Geese: And why, unless you shoot when they’re still a significant distance away, in most cases the knife reaches your flesh before your finger pulls the trigger.
When you a see a gun, you charge the guy. When you see a knife, you run away. Gun, charge. Knife, run.
-Jimmy Hoffa
You may not care much for libertarian social thought and politics but Mises, Hayek and Rothbard were good economists and discussed this aspect of the “crack up boom.” The regime’s gaslighting may seem ridiculous — why do they tell obvious lies when they know that everyone knows they’re lying — but Orwell and Goebbels fairly well explained it as did Bernays before them. If you happen to turn on the tube and catch a moment or two of this press secretary, Jean Pierre, you know that central casting runs the set and that the elite, before their downfall, are having… Read more »
Upvoted.
Mises, Hayek and Rothbard have, in my humble opinion, given as complete a treatment as can be had to the nature of money and value.
Also, Hayek’s treatise The Road to Serfdom is a great rundown of some of the problems with micro-management and long-term planning of compleck systems – in this case, a Nation.
Rushdie was stabbed in far western New York, not New Jersey, by a “New Jersey man” from Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon. On the one hand we decry Islamic nutjobs trying to kill each other over 1400-year old religious feuds, on the other hand we claim that Islam is the “religion of peace” and invite them it immigrate here even when they try to kill us. The hypocrisy is compounded when the Zionist States of America lecture the world about human rights and the rule of law, and then go and summarily execute people like Zawahiri and Solemaini. Weird times, indeed. Clownworld… Read more »
That does not explain why the system trundles on, despite violating all of the rules we have been told are inviolable. Social inertia. Most people, most of the time, keep doing the same things they’ve been doing out of habit. But not everyone, and we are seeing social breakdown in rising crime rates. Including things like mass and blatant shoplifting that weren’t ‘things’ during the high crime 70s & 80s. Also in all the tranny bullshit. And the shift in attitudes regarding the legitimacy of the system and the desirability of working. We’re headed for real mass chaos if the… Read more »
Sort of like the person everyone knows who lived the high life off credit card debt for several years, only to crash and burn when he finally maxed everything out. You can keep a lifestyle for a long time before the bill is due, but the longer it lingers, the more painful it becomes.
When a child is not embraced by the village, he will burn it down and fell its warmth. But before that ever happens, all comforts of the west must go. Smarth phones, constant food suppyl, irrigation, heat and netflix. Only then mister normie will start to feel the need to change and stand up to all of this bullshit. As for us, dissidents, we just need to find a way to survive and thrive in our own way. We will aways be the minority and maybe someday there will be men who to support and die for if need be.… Read more »
Nice comment, space cowboy…
Yea, we’ll carry that weight : ^ ))
> How does drag queen story hour fit in here? Who is benefitting from this lunacy? The point of this assault on the children seems to be the promotion of general mayhem At the current rate of acceleration, we’ll be seeing young boys being introduced in school to ‘Chris’ to allow them to ‘explore themselves’ while Republican congressmen lambast the practice, begging to go back to wholesome events like Drag Queen Story Hour. There are literally no brakes, and the radicals will keep pushing ahead just for the sake of keeping ahead of the progressive curve. It literally makes no… Read more »
it’s true there are no brakes, but people are pulling their kids out of public schools in large numbers. and that trend will only accelerate.
karl: While the upswing in homeschooling is encouraging, it is far too little too late. Perhaps 5% of US students are homeschooled, with another 12% in private school – and those students are, unfortunately, not all White. The average White citizen is still sending Billy Jr. off to the local public school with his best buddy Jamar, in the absolute certainty that the new school board members will ensure no teachers or approved texts indoctrinate their kids into their particular ‘ism.’
AZ leads the nation. All parents now have access to private school vouchers. I believe $7500 per student. Now that’s not at the level estimated in public school funding, but public schools are both inefficient, as in costly—and worthless, as in education for the buck. It will be interesting to see the alternative schools begin to incorporate and cater to their new clientele. Hell, even my old university opened up a charter school strictly to feed them usable Freshmen.
This is one facet of the unholy alliance between those primarily animated by power and wealth, and the other camp comprised of Homo sapiens living as true believer / radicals. Both have always been there in western (and perhaps all human) history, with the power / wealth perhaps having and earlier and larger cadre. But the crazies have grown dramatically as civilization made life less risky. Both groups have always presented problems for civilization. Their genius was in setting aside differences and doing the handshake. They realized that joining forces and each taking their desired goods from the spoils was… Read more »
In shorter terms: the crazies are footsoldiers and for their loyal service get to diddle our children while the oligarchs enslave us and rob us blind.
Sounds about right.
One thing for certain is that many jobs are simply unnecessary. That’s what the Covid shut-down showed. You can’t send that many people home and have the economy keep going if those people are doing productive things. Automation, productivity gains, etc., mean that many workers are doing busy work or working for service industries that don’t mean much if they shut down. As for Germany, I agree, it’s just bizarre. No one seems to be concerned. And it’s not just this winter, but their long-term standard of living is at stake. Germany’s economic model relies on cheap energy from Russia.… Read more »
RE: Germany – on top of nat. gas prices x 10 vs. January of 2021 – the Rhine river is now at such low levels due to (cue spooky music) climate change, they’re unable to float barges – which is a big problem. If the Rhine creek don’t rise and it gets real chilly come January – not sure the bizarre whistling though the graveyard will continue.
It should get real fun when all those “Germans” named Mohammed get all kinds of wild when they are told to freeze and starve by the government, which is used to Hans und Franz, who are docile little geldings and would never riot or threaten their overlords because of the ghost of Mustache Guy. Mohammed and his buddies don’t give a shit about that.
You knw the revolution has begun when it isn’t diversity doing all the looting of CVS stores, but bands of white guys.
You’ll know the revolution as begun when bands of white guys are allowed to DEFEND their businesses and neighborhoods “rooftop Korean” style without spending the next 5 years in legal jeopardy.
I figure the old Germans will be taxed at punitive rates to provide unlimited subsidized heat for the new Germans.
Soylent green for the new Germans is old Germans!
Yeah, saw that. Again, just odd.
The DAX is only down ~15% and up substantially from its lows. How is that possible with a potential energy shortage in the short-term and a dramatic rise in energy prices in the long run?
That simply doesn’t add up.
The ironic thing in that is the low levels showing the low water marker stones from the 1600s (and they have probably been visible many times in between). If it gets a lot lower they might even get back to the long droughts of the 1540s when the Danube and Rhine dried up so you could walk across them at many points. And that was when huge amounts of water were not being drawn off for millions of people. That climate change is almost as bad as the 1500s. The horror of modern activity! If only NPCs could use google… Read more »
Its like Napa valley. The wineries explicitly lay out that the topography and soil chemistry that makes it so great for wine grapes was caused by the giant ice sheets and glaciers that formed the valley. In Napa. Ice sheets hundreds of yards thick. But 2 degrees change in temperature (either direction!) is man made and unprecedented. It boggles the mind how wilfully ignorant and just plain retarded people have to be these days.
Citizen: No one in charge seems too worried, but I’d argue the frantic internet searches for wood stoves and firewood indicate the average citizen is plenty concerned. He knows that the heat in Ahmad’s subsidized apartment will remain on 78 degrees, while the local authorities remotely set Klaus’ at 62.
I would argue that we are in the lull before the storm. Most people are skating by using credits cards to leverage debt into a continuation of their old lifestyle. They do this because they can, and also because they have no expectation of ever paying off the debt. They assume that government will forgive all debt and monetize it. This spreads the impact to everyone in society and has the effect of transferring costs from the parasites onto the productive. How long can this go on? I think we’re down to months now. It’s going to get ugly and… Read more »
People aren’t thinking ahead and hoping for debt forgiveness, they are just trying to get by. Inflation hit people so quickly a lot are using credit cards to float gas and groceries. There has been more resistance to student loan forgiveness than I expected, there is no way consumer debt ever gets thrown out.
Student loans HAVE been forgiven. If you don’t make a payment on a loan for 30 months, that means you are not paying back your loan.
My desk used to securitize $750+ million a month of “private” student loans, paying a fixed rate barely above 1.00%, with a fifty year maturity. I haven’t closed a student loan deal in over 12 months (thank goodness).
To your first paragraph, Mow: good observation. Seems to be the same in England, with ever more lax constraints on payment, meaning that, one can eventually get away with paying either nothing, or substantially less than what one took.
To your second paragraph: I didn’t understand any of it!
i think people figure – correctly – they will just walk away from the CC debt if things hit bottom. why not, there are no consequences to doing so.
Stock up now on those tuna cans. I used to buy a six pack of canned chicken at Sams club. Was $10 then $13, $15, now $18. In less than a year. Most supplies I use in my business have increased 70%.
Well at least I haven’t financed these purchases unlike a few others I know. Slowly at first then all of a sudden.
for some reason tuna prices haven’t risen much, yet. i can get a 6oz can of chunk light for about $1 still.
OMG, I just had a dark thought. What if it isn’t tuna?
haha i swear to god i almost put in a comment about Soylent Green! the fact we are all thinking the same thing is telling…
That’s because tuna is now people.
David: I’m the only one in my family who eats tuna so I’ve stocked chicken and keystone beef and pork. On the other hand I found some surprisingly nice and solid wooden rockers on sale yesterday (unfortunately made in Vietnam, but they support up to 300 lbs) for $60 instead of $180, assembled and delivered. Grabbed a couple for our new front porch.
They will learn to eat (and love) tuna in due course. Buy, buy, buy.
Nothing will get “ugly” IMO until the normal comforts are gone. While normie can still flip on the game, check out his favorite shows on netflix, throw on the Xbox and play games – nothing will change. The march forward will continue and the move further and further left continues unimpeded. New precedents will be set. What I think you will see next is persecution for your politics and most certainly for being white. The banning of whites from certain jobs/roles in our society. This will be allowed to happen because those of us who have not been gotten to… Read more »
The great lesson of Covid is that the will of the people is a myth. Biden could announce that government agents will be going door to door to kick men in the groin and the people will just accept it. They will grumble on line, but otherwise take the kicks. A few will dodge the groin kickers, but most will shrug and open wide.
Hope does not lie in the masses. Hope lies in the elites blowing their own brains out.
Skill and cunning will arise when it must. Nothing focuses the mind like 3 days without a meal.
If the hiring of 87,000 IRS agents is going to happen,what are the chances that they don’t do any real tax investigations but a slick way of creating another quasi military enforcement arm of the government.
Everyone seems to think audits and cash grabs (protection money) are what it is about but the IRS business is just a wedge for more despotism and mayhem.
Quadrupling the amount of agents. All with accounting degrees I’ll bet.
There is a version of Brooks law with regards to the administrative state. The more people that are added to a department, the less work produced and the slower the production of what gets done. Adding 87,000 people to a department of 74,000 will take years. There is also the fact that the federal workforce is full of geezers. There is a big turnover coming over the next decade.
My guess is ten years from now the IRS looks like any other third world government office.
Having worked in tech in corporate America for 25 years now, I can tell you one thing I’ve learned. Adding more bodies does not equate to more productivity. In fact, it does the opposite. I started to really see the effects of this when I was in my mid 20s in the early 2000s. Lots of people with useless degrees were finding ways to get into the software business because it was relatively lucrative. Especially if they had a degree in gender studies or Greek philosophy. These are your typical useless, female, banshee shit-libs of today. They all broke into… Read more »
I think the groin kicking was mostly a one time thing. The masses were propagandized into believing it was good for them. You can only go to that well so often. There are a lot of people beyond dissidents just starting to realize they were conned. Wait until a Republican president tries the same trick, and watch the violent pushback. If he had not been cheated out of a second term, the pushback against Trump’s vaccine would have been yuuuge. Of course some things never change. The left has hated the FBI since Hoover, and now is their chance to… Read more »
You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time; you cannot fool all the people all the time.
And yet the normies have revolted in the past. As the commenter above says, usually when they are hit personally very, very hard. France was going downhill from the mid 1740s, but it was the bad harvest and cost of bread in 1788 that lit the spark and dragged in the normies.
Official (USA) inflation this year is in the 9% ish range. That is the official claim, which means the actual rate is much higher. How much higher? I don’t keep tabs, but 20% easily. Will this rate last? I don’t know that either. My point: At such high inflation rates, even the usurious credit card rates (as high as 23% for lesser credit scores) is made a lighter burden. Those with better credit ratings rationally should maximize their debt and pay it back slowly. I personally have about $20K in student loans from over ten years ago (during my university… Read more »
I’m not an economist, but it seems absurd to expect that a world economy could be shut down like ours was, without repercussions.
Or that a society as fundamentally divided as ours is, could continue to function as “one nation…. indivisible….”
Pat Buchanan is asking many of the same questions as Z-man: What could possibly bring it all together again? And if the answer is ‘Nothing’, then where does that leave us? What comes next?
https://vdare.com/articles/patrick-j-buchanan-how-when-do-we-come-together-again
Buchanan asks the wrong question, which is “WHY would we ever come together again?” There is no answer to it he would like. Buchanan has a great mind trapped in a time warp. His suggestion that a foreign attack might unite the country is laughable; a repeat of 9/11 would set off jubilation and partying, maybe some even within the area hit.
The United States has entered the collapse stage, and while none of us know when and how it ends, it ends.
That’s exactly what I thought when I saw the article. I no longer want to “come together” with them, since that entails subservience and surrender to rule by deviants and spiteful mutants who want me and my people dead.
This exactly ^^^. Not only do I not want to share a society with these monsters, but I don’t even want to share a planet with them. What bothers me most is how full of hate and malice I’ve become when it comes to leftists. There isn’t a word big enough to describe my true disdain for them.
Good point. Another 9/11 and my viewpoint is not outrage at American lives lost, it’s indifference that a bunch of people who hate me have died. I’d still get worked up about the firemen, but at this point are we even sure the firemen would risk so much to help people who hate them just as much?
Depending on the target.
Right? I mean, how upset could one get if it was California or NY? To be honest, I can’t imagine having any patriotic feelings towards my country ever again. I don’t recognize this place nor many of the “people” in it. I have not only lost my patriotism, but I’ve grown to despise it.
Loyalty to corporations or governments (except for ethnostates) is for suckers and fools. Patriotism is loyalty to the patria, the fatherland. One can replace this with ‘motherland’ or if one is a genderneutral twit with ‘homeland’, but regardless we don’t have one anymore.
It’s pretty bad when I catch myself rooting for Russia, indifferent to Taiwan, and hoping for an alternative to the US dollar, as painful as that will be for the country.
Yep. I’m a vet and have always been pro-military. How naive I was! I’d never recommend any young person joining the military.
“I’m not an economist, but it seems absurd to expect that a world economy could be shut down like ours was, without repercussions.” Heh. Don’t worry, since the fancy mathematics and bizarre theories, nobody is really an economisss. Commenter ‘David Wright’, somewhere in this thread, did a basic calculation regarding cans of tuna and business expenses. This showed that, for his person, inflation was bloody massive. That’s some good personal economics right there. No need for the differential equations, bizarre assumptions and Fischer-Scholes model, or whatever. As to Mr. Buchanan, I must echo other respondents to your post: who the… Read more »
Yeah, I get it, I don’t want to come together with the Progs either.
In fact, it strikes me as impossible for two opposing sides to come together, when you have no common ground to stand on. Any compromise would be unacceptable to both. I expect Buchanan knows that.
So the bigger question remains: Since the two sides aren’t going to be coming together, what’s that gonna look like?
Will Americans stand by and watch our liberties being gradually whittled away?
Will we stand there smiling and keep on taking that kick in the balls? Or if not, what….?
Related to this, one of the parallels between today and the late Roman republic is how ever more unspoken rules are being violated. And once one side breaks them and shows how effective doing so is, it becomes necessary for all parties to ignore that rule. We saw this in Rome as roughing up your political opponents grew into casually murdering them and their supporters and how bringing the army into Rome went from off-limits to a matter of course. In the US, we saw using weaponization of federal law enforcement against political dissidents escalate to the targeting of a… Read more »
The HBO series, “Rome” traced out this period of time. There’s this scene where one of the legionaries – very devoted to the republic and all its ways – is injured and taken with Caesar’s army across the Rubicon. He wakes up and asks where they are, only to hear they are all near Rome, itself. He mutters something like, “Damn, we’ll all be on crosses before the week is out.” But, instead, they walk in to Rome to find the whole place deserted and, well, we know the rest. It’s an empty shell. Still dangerous for lots of reasons.… Read more »
There’s an ocean of printed money still holding this lead balloon in the air.
Inflation because of this is higher, but still muted due to global absorption. Everybody talks a big game of the end of the reserve currency but the truth is no body else wants it.
When I was a young man just starting out, it was gospel that no economy could last with this volume of debt and money printing. By the rules back then, we should have collapsed into hyper inflation long ago. Yet, here we are.
The debt makes more sense than interest rates. You can have extremely high debt – especially interest-only debt like the government – so long as interest rates are low.
The real yield on the 10-year was pretty close to zero for the 2010s and is now deeply negative. Real yields in Europe have been negative for a long time.
Something is very wrong with an economy where you don’t get paid to lend governments and businesses money. Yet, here we are.
The thing is, the actual people making the actual decisions do get paid, and paid handsomely. That’s why the show goes on. And it will continue, as long as the jugglers can keep everything in the air.
What is to be gained by pretending that there will never be a day of reckoning because it hasn’t happened yet? Do you sleep better at night? Does it justify remaining idle? Do you really want to live in a world consisting of the illusion that consequences don’t exist?
“wants” got nothing to do with it.
A key, if not THE key, to the conundrum posed here is simply to ask the question: Who is it, in the main, that profits from all this debt? Who is collecting the interest? Who profits from transaction fees?
Note that the groups that profit from the fees care not in the least whether interest rates are positive or negative.
The classical economics conception of commodity money is clearly wrong.
Its been completely invalidated by the experience of the last fifty years, yet many people cling to the concept.
Not an economist so not sure what you mean by commodity money, gold or other commodity backed currency?
My layman’s take is that money can be backed many ways: commodity, trust (all involved agree to accept it and abide by the rules) or force. I’m sure there are others. Just because the others exist it doesn’t mean commodity backed is invalidated. Commodity money seems to be the fallback when the others fail (lose trust or power to enforce) .
The second option you give is fake news. The USD isnt accepted because of the “full faith and credit” of the people, but because the US Treasury demands tax payments in USD, and if every global Corp doesn’t pay up in USD, their executives do a stint at the gray bar motel.
In reality, currency is either hard (backed by a commodity) or spikey (backed by jackbooted thugs with sharp objects).
Remember when Obama threatened to deposit a trillion-dollar coin or something to erase the deficit?
It was taken half-seriously by the media. The Republicans sputtered and farted about it. Maybe that was when our rulers realized that nothing matters anymore.
Harry Truman already printed the trillion dollar bill. Mr. Burns stole it and Homer Simpson gave it to Fidel Castro.
Re: Drag Queen Story Hour – it’s a late development in the overall, first voluntary, now mandatory, acceptance of male homosexuality. And what does “acceptance” involve? What is society at large accepting, and how has it become the norm? It turns out that the governing principle is quite popular (not the icky stuff). And that governing principle is: F*** who you want, when, where, and how you want, without regard to existing relationships or commitments, and if there are consequences, socialize them. This has proven quite popular with men who like women, and with women who like men, and who… Read more »
To paraphrase Auron MacIntyre in order to get past the filter, they are evil want to have relations with kids. That is the point of all the drag queen stuff. They are trying to sexualize pre pubescent children. A sane society would be giving these people the death penalty.
Acceptance has nothing to do with it. It is far beyond that. What it really is is normalization and to subvert the belief that heterosexuality is normal. These people view gays and pedophiles as the normal ones, and if you don’t too you are a bigot or a “phobe”. It is exactly the same subversion technique being applied to race.
“Blacks are the REAL founders of America, and you evil white people exploited the brown/blacks for your own selfish motives. White western man didn’t really build society, blacks did.”
And their normalization effort slots neatly into their depopulation agenda.
They will really ramp this process up if they manage to install the social credit system.
the thing is, we can’t trust either side of the story. we don’t know for sure that EU has had its energy supplies curtailed. and we can’t trust that people there are not upset *if* energy supplies have been cut. the same goes for every major and minor event in the news. one thing that is going on is adaptation by the population, to shortages and inflation. how many people here have changed their grocery shopping habits ? you can charge $8 a pack for hot dogs, but you aren’t going to sell a single dog to me. maybe people… Read more »
“Reality will out”? I sure hope so but I’m no longer sure what reality is. When the current democrat president sends his own gestapo to raid the home of a former president who may run to be a future president would you/ could you ever believe that could happen here? In our “free” republic? Lawyers being subpoenaed for their “inviolable” client communications? People harassed and even jailed for their political views because they vote Trump and yet people with political views of Marxists, communists and fascists are celebrated? Even elected to office? The government through their co conspirators the media… Read more »
i never said reality is what *you* want it to be. we are all finding out what reality is, just like the Titanic found out where the iceberg was. TPTB believe in magic and their own infallibility; reality is in the process of providing them with a corrective lesson. sometimes hunkering down and waiting things out really is the best one can do (but not if you’re in Pompeii :P)
Very well said.
That would be nice, but at this point could it be recognized?
If/when enough people are cold and hungry some of them might deprogram.
Those who can not will cull themselves. Depopulation doesn’t have to include you.