Imagine you are a rich guy, maybe a banker working at an investment house, and your neighborhood starts to have a crime problem. Maybe you get mugged on the way to your car or perhaps you start hearing about break-ins in the area. All of a sudden, your safe world is no longer safe. You think that maybe it is time to hire some private security to enforce the rules, but you find that they do not exist. All of a sudden, your cash is not all that important to maintaining your lifestyle.
That is the position of Western political elites as they come to terms with the reality playing out on the Ukraine battlefront. The West has lots of cash. They can literally create what they need from thin air. Sure, it has created inflation for the Dirt People, but only a sucker cares about them. Ukraine is what matters. Even though Congress is slow walking the next pile of cash, there is still plenty to send Ukraine. The EU and now the U.S. are plotting to “loan” Ukraine the money.
The trouble is dollars and euros are not much use on the battlefield. What Ukraine needs is machines, ammunition for the machines and men to run the machines, but that is something the West is struggling to produce. CNN has a story up that reports the Russians now produce three times the number of artillery shells as America and Europe combined, which is probably an understatement. The production numbers cited are more theoretical than actual for the West.
The industrial aspect of this war has been a topic of discussion around here since the war started, but like the rich guys living in their fantasy world of wealth and access, the political class of the West has not thought about it. Making stuff, inventing stuff and fixing stuff is for the Dirt People. Cloud People need their time and energy to think about new ways to describe the glorious future or turn bits of invented money into more bits of invented money so they can underwrite their lifestyle.
What the war in Ukraine is doing is reminding the world that the strength of a country is not magical numbers in reports that no one reads, but the hard cold reality of making stuff, fixing stuff, and inventing new ways to make and fix stuff. You can probably throw in food production, which is a form of making stuff, but a unique form, along with digging stuff out of the ground, like energy products and minerals. Countries good at these things will be strong countries.
The West no longer does these things. America and Europe still grow lots of food but the war on food production, as part of the Gaia cult, is threatening to kill off whole swaths of farm production. The war on digging up the ground is mostly about aesthetics, as the Cloud People hate seeing people do dirty work like farming or digging minerals out of the ground. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. has dropped by half over the last half century, despite the population growing by a third.
This is why the West is losing this proxy war with Russia. Despite having a far smaller population and smaller GDP, Russia still makes things and has the facilities and work force to make more things. If you can grow your own food in vast excess, supply your own energy needs, plus much more for export and you make things that people around the world want to buy, you are going to be immune from the machinations of the money changers in New York and London.
It goes beyond this though. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and the world’s biggest consumer market. India is the second largest consumer market, and it is emerging as a manufacturing powerhouse. Russia is now the fifth largest economy in the world, despite the sanctions. What is happening here is the places where things are made and dug out of the ground are getting rich, which means they can also buy things, like the stuff they make for Western markets.
What we are seeing here is the death of the middle-man economy. For the last half century, America has positioned itself to be the money lender, the regulator, and the facilitator of economic activity, rather than the producer. To finance this, much of the manufacturing base was auctioned off and the economy became reliant on the production of credit to the global economy. To a lesser degree, the EU has done the same thing, as the junior partner of the United States.
What the war on Russia is revealing is that in a street fight, the banker has no chance against the guy who works on a factory floor. Sure, the banker has a Brazilian Jujitsu trainer and access to the finest steroids, but the working man knows how to fight and win, so it can never be much of a match. Further, in the contest of countries, it is the rules of the street that matter, not the rules of the boardroom. The competition of nations is always a street fight.
Long ago, the paleos made the point that you cannot have an economy based on everyone doing each other’s laundry. The great transition from an industrial economy to a service economy was cheered by the Cloud People but people like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot warned that it was unsustainable. A generation on and the world is learning that those old guys were right. A country that does not make things, fix things, and invent things is no longer a serious country.
Twenty years ago, Yuri Slezkine observed in his book, The Jewish Century, that the American economy had been transformed into one that primarily served the interests of the facilitators and middle-men. Jews, he argued, were unusually skilled at these tasks and that is why they have been so successful. According to the Atlantic, the golden age of American Jews is ending, and probably taking America with it. It turns out that the middle-man economy is not sustainable.
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“ According to the Atlantic, the golden age of American Jews is ending…”
Of all the terrible things we face; poverty, war, racial strife, diseases exploding throughout the land, growing illiteracy, fentanyl in every consumer product, political corruption, it’s the backlash against Jews that worries me the most.
The Jewish people have been blamed for everything from the plague to all the wars.
When will we support them and show them the unconditional love they so deserve?
Off topic -The guy who does Stone Toss Comics has been doxxed. Now he’ll be ritually denounced, fired from his job, and arrested on some fake hate speech charge. Hate hate hate hate AINO.
Doxxers are snitches. Take their names
He’s been falsely identified before, so maybe it’s that again. No matter what happens he’s theoretically ok, because since his last doxxing he’s become an NFT millionaire.
Unfortunately that meant dealing with cryptofags. Odds that if someone sold him out, it’s one of them? At least 100%.
I’m lucky that I know how to build and perform useful things anywhere.
I’m probably doxxed. It will hurt. Fuck them.
https://youtu.be/jRwtAQ1i8cU?si=9Yr34sTKc1XLBgJz
When you decouple making money from producing value, the value of money eventually drops towards zero. We are not producing much value, hence very small actual economy. It is just that the world is only now really catching on. Gold and bitcoin are rallying. I think that is because the non Western central banks and other big players are getting out of dollars. They don’t believe dollars will be worth much in the future. Considering that that is where most consumer goods are made that is like your credit card being declined.
But gold and bitcoin can’t handle the volume necessary if the dollar breaks. I would not be surprised if Russia and China, or maybe just china alone, announce some kind of alternative currency for international trade within two years or so. Maybe they are hoarding gold to be able to back it. Or maybe something else will back it although not sure what that would be (would you like to exchange your 401k for three containers full of Russian artillery shells or transmissions for a T-80 tank?? Me neither).
In any case we have forgotten econ 101, production is the creation of value, and reality is not a fun teacher but is very effective
Im with Peter Schiff, go for gold
I have this idea that if things get bad enough where gold is really necessary, the regime will do a repeat of what it did in 1933
https://theconversation.com/how-the-us-government-seized-all-citizens-gold-in-1930s-138467#:~:text=Most%20memorably%2C%20this%20occurred%20in%20the%20US%20in,citizens%20to%20sell%20at%20well%20below%20market%20rates.
I fear that as well. I habe never been able to understand how the hell that was legal. It was possibly the most openly commie move in US government history
In an “emergency,” pretty much anything can be made “legal.” Such as a CDC ordered rent moratorium.
True. A CDC ordered rent moratorium…. I’d forgotten how crazy things have become. The rational assumption must obviously be that not I’d too crazy to be impossible for the regime
Moran,
Yes, the taking of privately held gold, even in the form of government-issued currency, was unconstitutional, but it was necessary for pure fiat “currency” to take the next step forward.
They already had the “Federal” Reserve, the Banksters Delight (immediately useful to make it hand over fist in the Great War) in place, but that next step of removing, insofar as possible, competition for pure fiat from alternate stores of value was that next phase.
So, they gave you some piddling amount of fiat currency in exchange. Hmm, wonder if this will be revisited as Bitcoin gets “halved”; i.e., you get half of its supposed value in the new CBDC. And think of all the energy saved, beneficial to Gaia, when all of that Bitcoin mining is made illegal!
Coming and going they’ve got ya…
It was legal because the Constitution gives Congress the explicit power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof.”
It doesn’t say they have to do so intelligently or fairly…
Coining money does not imply the right to take privately owned gold. You would need a sort of eminent domain logic to make it legal. And I don’t think eminent domain applies to portable property.
The alternatives, prohibited substances or weapons, are even more ludicrous
According to the framers I’m 100 that taking people’s gold was absolutely, over the top unconstitutional.
In 1933 we were a different society. We were law abiding and really did not need gold coins, but could still move about the economy on the fiat, “greenbacks”. In a future of hyper inflation or economic collapse, alternative currency will be necessary. That will include gold and silver. No one will sell you a tank full of gas when the fiat dollar is questionable or simply worthless, regardless of the law.
In Argentina and Zimbabwe they violate the law all the time wrt their required use of State currency or official exchange rates. It’s a crime they cannot enforce just like use of illicit drugs. When no one obeys, the is no prohibition.
Boeing, the premier American export manufacturer, imploding and burning off a century’s worth of quality reputation in five years, makes all of that worse. High end used to be America’s niche in manufacturing. Noe that’s ot just dropping like a rock but physically out of the d*mn sky. Boeing s crisis has real effect on the credibility of the dollar. (So much so that I’m not surprised some suspect sabotage. It’s a hell of a time to have the premier American advanced export manufacturer lose credibility just now)
Russia and China, or maybe just china alone, announce some kind of alternative currency
—
There is nothing about the Chinese or their history to suggest that they have any discipline or desire to enact such a scheme (in fact there’s plenty to suggest otherwise. Just look at it right now: they’ve built their entire economy around the idea of selling stuff to people who cannot afford it, a vendor-financing scheme on a nationwide scale.
I’m not sure Chinese history is more important than western history for predicting a country whose state philosophy is based on the works of a German Jew and who openly state that the last 500 years of Western supremacy was a historical mistake about to be corrected. Beijing wants power and is willing to learn from anyone how to get it, including the West’s imperial history
China doesn’t even have a bond market for foreigners. I think like 4% of Chinese bonds are held by non-Chinese.
You can’t have a global currency without a global bond market. China won’t relinquish that control.
To have the world use your currency, they have to be able to store that currency and that means a large and liquid bond market.
Sure, you could maybe use gold, but if China or Russia wanted a gold-backed currency, they would have done it already. They don’t want it.
Yep. For now, there’s no alterative to the dollar.
A BRICs currency is a non-starter, except for large, quasi-government deals/payments at best. To have a currency, you need trust and a bond market. A BRICs currency has neither.
The only good news is that the Eurodollar system will implode at some point. As to what follows, I haven’t a clue.
It always gets me downvoted but:
Global trade lockup.
It’s happened before
But gold and bitcoin can’t handle the volume necessary if the dollar breaks.
Anything sufficiently (and conveniently) divisible can handle the volume. The value of a thing is only what someone else is willing to trade for it. If that means gold has to rise to the value per mg of insulin, so be it. Obviously, we have the technology to make tablets with mcg quantities of medicine. Making tablets with small quantities of gold could use the same equipment, if it were to become necessary.
I’m not saying gold is an ideal medium of exchange, but I would be sitting pretty if it were to become so.
Yeah true but if gold appreciated fortunes would be counted in micrograms. That would almost made it fairy dust
The dollar isn’t going anywhere for some time. There’s more dollar debt outside the US than in the US. That means that businessmen across the globe will need dollars to pay off that debt and interest for many years to come.
Also, what’s the alternative?
Look, I hate GAE as much as anyone, but we have to be realistic. The world runs on dollars – really, Eurodollars – and that’s not going to change for awhile.
Central banks can do what they want. Banks and businessmen around the world will still use dollars because there’s no alternative. You say the US govt is in bad shape. Quite true, but so are the govts of Europe, Japan, UK and China.
Maybe the BRICs come up with an alternative currency. How’s that going to work? They’d need a massive bond market for that new currency, but that would require all of those countries to convert their current currency to the new BRIC currency and that’s not going to happen.
A currency requires a bond market to store that currency. The treasury market dwarfs all other govt bond markets. China doesn’t even have a bond market that foreigners can access. India, no way.
Put yourself in the shoes of a businessman or bank. What currency compares to the dollar in terms of being accepted, stable and bond market size. Nothing.
But the good news is that Eurodollar system will implode at some point, but the odds are that all the other currencies will crash before the dollar, which, itself, will eventually supernova.
The dollar won’t go anywhere. Until it suddenly does. I’d bet there were plenty of gentlemen in posh London clubs saying the same about the pound sterling in 1910
Of course, the dollar will fade at some point.
Btw, with the pound, everyone could see the writing on the wall after WWI, but still took until the 1950s before the dollar overtook it. And the dollar was an obvious alternative even in the 1920s.
My point is that it can take decades.
My guess is that the dollar isn’t replaced by another current currency, but that the whole Eurodollar system implodes, forcing some type of completely new arrangement. When and how that happens, I have zero idea.
You’re basically right, and o am well aware that you are not a GAE supporter either.
I think the only difference between us is, I think something will happen with the dollar a little sooner than you do. You may well turn out to be right
A plausible scenario is a CBDC, though. I think that’s probably the reason they’ve left Bitcoin etc. alone for as long as they have. To get people used to the idea that it would be safe, even appreciating.
And then some crisis comes along, they demand tax payments in CBDC, and not only do you have to cough up that much, you need to have the paper trail showing that your declared CBDC earnings are enough to pay for your lifestyle. Same thing that got Capone locked up.
And then, to add injury to injury, they reprice debt like your mortgage into the new CBDC, at terms favorable to the banksters. Not only do the banksters not take a hit from their role in collapsing the currency, they get a windfall.
Out on the streets where goods are exchanged for money, only weed shops and lottery ticket vending machines in ‘hood groceries take bitcoin (at a fraction of its supposed price).
At the retail/”investor” level, digital currencies appeal to a certain kind of mind—a specific race of *brain*, one might say—that un-self-reflective STEM types especially have.
It’s such a well-designed trick, I wish I knew which org thought of it. They even gave the “inventor” an anime name!
It’s interesting that a normie-con like Pierre Poilievre just recently gave a speech in which he said that he would never allow Canadians to be subject to a CBDC (along with saying that he’d ban any member of government from having WEF ties). That’s quite a development from a nation that prides itself on going along to get along.
Need for a thing (businessmen around the globe need the dollar to pay off debt) does not guarantee its continued existence. By this logic, until such time as all debts are paid off, the dollar will continue to reign. New debts in dollars are racked up everyday, so, essentially, the dollar will never die.
(If you’re hanging your hat on a thing’s continued use — and necessity for its use — being a guarantor of its existence, that is.)
I’ve never understood this line of argument. The need to use the dollar does not logically entail that it will continue to exist. Nothing in a foreign businessman’s debt portfolio (in dollars) can change geopolitical trends that will always supervene on a nation’s currency, as well as the individual debt holder.
We’re not talking about a physical object deteriorating slowly in front of us with a visible expiration date on the distant horizon, in other words. That, I admit, *would* allow one to make a decent prediction as to when it will no longer be functional and necessary.
This is paper, and nothing more.
“Jews, he argued, were unusually skilled at these tasks and that is why they have been so successful.”
And that is also a big reason why we gutted our ability to make things. Wall Street which is controlled mainly by you know who was the incentivizer and enforcer.
For as much I’d want to pile blame on top of the merchant class for that, I honestly don’t think it ranks terribly high: they would have profited no matter what. However, there has always been a disconcerting trend between women entering the workforce and the economy bending down to their level to support jobs they excel at rather than those that benefit the nation as a whole.
Doubtful. Gutting “our” manufacturing base appears correlated to growth in central government, not in growth of you know who. The Lower East Side was home to the desperately poor, which for a long time included high numbers of them. People subsisting on turnips and cabbage soup didn’t export any jobs.
To the extent they were involved, a better case can be made that growth of the central government is tied to a tiny fraction of them, in much the same way it was in early USSR. The more money that passes through DC, the more sticks to the people handling it. It needn’t be anything more nefarious.
Listening to people in politics here in Europe talking about sending troops to Ukraine is really scaring me. Even after two years of war this idiots don’t seem to understand that this war is not Iraq or some african military expedition. I really hope it is all just bravado.
If they want to send them to the front lines to fight Russians then they are even dumber than I think. But I don’t believe that’s the plan. I think they are planning for a new DMZ somewhere in the country formerly known as Ukraine, kind of like the one in Korea.
What would a DMZ look like in an age of drones and guided missiles? Food for thought.
“the American economy had been transformed into one that primarily served the interests of the facilitators and middle-men. Jews, he argued, were unusually skilled at these tasks and that is why they have been so successful”
Then building, growing and fixing things is anti Semitic. Maybe SD, Florida and other states can banish those in their anti anti Semitism laws.
An empire built on financialization perhaps could have worked for much longer, had it been seen as an “honest/neutral broker.” Kind of like Switzerland but on a larger scale, say. Like it or not, the great majority of the world has enjoyed the material benefit and convenience of globalism, and would have been reluctant to give that up, in fact was reluctant to give that up, without some compelling reasons.
The people running the empire just got too greedy. Not just for money, but for power, for ideological ephemera. Human nature being what it is, maybe that was inevitable? The wealth of the empire that accrued to the financiers could have gone on in perpetuity, had they accepted some limits on themselves. But limits were something they could never accept, or not for very long.
This hypothetically benign financial empire wouldn’t have solved the problem of the underclass in AINO that it created (maybe it could have thrown more welfare at them), but under better management it could have kept the rest of the world happy for a long time.
America’s GDP is largely fictional…40% is government expenditures, and whether that is even net beneficial is doubtful…Americans are living in a fantasy world….When the dollar goes South and disappears from world commerce, that fantasy will quickly dissolve…
You don’t have to tell me. But what I’m saying is that this fiction could have gone on for a much longer time (in fact, as of this moment it is still going on). Even centuries, perhaps. If more prudently managed. It was, for a moment in time, the most globally beneficent empire the world has ever known. It could have had better legs.
To build, grow, fix and extract things without succumbing to Gaia sophistries requires social and human capital. Racially homogeneous countries will have far better social capital, and in most cases better human capital, too. And that is where Russia, China, Japan and Korea, among others, have a huge leg up on the Blackberry Fruitcake Empire. You see, diversity is not a strength after all. Contrariwise, it’s the deathwatch beetle in a nation’s framework. Knock us over with a ruddy feather, huh?
Low IQ diversity is particularly deadly, and the US has a lot of it….
pyrrhus: “Low IQ diversity is particularly deadly”
Apparently some d@mned armadillo [IQ 97.5?], named “Anthony Bernal”, has been moistening the va-jay-jay of boomerette Dr Jill Biden:
==========
A top Biden White House official has bullied and verbally sexually harassed colleagues over more than a decade, The Post has learned — but is considered “untouchable” because first lady Jill Biden regards him as her “work husband.”
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4223746/posts
==========
This weekend , I was telling y’all that if that va-jay-jay is still moistenable [and if that cl!toris can still rise to the occasion], then them boomerettes are gonna be dominating the Sexual Market Place [the SMP] well into the dadgum 2050s.
LOLing at all the poor Xer-ettes & Millennial-ettes & Zoomer-ettes who thought they were gonna have a seat at the table.
Muh advice: Invest in d!ldos & their batteries.
PS: Dr Jill has a disturbingly khazarian-sounding maiden name, of “Jacobs”.
And her nose seems to keep growing like frigging Pinocchio’s.
I’m looking at her picture on wikipedia, and she could easily be a body double for (((Babs Streisand))).
Just saying.
One area where the BRICS cannot compete with us is in the mass production of anti-White diversity training Power Point slides.
Post of the Day. Even Post of the Year!
“ What the war in Ukraine is doing is reminding the world that the strength of a country is not magical numbers in reports that no one reads, but the hard cold reality of making stuff, fixing stuff, and inventing new ways to make and fix stuff.”
I’ve commented on this previously, but it’s worth a second mention here about the USA pre WWII. When WWII went into high gear for us after Pearl Harbor attack, we had *idle* industrial capacity *equal* to the entire industrial capacity of the Axis powers. Idle due to the lingering effect of the Great Depression. The war in the Pacific was decided Feb 1943 with the end of the Guadalcanal Campaign, and the war in Europe in May 1943 with the end of the African campaign. Some might claim the Kursk offensive and defeat, but the African campaign drained the Eastern front making the Kursk defeat inevitable.
This was due to our ability to field and supply soldiers—both ours and the Allies, due to our extraordinary industrial capacity. (For example, we turned the switch and our car producers started to deliver Sherman Tanks in late 1942 for the African Campaign. A total of about 50k (Sherman’s only) were produced before the end of conflict in 1945, which was equal to *all* tanks produced by the Germans during the entire war!).
All the rest of the conflict was simply bloody mop up. but the outcome was never in doubt. Russia is not prewar USA, but it is definitely not today’s USA. And when this war ends, it will not forget the wake up lesson the GAE has taught it.
Jean-Jacques, Cheng Li, Juan and Shaneekwa and will not be able to dig things out of the ground, man the refineries and the factories, they will be too busy stealing and arguing about who is most worthy, or shooting each other, and the white man is sitting on the sidelines going “toldyaso” , while Ari and Jagdish scurry away with the leavings.
Yep. And such has been mentioned repeatedly wrt Russia—no Shaneekwa‘s to contend with. Why do we import them?
Years ago, when son went off to college we both looked over and then visited offerings. He finally went to a smallish university specializing in engineering fields (with rankings in top 10 across all American universities). Turns out this university was the recipient of many USSR refugees from the collapse. All White men with extraordinary amounts of knowledge in their (engineering) fields.
When son came home from first year, his stories abound wrt to these men. One for example would often remark how “stupid and spoiled” the students in class were. He would tell them about what true work was in succeeding in their studies and how lucky they were to be sitting in their chairs. He never brooked excuses for subpar work, while cajoling them to live up to their potential and parental expectations.
It was then that I realized—and son did too—that he (son) had never been challenged in his studies, nor made to understand just how damn easy life was in the USA compared to the rest of the world. Best money ever spent for an education.
I’ve commented on this previously, but it’s worth a second mention here about the USA pre WWII. When WWII went into high gear for us after Pearl Harbor attack, we had *idle* industrial capacity *equal* to the entire industrial capacity of the Axis powers. Idle due to the lingering effect of the Great Depression.
Yes, and no. Like him or hate him “Wheels” Roosevelt laid some of the groundwork for the “Arsenal of Democracy” prior to WW2. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s Naval Appropriations Bills were signed to 1) Strengthen the US Navy and 2) Get people back to work in the steel and shipbuilding industries, and related industries. Added to that was the Emergency Shipbuilding Program started in 1940 to supply ships for the UK and US. This spurred a massive expansion of shipyards and related suppliers.
Another turning point was the defeat of France in June 1940. It spurred creation of the Office of Production Management to “coordinate” conversion of civilian production to military needs. Ironically there was pushback from consumer product producers (ESPECIALLY the auto industry) because by the late 1930s / early 40s the economy had started to show a recovery and they didn’t want to sacrifice profits entirely to produce military equipment for the government. Thus begins “sweetheart” contracts from the government to “entice” civilian firms to take up more production of military equipment.
You’re correct that the US was not 100% on a military footing prior to 12/7/1941 but we were heading that way. Chrysler had built the Detroit Tank Arsenal in Warren, MI and was building M3 Medium tanks there before Pearl Harbor and (such was the need for equipment) before the entire plant was finished. Ford had broken ground for the Willow Run aircraft factory in Ypsilanti, MI in 1940 and, like Chrysler, started production of B-24 Liberators and components in the summer of 1941 before the factory was fully finished.
A great book to read about the Herculean efforts of American Industry in WW2 is Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Herman.
We certainly couldn’t do that today. 😒
No argument there, but when we went to war we had the ability to produce, and produce we did. The timing—even from your 1940 date—is at best 2 years added to the end of 1941–probably closer to a year. A new shipyard is nothing without materials like steel to produce ships.
Today for example, IIRC, when Trump hit office, he was amazed to learn we imported 60-80% or our steel and aluminum production. We never depended on anyone in 1940 for steel.
I could go one, but the point is made. We are truly a paper tiger as the Chinese like to say. Ukrainian war has shown this.
What?
Can’t build?
Can’t maintain?
Can’t operate?
Boeing says “hold my beer”…
Yeah, but Boeing totally kicks Aeroflot’s ass when it comes to DIE initiatives, bud.
HaHaHa
Yep
Door Systems chief engineer LaQuisha Franklin completely and wholeheartedly agrees…
Last week I watched a bunch of the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament. One of the main advertisers was a mining concern+ there apparently a lot more than iron ore up on “da Range”.
the thrust of most of the ads was that, if we allow more mining up north, it would be good for the manufacture of more windmills and solar panels. Sheesh.
Back in the day, the Iron Range was where you’d get all the tough, enforcer types.
Like the Hanson Brothers in the movie Slapshot from the late 70s. They were from the Iron Range, specifically Virginia, Minnesota and were real-life hockey players and enforcers. Two of them were played by Carlson brothers and the third was supposed to be played by Jack Carlson, but he got called up to the NHL, to be an badass enforcer, at the last minute.
Ha! The Hanson brothers – that was a great movie.
And the steel towns of Western Pennsylvania was where you got all the tough offensive linemen. Those days are gone. The New Left’s propaganda system made sure to machine all the toughness out of those rural white boys.
Citizen: One half of an older couple here, who are long-time hard-core ‘preppers,’ is from the Iron Range. Moved here 20 years ago after a decade in the middle of nowhere near the southern border. Although she’s a bit more realistic than her husband, they are resolutely color-blind and Minnesota ‘nice.’ I know, anecdote is not data; just thought I’d mention it.
Living near the southern border and remaining obtuse about race requires a full retard level of cucking. They need to move back to Minnesota and convert to Islam. Inshallah!
Minnesotans are the worst cucks that I’ve ever met. Great people, very nice, but an evolutionary dead-end. Pure Eloi.
Being nice is getting white people killed. To quote Johnny Cash, we’ll have to either get tough or die.
The Twin Cities are making sure the northern half of Minnesota gets a double dose of diversity.
The Finn/ Italian/ Balkan Rangers and their Scandinavian cousins to the west are like baby seals.
That being said, there are A LOT of Trump signs up north.
NE Minnesota even elected a Republican to Congress (!!!). Ferals, foreigners and fentanol are NOT popular, no matter how “Minnesota Nice” you are.
The first time I actually learned about it, I was very surprised at all the work shells of any kind require. I had always just assumed they were cast and then a fairly simple machining of the surface so it would work well in a barrel.
Here is a video of some pretty simple shells being manufactured at the Frankford Arsenal (it’s not actually in Frankford, but details….) in the city I grew up in during ww2. Frankford is a neighborhood in Philadelphia that was full of factories. It was a nice working class neighborhood. It is an absolute slum today. Frankford borders Kensington ave (that Kensington ave) . All the factories are long shut down, many are still standing with all the windows broken out, husks of a building. 1/2 the houses are condemned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGqLjnNIJY
I too am from Philly hence the name Hoagie. I grew up in South Philly near the Frankfurt arsenal. I watched Philadelphia turn from a productive city, clean, very friendly (city of brotherly love) you know, a great place to work and play into the crap pit it is today. It took since 1950 when the first Democrats took over the city in what has become the usual manner rigged elections. Rigged elections have continued ever since and are there today to support Biden and his puppet masters. I remember manufacturing all over the city. Places like botany 500 and other manufacturing companies all over North Philadelphia. All of these areas now are ghettos full violence and drugs darkies and gangs. There is nothing that could be done about cities that go this route. There is nothing that can be done to help states that go this route. And sadly there is nothing to be done for a nation that has chosen to go this route.
Hey Hoagie, better handle than Cheese, as in cheese steak, yes?
Does the name Rich Zeoli ring a bell?
He just needs to get his brothers, Grinder and Hero to start posting.
If you ever come to Philly, don’t go to Pat’s or Gino’s. They are a tourist trap selling the absolute worst and most over-priced cheese steaks in Philadelphia. Burnt steak-ums with a ton of the worst canned fake-cheese money can buy. NASTY!!! The average pizza place makes a MUCH better cheese steak for 1/2 the price and will deliver.
The Frankford Arsenal is nowhere near South Philly. If you know where the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge is, it’s right near that in Tacony (which borders with Frankford. Also, I am not misspelling Frankford). It was huge too. The complex still exists. It’s like 3 long city blocks by about 2-3 city blocks. Though it now has things like a black charter school in it as far as I know. There’s a flea market at the next corner I sometimes shop in, so I pass by it occasionally.
Wiki article covers the vast range of its activities. Worth a read.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankford_Arsenal
South Bend, Indiana where my parents grew up used to be a beautiful industrial city, with Bendix, Studebaker, Oliver Tractors amongst the hundreds of industries supporting a community of smart industrious white immigrants from Poland, Belgium, Germany, Italy…
Now i’ts a seedy slum with a scattering of Mexican food joints and Notre Dame University. The University is thriving, but the city is dead as are all the factories and the folks that worked in them. Another country altogether.
There’s a big section in Philadelphia called “Germantown” where not a single German lives. It’s very sad.
Google street view really drives home that sadness. I look at the house I grew up in and the house my father grew up in. Just big old slums. Though the house my father grew up in was a slum even when I was a kid. The war changed everything. All the White men were sent to fight the war plus the massive expansion of the state, creating labor shortages all across the industrial North which lead to the “great migration” of blacks from the South to the North looking for work. Once they were here, everyone moved. Philly went from 2.5 million to 1.5 million.
Sadly, if the University Industrial Complex is ever “right-sized” (to about 1/10 the number of students) many small cities across rural America will die. It’s the last industry left in them. Take away the colleges and it’s nothing but Fentanyl dealers and methheads.
The only way colleges and universities will be “right sized” would be in combination with other changes in the economy. The current former middle class taking drugs and generally being screw-ups is a great untapped resource.
They are victims of circumstance and in other circumstances (like existed before 2001, largely) would make up the backbone of the community. If there were productive jobs for them to be had, they would be doing them. Some percentage would always be the downtrodden, the criminals and the screw ups. I’m not discounting this.
We are a society obsessed with high IQ work and forgetting that 1/2 of even the White population is below average. Without profitable and honorable work for them to do, they turn to the black market and make other bad decisions. Our society did this to them. The “criminal class” does not just blow up in one generation without cause. You don’t just go from a large, happy and productive middle class to armies of homeless drug addicts without something making that happen. In many cases, it wasn’t even a generation, it was less. It was the 35 year old who got laid off when his company sold out and moved production to China. Since everyone else was doing the same thing, he couldn’t get a new job. He wasn’t smart enough to be a coder or train for other high IQ work. He was a high school graduate with 100 IQ or close to it.
Maybe. Static model, sure, but only governments can run under static models, and even then, not for very long.
If the UIC ever comes in the crosshairs, there’s going to have to be a lot of other things changing. Maybe you can warehouse young adults in dorms to get a degree, but without something like national service (draft) or company towns, you can’t safely warehouse them if they have either ambition or resentment.
“…if the University Industrial Complex is ever “right-sized” (to about 1/10 the number of students) many small cities across rural America will die.”
But is this not like “doing each other’s laundry”. Simply warehousing students for 4 years and then sending them into the world without useful/needed skills is not producing anything. Allowing/promoting such becomes a form of welfare and ensuing dependency.
I’m a bit more generous in my right sizing, I’d say 50% cut in academic enrollment would seem immediately justifiable and much of that might be taken up with more emphasis on vocational (Trade) schooling. That would be along the lines of the community colleges we currently have, but are an infinitely more justifiable use of societal resources.
One bright spot in South Bend is the Tippecanoe Restaurant in the old Studebaker mansion.
They serve an absolutely unbelievable prime rib special from time to time.
Today’s topic always makes me remember listening to the little local radio station which carried Chuck Harder’s show “For the People.” His syndicated show was bumped off the stations owned by major corporations and relegated to the leftover mom and pop stations.
Harder always took the side of the little guy, the dirt folks. He was truly heartbroken over the loss of value-added manufacturing and continually warned that this would mean disaster for the US. An example he used as the way for a country to become wealthy was a three-legged stool of mining, manufacturing and agriculture. Kick one out and it topples.
The downfall of the US is tragic. Blessed with natural resources like minerals, incredible farmland, and 85-90 percent high IQ, industrious Whites (in the past) and then throwing away. Deliberately, of course.
I remember that guy. I used to listen when I could on the late shift.
In the 90s I used to listen to For the People on the local small town AM station. Chuck was a populist who hammered everyone in the establishment. Among many topics he covered he used to dig pretty deep into the Clinton scandals like all the drug running that went on in Arkansas on Slick Williie’s watch. Clinton signed the communications bill that consolidated radio station ownership eliminating most of the independent radio stations that carried Chuck’s show. I also read where the IRS put him through the wringer in the late 90s and early 2000s.
A century and more ago, the elites mostly understood reality and the people who populated that reality – and mostly acted accordingly – mostly to the benefit of the country. Now, these turds basically have no connection, and again act accordingly – to the absolute detriment of the country. The tribe never wants to get their hands dirty, literally or figuratively – it’s so much better pushing paper around and printing zillions out of thin air. Among many others, they have to go…
“To finance this, much of the manufacturing base was auctioned off…”
This is false. America is number two in manufacturing output, behind China, and producing more than the third, fourth and fifth ranked countries combined. America has roughly fifty percent of the output of China, and does so with one-fourth the population. While the number of jobs in manufacturing in America has declined by roughly forty percent since it’s peak in 1979, manufacturing output has increased fifty percent. America didn’t auction off most of its manufacturing base, it automated it.
No, it moved to higher value stuff like machines. Also, a lot of what is “made in America” is not really made in America. There is a minimal amount of “value added” you have to do before you can call something made in China or Vietnam as “Made in America”
Just look at all the stuff labeled “Made in America from global materials”
You can import a fully assembled machine into the US, then put a bunch of US made software for controlling it and then declare the machine “Made in America” You can assign whatever value you want to the software. You can easily claim you’ve doubled the machine’s value.
Virtually all consumer goods are made somewhere else now. Even much of the high end machinery US manufacturers are known for have a lot of foreign made parts.
Yeah, I believe that stat for US manufacturing is based on “additive value.” In short, if the US imports a book printed in China, at a cost of $.30, they put a jacket around the book, and sell the book for $15, the US just “manufactured” $14.70. Note that much of this value is inflationary or currency exchange based. The domestic markup of imported products is technically calculated as manufacturing, as long as something is done to the product (such as assembling or even possibly marketing).
I haven’t looked into this in several years, so the metric may have changed, but when I looked into the subject a few years ago, I believe this is the essence of the calculation.
Much of that production is mal investment. Obsolete or ineffective military spending. Aircraft carriers for example and the F35 with it’s notable issues. The point is our “production” in the U.S. is often comprised of things that we cannot profit from but a few people profit hugely from.
The Chinese build economic infrastructure that will aid their country. It looks like we just lost our chance to have semiconductor factories built in America because the billions from the government for the investment required DIE and other retarded requirements. The companies walked away.
With the DIE requirements that are now imposed what are the odds that a small increase in our 155 mm shell production, if there ever is one, will lead to a massive explosion at some point at one of those plants.
Completely forgot about this. A quick stat check registers SIXTY PERCENT is military. Again, rough estimates, but a valid point.
I did not know it was that high. Holy crap.
“While the number of jobs in manufacturing in America has declined by roughly forty percent since it’s peak in 1979, manufacturing output has increased fifty percent. America didn’t auction off most of its manufacturing base, it automated it.”
Yes, this is partially true. My late father worked in a Ford stamping plant for forty years. When he started in the 1960s they had 6,000 employees. When he retired they had 1,400 and produced more. They automated the production lines so instead of needing 20 guys to manually feed and extract parts from a line of presses, they only needed two or four.
A lot of those jobs were repetitive, boring, and shitty, but they paid a living wage with union benefits.
That being said, a significant amount of American industry WAS also offshored.
When you combine automation, offshoring, immigration, affirmative action, and the entry of females into the workplace, the white male industrial worker was fucked six ways to Sunday and his standard of living plummeted.
A thing I am seeing down here in the patent mines is increasing speculative patents, i.e., paper innovations that are not actually made, used and sold nor intended to be. The companies are waiting for some other organization to deploy the technologies and take the investment risks and then they’ll crash the party by asserting prior patent rights. Accept our license terms or shut down. It’s trending toward Jerry Lemelson 2.0, which is parasitic drag on an economy.
Huh.
Jerry Lemelson doesn’t have an “Early Life”; he has a “Biography” [apparently the Lemelsons most recently hailed from Austria].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson#Biography
I guess the JIDF must be working furiously to scrub “Early Life” from teh innerwebs.
DaBears: Never knew there was such a thing (one of many times I learn something here at Zman). So who pushed the 2011 Leahy-Smith Act changing the system from “first to invent” to “first to file”? I suppose I’m old fashioned, but I think that’s an abomination.
My last understanding was that the move was to come into compliance with most of the rest of the world wrt patents. That use first to file. However, I’ve not followed the pro/con arguments.
DaBears: Help me out, please? Apparently we copied the “first to invent” system from England. They switched to “first to file” in 2011. But thus far, all I can find online is that we were the last industrialized nation to make the switch in 2013. Who came up with the idea and which nation switched first? Assuming it was yet another example of Every Single Time, but would appreciate confirmation/clarification.
It was adopted to harmonize with the rest of the western world and to reduce the adverse impact of the (((Jerry Lemelsons))) and their litigious ways. Most industrialized countries have found certain practices over time tend to produce a sweet spot in terms of protecting against the most egregious abuses of legit innovation by second comers and thieves — lookin’ at you China and India — yet reducing hyperzealous patenting and litigation.
We inherited our initial structure from the British and tracked them through a lot of the industrial revolution. However, the Brits were a monarchy and Americans a dispersed republic, at least on paper, and so as Americans pirated industrial property rights and technologies from European countries, and oh boy did we!, especially given the delays in communications and formal writs and other antiquated mechanisms for relief, their grew a divide between the American system and the world systems.
I was a direct leader in the harmonization and AIA implementations. I didn’t particularly care for Q. Todd Dickinson, the former Director, but literally stood with him during proceedings to change the GREAT AMERICAN WAY and defeat counterproductive entrenchment and manipulation by mega business at the expense of smaller companies and the consolidating monopolization effects on developing new and useful technologies. For a time, and I just gave up eventually being worn down, deliberately and it was costing me life, I was a big deal in the business of IP. I had a great perch.
I’m a hater. But I wouldn’t attribute the abusive IP litigation horror show after (((Jerry))) to the goblins. They’ve gotten lazy and what Jerry did is pretty much irreproducible nowadaze, at least until some other bloodsucker discovers a means to undo the current regime. There were a lot of federal trademark leeches that offered “services” in the field at an affordable pricepoint and then scammed you by not delivering anything of value.
But generally, harmonization and AIA were good ideas at the time. Approximately one-quarter of US patent applications are or recently were filed by the Japanese. They are still innovating. The Brits cannot innovate well, the Germans are still innovating, and Americans and Canadians still have a cadre of inventive sorts and the money to make it happen but we are in decline across the board and the new arrivals, well, there is a reason the Mexicans even with petrol dollars have never bothered to make their own second generation products let alone fifth, sixth and superlative generations of technologies.
Although I do love to point out the small hat israelis have a national small hat g iq of 94 approximately. Consider.
DaBears: Thank you for the reply. But I still would like to know (assuming you do) which country first instituted the “first to file” type law? If we changed ours to match the rest of the world, that change started in some other country and it was not the UK. So who/where?
You have difficulty because it’s not generally a single country. I couldn’t say because I don’t know. Possibly one of the Scandi countries, because they have small populations and economize on obtaining a “just” result.
Sorry I don’t know which one. It’s public record I am actively involved in Swiss IP, maybe a self-dox, I am listening, thanks to Z, to Nick Drake music which was before my time but I can play and almost sing as well.
Cheers.
Think of patents as do it yourself crypto. You “innovate” a new way to make antigravity anal lube that you’ve never tried to implement. Then you hope some corporation pays you for the patent rights. Maybe they’re not interesting in making people’s asses float either and just want to sell it for even more to some greater fool. If the dollar collapses perhaps people can trade trivial patents with each other.
I have made a ferk ton off crypto. No joke. Just some friendly advisement. You can buy crypto or otherwise leverage it. But it’s pointless to go for patent protection. Keep it secret or STFU. My nephew paid 800k for a beginner family pad an hour outside Boston, Boylston almost entirely, he claims, from BitCoin. Given my BIL, the apple may not fall far from the tree. I was personally in early just to see how everything works but then exited in favor of foreign bonds. Say what you will.
Speaking of books, I’m reminded of Matthew Crawford’s “Shop Class as Soulcraft.”
Crawford had a Ph.D. in political science and was working at some D.C. think tank, but then he quite his job and started his own motorcycle repair shop.
Robert M. Pirsig
September 6, 1928 – April 24, 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance
Ja, a favorite of mine, Bourbon. Need to give it another reading.
The war on digging up the ground is mostly about aesthetics, as the Cloud People hate seeing people do dirty work like farming or digging minerals out of the ground. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. has dropped by half over the last half century, despite the population growing by a third.
Some of it is onerous regulations and draconian taxation driving manufacturing out of the US, some of it is the pace of technology. I came across this YouTube video about BMWs plant in South Carolina: https://youtu.be/-BPTKuDkyo8?si=5ZNFMG89SvUdvk_I
At about 2:30 in the video gets to the making of a BMW SUV. It’s an eye opener. There are long stretches of the line where human hands don’t even touch the vehicle. Robots place, weld, paint, and assemble the larger pieces of the vehicle, jobs humans used to do. Go to YouTube and search “Ford River Rouge” or other American automaker videos from the 1920s – 60s and you’d see thousands of workers doing the same jobs by hand forming the parts around assembly jigs and hand welding, or wielding spray guns to apply paint.
Plus side: Everything’s consistently applied and assembled
Minus side: Less humans employed
Minus Minus side for The Powers That Be: I can teach Joe the Welder to switch over from welding Chevrolet bodies to welding, say, HUMMV bodies when the factory switches over for war production, in an hour or two. Weld-o-matic 1000? Well, now we need programmers to show up and reprogram the whole shebang and even then I’m not sure we’d introduce a glitch that made the robots weld each other.
And Bender the Bending Robot? Well, he’d tell you to bite his shiny metal ass pal.
I can teach Joe the Welder to switch over from welding Chevrolet bodies to welding, say, HUMMV bodies when the factory switches over for war production.
Heh.
Whilst I agree with everything you’ve written, the idea that any of our beloved countries will ever engage their full might in war production like they did in the 1939-1945 war is somewhat amusing.
As an additional bulwark to your pertinent and interesting comment, I recently watched an old BBC program called Steam Days, which overs various aspects of steam locomotive development in the UK. There was some footage of the assembly of one locomotive, Duchess of Hamilton, and I was amazed to see how many men were involved in her assembly.
It’s almost like keeping people employed doing something might be good for them and society in general!
the idea that any of our beloved countries will ever engage their full might in war production like they did in the 1939-1945 war is somewhat amusing.
True. There’s an old TV series titled War and Peace in the Nuclear Age from PBS in the late 1980s (La Wiki tells me 1989). One episode has the narrator walking along the General Dynamics F-16 assembly line in Ft. Worth, TX. He mentioned that if a war were to occur, we’d be fighting with whatever we already had because that very factory would be vaporized in a nuclear exchange. 😬
Consider too, that the Wunderwaffen the West produces is vastly more complex than anything produced in WW2 (Compare an M4 Sherman tank to an M1 Abrams, an P-51 Mustang to an F-15 Eagle, etc.). Realistically how long would it take, say, an automobile factory to retool to make an M1 Abrams or F-15 Eagle? Today, years, if at all.
Humans are still valuable building things. There ARE people on automobile assembly lines, they just do the finer motor work like installing interior trim (Seats, carpets, dashboard, hooking up interior electronics, etc.) or supply and/or monitor the robots working on the line.
And yes, you will see SOMEONE at BMW ensures there are working turn signals on their vehicles. 😏
(The drivers actually USING them, well, that’s on them.)
Alexander Mercouris at The Duran has many times made the point that Russia does not manage industrial capacity anything like the West does. He has personal experience visiting their factories and talking to pertinent people. Russian factories do not aim to pare potential capacity to the bone, in the manner of just-in-time logistics and a pursuit of efficiency that is marked by tunnel vision. They maintain a surge capacity so if production needs to be accelerated it happens quickly. Hence, Russia can ramp up production, for example, of drones and shells quickly. In contrast to CNN the NYT last year reported Russia outperformed the West in shell production by *seven* times. Meanwhile the US has to coax and plead senior citizens out of retirement to restart production of Javelin missiles because no one in the workforce remembers how to build the damn things. This is also a case of lost knowledge; even with archived plans and diagrams available, there’s always that sum of experience only known to people who were on the factory floor which can be essential to successful efforts.
The president of Raytheon was quoted last year as saying that the Javelin missile production line revamping was 18 months. (IIRC) There is a problem with complexity I suspect as well as materials to be sourced. Not an expert here. However, it seems wrt the Uke war, we are seeing a war resembling something we’ve not expected, therefore not planned for.
Seems the old adage, “perfect is the enemy of good enough” comes to play. We are seeing a war where technological sophistication/superiority seems a waste of resources and therefore a liability. That’s the difference between war games and battlefield experience I suppose.
Russian factories do not aim to pare potential capacity to the bone, in the manner of just-in-time logistics and a pursuit of efficiency that is marked by tunnel vision. They maintain a surge capacity so if production needs to be accelerated it happens quickly.
Interesting point on JIT manufacturing: I was reading a post that talked about it in the context of the vaunted Toyota Production System. To wit: JIT works GREAT for Toyota in Japan because its subcontractors are usually in the same neighborhood or city. I won’t say it’s not an issue if your fan belt subcontractor has a problem delivering, but it’s easier to solve if it’s a 10 minute walk/15 minute drive to their office to find out just what the Heck is going on down here?!?!?
Half a continent or a world away? NOW you have a problem.
Driven home straight to your face with all five knuckles by the COVID-19 “pandemic”.
Two things we forgot: 1) We used to have subcontractors close by to major manufacturers. Famous example: John and Horace Dodge were subcontractors to Henry Ford and opened a plant in Hamtramck, MI initially to provide parts to Ford, and then when they got tired of dealing with Henry, start their own firm.
2) Both the Dodge Brothers plant and Ford’s River Rouge plant were as vertically integrated as possible. The Rouge took in raw iron ore and cast their own steel, machined their own parts, and kept outside subcontractors to a minimum. Perhaps COVID-19 might provide a lesson on relying on yourself VS. supply chains that can be cut.
Nah, that’s not what they teach you as an MBA. 😏
mmack: Fascinating. So JIT + globalism + financialization of everything = the AINO economy.
Another delusion was the stated goal to exhaust and weaken Russia with prolonged conflict and presumably to be greeted by Muscovites as liberators. This assumed (a) the West could sustain the war and (b) Russia would be weakened and demoralized if the former happened. This essentially was a retread of the Cold War and straight from the George Kennan playbook, more or less Containment for Dummies.
You list many material reasons this was doomed from the outset–deindustrialization, the increased demand for Russian energy and other raw material, and so forth. Yes, this ultimately matters. But there also are larger psychological and sociological components. Westerners justifiably have lost all confidence in their governments and will not suffer discomfort for illusory goals. As you mention, the suffering of Dirt People does not matter, but a diminished and ludicrous Ruling Class also lacks the mental facility tolerate embarrassment, shame, and loss of status.
The deranged Regime not only thought it could meme Putler out of existence, but it had delusions of taking selfies in front of an occupied Kremlin and posting their heroic images on Instagram. The fact these maniacs have access to nuclear weapons is nothing short of terrifying. It is almost certain that the Russians are discussing how to mitigate the West’s upcoming humiliation so that the ultimate horror does not materialize. Putin’s decision to be restrained rather than to gloat in his interview with Tucker is Exhibit A in this theory.
I fear mitigation of humiliation may be the wrong tact due to the derangement involved. The psychopaths probably are less dangerous the more broken they are in the same way the Imperial Japanese were. Putin remembers the West he fought while stationed in East Berlin, and that worthy, talented and confident adversary no longer exists. This probably is a very dangerous misperception.
As always, dumb about this stuff, but as long as we use money, somebody will have to be the banker. Tends to be the rich guy. Since the industrial revolution, the guy who makes stuff.
If this is the high tech revolution, maybe we get off of money and on to something like bitcoin. Ukraine might indicate Progress! isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
“the golden age of American Jews is ending, and probably taking America with it.” There’s that JQ again, lol. Is that our thing? Indifference, anyone?
No, Z-man’s position on the JQ is quite mild and mostly minimal to his comments. Other’s are most vocal and perhaps that’s the conflation. I myself have less interest as you seem to as well, but I don’t fault the occasional reference by Z-man.
I wasn’t saying it’s his position. I was talking about the idea of going down with them, which is characterized as the Atlantic’s position.
I’m not one of the downvotes, but money is not the problem. As you note, for most of the industrial revolution, the rich guy was the one who was taking the risk producing stuff. Before FiatBux, storage of money was expensive — you had to buy vaults and hire guards, and, for what? Best case, when you open the vault, you have just as much gold in it as when you closed it. It was vastly better to convert gold into something hard to steal, like another factory, which made everyone a winner.
Bitcoin would be a step in the wrong direction, unfortunately. At best, all it does is get us off FiatBux. It does not create an incentive to put the money to use, but rather, to “invest” it into speculative financial derivatives with no tangible output. For example, an option vanishes into nothingness when the option term expires.
If the JQ is your big concern, it is a really bad idea to play to their alleged strengths as financial middlemen.
Sorry, that was two disconnected ideas, and I didn’t make it clear. The first part was about economic ‘progress’ leading to the end of work. You’re right about reinvestment. It’s interesting how it’s lead to high tech without value to back it up, especially in light of rather old school industrial warfare dominating in Ukraine.
The last paragraph was a just a quip about The End and it’s origins. Very interesting that the Atlantic would make that connection, even if, presumably, from a different and secular POV.
The Middleman ain’t dead yet! Just look at the booming business in trans-shipment and sanctions-busting. You can all decide who is involved in these trans-shipments haha..
https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2023/03/new-us-efforts-to-prosecute-sanctions-evasion-and-export-control-violations
Meanwhile, China – also under the boot of our semiconductor sanctions – cannot afford to let Russia lose now. They are probably helping the Norks ramp up artillery shell production. So the Ukes/NATO basically have no chance to close the artillery gap.
Yes, we truly have become a Jewish country, or, at least, our rulers and managerial class have become “Jewish,” culturally if not always ethnically.
It’s no surprise that GAE’s last and biggest power is financial. We control the money (the dollar) and access to the money. We are a maritime power, but it’s not the sea lanes but the financial lanes that we control. That is the source of our wealth and power.
So, yes, we are very much a Jewish country. But, just as has happened so many times in the past, Jews over-reach and piss off their hosts. In this case, we’ve pissed off the rest of world, which we rely on to make our stuff while we give them access to money that we control.
This time is a tad different, however. The US is a country, not a community within a country. China can’t kick out its Jews. Instead, the world is turning its back on us, trying to cut off our power over them. They’re not so much kicking us out and cutting us off.
American Jews like their military tools and their goy warriors, but the source of power that they understand best and rely on most is financial. That’s the real battle.
“Long ago, the paleos made the point that you cannot have an economy based on everyone doing each other’s laundry.”
This was the exact same phrase my friends, my transhumanist friends, and I used a lot when talking about economic issues in southern CA in the late 80’s. Real economic value is based on production. All the libertarians and transhumanists I knew at the time (we created transhumanism, btw) were “producerists” in this regard. It was the rise of the “new paradigm” during the 90’s that saw the loss of this reality in peoples’ minds.
What we are seeing here is the death of the middle-man economy.
What is being seen is the death of a fiat currency backed only by military might. As the might fades, so does the currency. Oil being sold in rubles, yuan and dirhams is the clearest indication.
Stealing almost half of another nation’s reserve assets denominated in dollars did not go down too well in retaining trust in the currency either.
“Yuri Slezkine observed in his book, The Jewish Century …”
I wasn’t aware of this book. From the bits I’m seeing it seems to be intensely readable.
Seems the argument here is that high IQ is not cumulative. If middle IQ people are better at making and fixing stuff, then high IQ ashkenazi should also be smart enough to handle all things on the IQ spectrum, from a residential electrician’s work all the way up to high finance. No?
” … then high IQ ashkenazi should also be smart enough to handle all things on the IQ spectrum, from a residential electrician’s work all the way up to high finance. No?”
Nope. It doesn’t work that way. High scores in IQ tests tend to mean you’re good at some things — assimilating and playing with abstract symbols, abstract information — but usually at the price of not being good, or at least not having a taste for, more mundane things. The mundane things require a modicum of being able to play with abstract information — e.g., knowing the multiplication table or reading an engineering drawing — but also the skills that come with experience and practice and “knack.”
US-Jewish culture fetishises IQ, college degrees, and facility with words. This is the eloi mentality. The morlocks are looked down on.
I may have told this story before but back in my college days I worked doing some light auto mechanic work at local quick lube / quick tune place. One day walking on campus with another student we got to talking about working over summer break and I mentioned I’d be returning to my local garage to earn some money. He sneeringly replied “I ought to do that! Any idiot can be a mechanic!”
I looked at him and said “Next time you’re driving along and your car breaks down, don’t call a tow truck, fix the problem yourself. As you said ‘Any Idiot’ can fix it.”
He thought, looked down at the ground, and ashamedly said “Yeah, I guess you’re right. I’d be the idiot wouldn’t I?”
Lots of people look down upon manual work but man, when the air conditioning dies when it’s 95 degrees F out (Happened to us last summer) or the furnace dies when it’s below freezing or your pipes freeze when the city installed leaky water meter freezes solid (yup, had that happen too), then you need the guys you sneered at in High School, don’t you?
You may have a college degree, but if you want to eat, you may want to thank the farmer who learned how to farm from his father and grandfather, just sayin’.
You would be amazed at how many rich people don’t know how to open their garage doors when the power goes out…You would also be amazed at the invites by their wives after they leave for work…
Hell, I’ve related I changed the car battery on my Ford once and when I told my co-workers you’d have thought I’d built a functioning nuclear reactor by their incredulity.
I’ve fixed my lawn mower and my snow blower last year. If I tell people they’ll think I’m Elon Musk. 🤣
A modern car is oft referred to as a “computer on wheels”. Aside from the tools/instrumentation you need, it does require a pretty high IQ these days—IMHO. Whenever I see a truly superior mechanic, I am impressed at the analytical skills employed in diagnosis and repair.
On the other hand, I admit that much of the technology now involved with these “computers on wheels” makes the job of repair and diagnosis easier for those less blessed with “smarts”. However, I’m not convinced auto repair is for “idiots” just because we have hacks in the field.
Mechanics use much the same analytical skills physicians use. They just didn’t have to ace chemistry classes.
No matter how easy the computer makes it to diagnose, the wrenching skills are only learned the hard way.
Said it here before, and I’ll say it again–a plumber provides more value to society than a professor. And I say that as one who went the full academic route for the Ph.D.
Here’s a story from my graduate years. Went to a friend’s party, an outdoor barbecue. All of us were majoring in divergent fields and learning “more and more about less and less” as the quip goes. 😉
One was in physics, another business, another…and so on. Little in common and we were not into sportsball talk. As I mingled I noticed a crowd in chairs sitting around a middle aged guy who was the head of the auto repair department/discipline at the local community college. There was a reason for this. Everyone had a car! Instant camaraderie.
Anyway, this guy was the life of the party so to speak. His stories were interesting and he was expert in his field. It was every bit as entertaining/educating as any class lecture I’d ever attended.
And there was also another lesson I learned that day, which was just how valuable we budding “elites” were as compared to this “lowly” mechanic in society. When we got around to discussing summer employment and jobs and things—the community college was basically closed for summer as was the university and folks sought other employment. He related how he found such employment each summer. He packed up his truck and drove up “auto dealer row” in town, stopping at each one and asking about summer employment. As he put it, “I’ve never made it past the third or fourth dealership!”
I’m not so sure.
When people discuss the correlation between IQ and jobs suitable to that IQ, it always is presented as a one way street. Meaning, an IQ of 110 suits you well to be an electrician. A 120 and you could be a lawyer. A 140 and we are talking a surgeon.
So why wouldn’t it work in reverse?
Why couldn’t a surgeon be a highly capable electrician? He has the brains for it. Why couldn’t a large group of Jew attorneys corner the market on being electricians?
I have never, and granted I don’t read this type of stuff much, but I have NEVER seen anyone in the HBD “space” take on my simple question. They always work up the ladder saying what a lower IQ guarantees you won’t be good or capable at. But never that a high IQ means you are also too stupid to be a good electrician. Or more nicely, you are too “abstract” a thinker to be adequate at fixing a car.
I think this all deserves more consideration. It tells me there is more to being good at something than what can be measured by IQ.
Moral of the story, the IQ debate is lacking in depth and breadth to ever become more than an academic argument or something perhaps for colleges to consider when evaluating a student’s prospects. Iif it only works in one direction then it has serious flaws.
This is, largely, because of societal prejudice. A high IQ person could become a brilliant electrician – particularly one that plans a job, not simply executes.
A surgeon can be a brilliant electrician – he simply does not devote the time to the task.
To clarify, I do not think IQ is everything. I would also agree with the caveat that high IQ tends to mean one deals with abstractions, an impediment to fixing practical problems. But this can also be down to personality types, as well.
“Why couldn’t a surgeon be a highly capable electrician? He has the brains for it.”
You’ve answered your own question to some extent. Because there’s more than the ability to score well on IQ tests that’s involved in being a good electrician or mechanic or plumber. Much of it is very specific knowledge and experience that a high-IQ person won’t have the time or patience to acquire. But besides the time and patience there may be other qualities missing — he may lack manual dexterity or any number of other skills that are a blend of mind, muscle, and trained instincts.
If you recall Huxley’s “Brave New World”, the resident world controllers did experiment with trying an island with just Alpha Double Plus people. It was an abysmal failure. No-one wanted to do the dirty but essential work that’s required to keep a society functioning. A society can’t function with just theoretical physicists and chess grandmasters. It also needs cooks, nurses, technicians, plumbers, bricklayers, and the like, and these jobs require their own unique aptitudes, knowledge, and experience. That’s why in Huxley’s “Brave New World”, only a few were created as Alpha Double Pluses. A society does need a few of them. But most people were lower down on the scale, from Alpha Pluses to Epsilon Minuses.
Part of the answer to “Why couldn’t someone with a 140 IQ be a mechanic, electrician, carpenter, etc.?” is societal or familial expectations.
I can tell you having different mental horsepower and different economic status puts pressure on you to not “accept” a “lower” status job.
For Ex: Growing up I knew several upper middle class Indian (from India, not the Reservation) kids as classmates. Their career paths were:
– Doctor
– Engineer (Electrical, Mechanical, Structural)
– Maybe, MAYBE, Computer Programming
That’s it.
Mechanic, electrician, carpenter, plumber? Not MY son or daughter! Off to college with you!
Heck, think of the dating world. Women want men who 1) Make the same or certainly MORE money than they do and 2) Have an equal or HIGHER status job (whatever that may be) than they do.
(Because she wants to brag about you to her friends. “Oh, did I tell you Falcone is a stockbroker. 😉?” Implying you’re rich, and will shower her with presents. Stay with me here.)
My wife is an attorney (post jeers or sympathy below), I am in IT. I may not be higher in the “status” chain than she perceives herself to be, but amazingly I pay all the bills around here. 😏 I would state we’re pretty darn close in IQ. Would My Lovely 🥰 Mrs. have married me if I were a mechanic and earned less than her, even with my same IQ? Perhaps, perhaps not. I’ve known female lawyers who have married “blue collar” men. One husband owns his own remodeling firm, so he’s the higher earner of the couple. Other guys, well there was one divorce and one where it’s obvious they hate each other.
Sure, a 140 IQ fellow could be a great electrician. Heck, he could even be happy with it. The sad thing is even if he made more cash than a female with a 120 IQ who was a lawyer, systems analyst, or middle manager, how’s she going to waltz around with him on her arm and impress that Basic B!tch Becky with “Well, Falcone is an electrician“?
TL/DR the old saw “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” or in this case “Really Rich?”
In my own case, I DID want to be a mechanic. No how, no way said my mother, who was NOT having her youngest child NOT go to college. So I went off and majored in Computer Programming. Can’t say it really helped the old dating chances, as we know what nerds 🤓 programmers are. 🤣
So there may be societal pressure put on “smart” people to go out and do “smart” work and earn more money, or climb up the status chain. It’s a simplistic answer, but one based in some reality.
Status. Fortunately I was never infected by it. But as far as money and status goes, I can only judge by my neighborhood. As expensive as it is to live here, the place does not seem “elite”. Right across the road, the neighbor here repairs/installs A/C units. Drives his work truck home. Down the street, we had a Snap-on “tools” guy who drives to the dealerships in his truck. My neighbor directly next door worked as a lineman for the electric company. We had in the neighborhood a city policemen who drove his squad car home. Another neighbor is a commercial artist for business logo’s, advertising and such. And as I’ve noted, I’m neighbor to the ex-Governor of Montana. He ranches up there and comes down here to keep from freezing.
I just assumed this was America, screw the status crap. You work, you make money, you mind your own business, you are respectful, you live where the hell it pleases you.
Heh heh. I’m usually not a fan of emojis, but yours crack me up.
Compsci give him a kick in the kneecap for me if it’s Steve Bullock
Falcone, your question is a good one, but I don’t think it really applies as a critique of *all* “HBD’ers”. I really don’t hear many HBD folk—in the know—as saying IQ is *everything*, rather IQ is an underlayment to success. There are other factors—non IQ—that are important within any person’s successful endeavors.
What I find myself doing is emphasizing IQ to those who simply deny IQ, or rather assume all people are basically the same wrt “g” if only for a poor environment, or that IQ is a meaningless construct. That tends to impress people as a singular understanding dependent on a singular measurement. Rather than a nuanced understanding.
IQ is reasoning ability. If you have a high IQ, you have the ability to apply that reasoning ability to a variety of problems (e.g. calculus and plumbing), but IQ alone does not provide the requisite skills. IQ allows you to learn the principles of the material, but a person still needs to employ their reasoning ability in mastering the material.
There are, however, drawbacks to reasoning ability. I tested in the 130s in IQ years ago. This serves me well with many things, but this ability actually hinders me when I play music (purely a hobby). I have a hard time turning off my analytical brain and being *in the moment*; to wit: I think too much while playing.
I have improved in my ability to switch over to pure experience over the years, but I will certainly never be a wild-eyed sorcerer like Van the Man.
To be fair, I do not think that the two are mutually exclusive, but my manifestation of reasoning ability does impact my ability to just play.
Art is intuition rather than reason. (Reason may come ex post facto in the form of art theory and criticism.) When reason overwhelms intution, creation is stifled. And that raises a question–namely, what role, if any, does creativity play in intelligence? I think it plays a major role, and yet it is unlikely to be captured by IQ tests.
The Ashkenazi IQ advantage is entirely verbal. They’re actually worse at spatial and mathematical reasoning (the Jewish physicists of the early 20th century were the Neil Degrasse Tysons of their time with Brits and Germans doing all the heavy lifting).
The thing about verbal IQ is that it’s pointless in terms of survival: it’s a peacock trait that evolved through sexual competition. And you see this in the way Jews disdain doing anything with their hands, the social status flex is how they make so much money as a lawyer or film producer that they can make better men do all their work for them.
Outside the artificial world of urbanite sexual competition, if you were dropped into the woods would you rather have the ability to build a shelter that doesn’t fall down, or the ability to write poetry about how cold you are?
Tyson doesn’t have enough apostrophes in his name to be a true brutha…
> Sure, the banker has a Brazilian Jujitsu trainer and access to the finest steroids, but the working man knows how to fight and win, so it can never be much of a match.
You can always tell the serious people in a dojo by the amount of contact they allow and their lack of emphasis on sport sparring. The really brutal guys won’t care about the ring rules and will teach their students accordingly as much as they can without seriously hurting them.
Truth is though, if the banker is in an even fight with a working man, he’s already lost. The point of being the banker is to pay off a dozen lackeys who will beat the crap out of the working man while never getting his hands dirty. He can’t do that when his money can’t buy off lackeys with anything they actually want.
Not sure that’s the best analogy. The banker may be someone accustomed to immense mental stress and pressure, while the working guy may be some flabby, lazy union skiver constantly presenting sick notes.
Jannie: “some flabby, lazy union skiver constantly presenting sick notes”
Passive Aggression seeps in & metastasizes throughout all possible tiers of every possible suhciety, and eventually it destroys all of them.
Massa Lucifer hisself inserted the genes for Passive Aggression into our genome.
Passive Aggression is His Magnum Opus.
This. Our side has recently started lionizing the working class so much that the communists from a century ago have started to get uncomfortable. The modern American working class are short fat guys who do whatever the television tells them to.
This isn’t to say we should instead lionize the upper middle or middle classes either. We shouldn’t lionize any of them. The Fish town folk deserve no worship, but neither do the laptop class/ COVID lockdown class.
While some folks working the line may be some dumb, or fat, or lazy, few are all three. And these aren’t the folks who make the factory run. Its the mechanics, plumbers, electricians, tool and die makers, and engineers who are the “working class” that power industry.
I have yet to meet anyone from the dark continent who can do any of those jobs with any degree of proficiency, much less mastery.
Zulu Juliet: We had the occasion to utilize the services of plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians multiple times during our 29 years of home ownership in DFW. Finding someone genuinely capable and qualified (and honest) was an immense blessing. In my experience, at least, they were 98% White men. They were, almost to a man, also hunters and general outdoorsmen and politically to the right of the spectrum.
Now, in the Ozarks, it’s sometimes hard to find a qualified tradesman because everyone here does almost all his own work. Our neighbor has insisted on doing many minor repairs and even electric work for us, when we asked him for the name of a good tradesman. Only thing he doesn’t do is plumbing – hired someone to do all of his in copper when he built his house. Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of plumbing repairs because his father (whose house we bought) did his own plumbing . . . and used PVC instead of copper.
I can speak to the HVACR field, and at least half the people doing service ought not to be. Their main job is to say “Oh its ten years old, time for a new one!” The sad part is their managers don’t care, its good to sell new equipment.
Making stuff, inventing stuff and fixing stuff is for the Dirt People.
That’s just it, isn’t it? I’m no economicks whizz (to be fair, I see the bulk of the subject as highly opinionated and subjective rubbish), but if you have all the money in the world, and you want to buy ‘army stuff wot armies use’, it ain’t no good if there’s no ‘army stuff wot armies use’. So obvious, really.
It all comes down to tangible wealth. Stuff you can lay your hands on and use for a purpose. Guess many of our rulers just think that the cash will procure the stuff. Then again, seeing that it is Evil driving a lot of this, perhaps many of them do know – I mean, it seems pretty obvious.
Brings to mind a quote from one of my favorite authors. I think this touches on the problem:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
I’m a PhD. I do my own laundry. I make my own bed. I cook my own meals. I mow my yard. Build my own computers. And so forth. Never was raised to consider myself above the basic tasks of life.
Speaking of farmland, there are some interesting trends in that area.
First, America continues to lose cropland due to development. We’ve lost just shy of 15% of our cropland since 1997, from ~445k acres of farmland to ~385k. Now, this wasn’t such a big issue since the falling number of acres was offset by rising crop yields.
That same dynamic is supposed to continue, but I’ve seen some data that crop yields are stagnating or rising slower in some crops. Hard to say, but we do know that the amount of land available for farming will be less. And, no, we can’t expand. Farmers went fence row to fence row in the 1970s, so we’ve got what we’ve got.
There’s also the issue that farmers are old, like really old. Not sure who’s going to replace them. Granted, technology is allowing farmers to farm dramatically more acres than in the past, so that could fix part of that problem.
Basically, we know of two unavoidable problem in farming: falling number of cropland acres and a falling number of farmers. Those are fact that will happen. We are relying on technology to offset them. So far, that’s been right and probably will continue in the future.
But it’s a delicate balance and one that could easily be upended by idiots in DC or state capitols.
I had pondered this about farming over here in The Late Land of The Angles. Farming always seemed to me to be something you were born into. A trade that really was passed down from father to son and so on.
Don’t think Raj or Muhammad are going to be going to agriculture school or become apprentice farmhands. So you’ve got the skill shortage; add to that that it is considered hard and unglamourous work.
Then, as you say, we also seem to be chewing up more and more land for development. A few years ago, they were harping on about ‘vertical farming’, which would allow our selfless and benevolent elites to chew up as much land as they needed, but George the farmer could increase his yield 1000% using vertical farming methods! That seemed to me how it was being sold.
Nevertheless, the skill of farming does seem to be both under-appreciated and under siege.
Yeah, that “vertical farming” sounds practical, doesn’t it? How ‘bout vertical farms indoors with artificial light? I’ve actually heard such ideas floated—apparently by people who grew a little weed in college or something. Could you feed a nation that way? Let’s get real.
Ha!
It’s so simple, my dear fellow. You just build a skyscraper with tonnes of light and then put some seeds in, and Presto! You have a vertical farm!
Tiresome, indeed.
Those urban hippies never mention the power costs for those places.
Fucking morons.
Vertical farming is a joke. Total fantasy outside of microgreens. You’re not growing corn and soybeans with vertical farming. Also, the cost is extremely high so only very high-end crops could maybe make some sense.
As to the skill to be a farmer, it’s ridiculous. Here’s the areas that you need to be good at:
Mechanical
Chemistry
Finance
Banking
Bookkeeping
Soil management
Etc.
Oh, and you need to get up before dawn and work like crazy for a good part of the year.
Midwest farms are a business like no other. And, yes, it’s almost always sons who takeover for fathers. Jose and Muhammed need not apply. Even those smart Asians can’t do this job.
Not just that the smart Asians can’t do it, Citizen. They simply won’t. Remember, in their lands, farming is for the plebs.
Plus, they probably don’t have the physique for it anyhow. When I look at some of the boys working in Lincolnshire or Somerset or Cornwall &c., they’re imposing fellows, to be sure.
Also, kudos to you Citizen for pointing out the need for knowledge of Chemistry and Soil management.
It is a job with many faces, and I’d imagine the bulk of any population don’t have either the physical or mental strength to do it.
It’s not for the faint hearted that’s for sure Brother…
I don’t need to know about farming. Milk comes from a bottle or plastic container, and my meat and veggies from the supermarket. So there. I’m reminded of E.M. Forster’s old story, “The Machine Stops.”
“Then, as you say, we also seem to be chewing up more and more land for development.”
Raj and Muhammed need a place to stretch out and reproduce ad infinitum.
I have tried to square the circle about drastically increasing populations with generally worthless people while simultaneously decreasing food supplies. Even ascribing the evilest motivations such as mass starvation and a population dependent on the state for food rations, absolutely none of it makes sense. Therefore, the correct answer surely has to be derangement and delusion.
Haitian barbeques are the future?
Haitian barbeques are the future?
Will they be on the barbeques or conducting them? It makes all the difference, you know.
Conducting them if White Men don’t Tribe Up…
It’s all technology, mechanical, chemistry, robotics, satellites, internet, transportation, etc.
Farming is no less fragile than any other high-tech manufacturing industry. It relies on so many links in the chain. One link fails, and you’ve got a big problem.
Cheap energy is the lifeblood to them all, once that goes everything gets a lot more difficult…
Cheap money is the real lifeblood. It’s what supports so much. One of the reasons that we had cheap energy was the cheap money allowed a lot of fracking that just wasn’t that profitable.
The problem is that ZIRP caused all kinds of problems, but normal interest rates will crush so many enterprises, most notably, the US govt.
The US is now built on negative real interest rates (below inflation). Without them, the real world will start to exert itself again. Going to be fun to see how this plays out.
Keep real rates below inflation and you’ll likely get more inflation. Let them rise and the debt can’t be serviced. Rock meet hard place.
Not sure what it’s like in Perfidious Albion, but in AINO, all of the country’s population growth springs from immigration, legal and illegal. And it is population growth that drives urban sprawl and the obliteration of farm land. Just one more outrage for which the rulers will one day have to answer, God willing.
I dunno. Trend corn yield is pretty impressive and we did over 177/acre here (US) last year with dry weather in a lot of the Corn Belt. Monsanto for the win haha. I think the USDA is using around 180/acre for this year.
Yeah, it could keep increasing. Sure. Indeed, I would assume that it will keep increasing. But we know for a fact that less land will be available. We’re only pretty sure that crop yields will continue to increase.
There’s also the possibility that a technology will come along to make more land arable. Nothing is written in stone.
I’m just saying that there’s only two facts that we know 100% for sure: cropland will fall and less skilled farmers.
Not to mention that we have sold our soul to industrial processed food production that is poisoning our endocrine systems. Mental health, diabetes, cancer, trans crap, are crushing the health care system. Try telling Kelloggs to stop making Frosted Flakes, they’re not great by the way!
All true. We’ve also stripped the land of micronutrients. We’d have to farm in a very different way to bring those back.
For the longest time, I’ve been worried that exports of USA-grown foodstuffs [to include not just grains but also beef/poultry/pork/etc] is simply robbing our own soil of its best nutrients, and sending those nutrients across the ocean to be sh@t out into the soil of some foreign nation [thereby increasing the soil nutrients of that foreign nation, whilst our own soil is left depleted of said nutrients].
This is also true of the export of fertilizer ingredients, and, in particular, my sense is that exporting our Phosphorous reserves [such as those from the “Aurora” mine] is existentially foolish, and likely to end in disaster for us.
Somewhat true, but farmers do a good job of protecting the soil in terms of just not losing the actual soil. We could replenish the soil with micronutrients relatively quickly, but it would require a different way of farming that would yield less, so it won’t happen.
If you want vegetables that soaked up micronutrients, just grow your own in good soil. There’s probably some flours out there from organic farms that might – might – have better nutrients, but I don’t know that for sure.
And to think my neighbors didn’t like me going outside to pee next to my tomato plants.
And to think my neighbors didn’t like me going outside to pee next to my tomato plants.,/i>
And to think my neighbors didn’t like me going outside to pee on their tomato plants.
I was always a Captain Crunch man, myself…
Note to self–politely decline Ploppy’s invitation to come over for a spaghetti dinner…
As far as I can see, there are two main reasons for the increased yields: tougher hybrid crops that are more resistant to pests and drought, and better farming tech. Both of those are reliant on big-Ag supplying the seed stock and reliable support for the high-tech equipment. If you remove either of those, yields will inevitably decline.
Yep. Farmland is still own almost exclusively by farmers or small absentee owners (like me). But farmers are reliant on Big-Ag for everything.
One interesting thing about farmers is that their debt load is historically low, so the banks don’t have the same control over them as the past, but the farmers still need financing and various other financial instruments to function.
Corn and bean yields are up, most everything else is flat. You’ll mostly hear that is due to genetics or “precision ag”, but this study (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2113629119) claims its warmer temperatures. I’d agree with that at least here in the mid-atlantic states.
The other piece everyone forgets is how easy money from loans and government incentives has pushed big agriculture, with farmers loaded up on debt and the risk it entails all chasing the “go big or go home” game. There are a lot of CRP farmers now too out west, and that has driven out a lot of the young folks from farming.
I don’t have great knowledge on corporate farming. I know that ~97% of farmland is still owned by farmers or very small investors, usually children or grandchildren of a farmer who don’t farm themselves.
But how much of farmland is being farmed by a farmer contracted by Big-Ag is something that I don’t know. Probably a lot. Regardless, the farmer has to sell to someone anyone.
Big-Ag also has a lot of power via controlling the seeds. Since everything is genetically modified, a farmer can’t just go buy any seed. But, again, I’m not a farmer so I won’t claim to know what the power dynamic are.
Pickers wanted….
How about grinners?
Cain’t have a pickin’ without a grinnin’. 😀
Citizen, methinks you need to check your numbers. There are nearly 36MM acres of farmland in Iowa alone. Some of the larger counties in the state have over 400k acres in the single county. Statista reports that farm acreage dropped from approximately 940MM acres in 2000 to 893MM acres in 2022.
Otherwise, your points are well taken.
Whoops. Make that millions, not thousands.
Just a minor mistake. 😉
Citizen: It’s more than just the loss of farmers and cropland. Below is a link to some excerpts (note: the blog is not ethno/nationalist or race realist) from a book exploring our food chain. With the usual caveats about the Gaia worshippers, this still recounts the history of farmers naturally seeking increased yield and profits, government benefits and interference, and corporate involvement that – without some over-arching plan or conspiracy – created our chemicalized and industrialized farms of today.
It’s also important to note that those who today do use older and more beneficial (to land and people) farming methods are today’s ‘homesteaders.’ And even those who do their best to produce as much of their own sustenance as they can (while building and repairing their own equipment, etc.) cannot make ends meet solely via farming. Many of them had/have outside part-time jobs. Most depend on YT (as well as hosting workshops or selling how-to plans). My husband has a customer who started his own farm in anticipation of Y2K – got the land, older equipment, animals, the whole nine yards. He did this in addition to his private business. His farm never made a profit, and today all his children work in the family’s private business. They’ve kept the land, but no longer raise their own crops or animals.
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/03/saturday-snippet-it-all-comes-down-to.html
The core difficulty with the Ukrainian war is one of motivation. The Russians practically see Ukraine as being part of the ancestral homeland. For the West, Ukraine is merely an abstraction, part of the grand neo-Liberal project.
There can be no contest where the motivations flutter so starkly different, like children’s flags in a game of Capture-the-Flag.
Yes, but to Ukrainians the war isn’t an abstraction – it’s the real thing, happening to them. Of course they care passionately about it, but it still doesn’t matter. This was a theme early on in the war, that the Ukrainians are deeply motivated because they’re fighting for their own land, while the Russian soldiers are morose and depressed hired hands who don’t want to be there. Everyone was led to expect that the high spirits of the Ukrainians would drive the demoralized Russians out, but in the end this war has turned out to be a matter of metal and exploding chemical compounds, not emotional surges.
This is a proxy war between the West and giant sprawling Mother Russia. The Ukrainians are very much junior partners. Remove Western support and it would be like yanking the carpet out from under the Ukes’ feet. As a proxy war, the motivations of the 2 main parties do indeed matter. For instance, if NATO really felt threatened by the Russkies, they could ramp up industrial production. And don’t think they couldn’t. America still has an intact Military-Industrial Complex.
The Russians currently occupy predominantly Russian speaking ethnic provinces in Ukraine. That was their purpose to begin with. To protect their people’s interests. If they simply wanted to recapture a former territory, they’d have invaded from all sides and this mess would now be over.
That the Uke’s consider those provinces to be “their own land” is debatable and denies the fact of the Russians living there for generations. As far as morose and despondent Russian soldiers, I don’t see that with the current revised military units in Ukraine—not to mention that the initial bulk of the fighting was using Ukrainian militias from the break-away provinces.
No one’s enthusiastic about war, but NATO involvement at the very borders of the Russian State is not lost on the rank and file Russian. I doubt that their will to win this conflict is flagging, but rather growing. The current fighting is intense and would seem impossible with a demoralized force simply doing the least possible to avoid casualties. Recent events such as the fall of Avdiivka would seem to support that assertion.
Warren Buffett, like him or hate him, uses the term “finagaling” to describe this. It is merely re-arranging existing things for a cut. Nothing new is created. Back when we had to go on the “Great Russkie Hunt” to find any evil Russians we might be doing business with, ostensibly to help force the Russians to heel, told my colleagues the great difference is the Russians make things and this would be an utter waste of time.
Just FYI, Warren Buffet has been pushing v@xxines for decades & decades now.
Apparently very early in his career, Bill Gates was forced to make the trip to Omaha and bend his knee to the Oracle [and nobody knows v@xxines quite like Bill Gates & his fambly know v@xxines].
Why oh why oh why did Cro-Magnons have to introduce the genes for perfidy into our noble & virtuous Neanderthal species?
Oh come on! We have people. Lots and lots and lots of people. And we can add more and more and more people.
Look. Just buy Peter Zeihan’s books, throw on top of it ten more books about how you can manifest your dreams by meditating on them and sit back and let mass immigration save our countries and make us a financial powerhouse.
Come on man. The numbers are going up. More money in the hands of more people. It is all going to work out.
“Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.” – Atlantic
Uh. Isn’t there some proverb about eating your seed corn. Maybe there is one about getting fat on eating other’s seed corn and selling off their ability to produce it?
Self awareness – zero.
Speaking of books, I am working my way through Buchanan’s “Suicide of A Superpower.” Whoah boy. Every day, each one of us needs to plant and tend to a baby tree. Our posterity is going to need all the help we can give them.
God bless you all. With fortitude, diligence and planning ahead, our children and grandchildren will survive the winter.
“Speaking of books, I am working my way through Buchanan’s “Suicide of A Superpower.’”
Yes, great book. Ditto his “Death of the West”, which contains I think his most prophetic quote ever that “The birth control pill will go down in history as the worst invention ever in WCiv.” Of course, we are now seeing the fruit (or rather non-fruit) of his assessment as all the once great white nations slowing non-breed themselves out of existence. It greatly saddens me every time I go to a public place or event and see all the nubile, young white women who will never pass on their genes.
save the seeds and pits from the peaches, cherries, plums and apples you eat, dry them on a windowsill all summer, and poke them into your compost in the fall, remember, start yesterday as a fruit tree takes YEARS to bear fruit.
Peter Zeihan has spent the last two years predicting disaster for the Russian economy
He’s one of the most confident fools I have ever seen on YouTube
Zeihan is a fascinating character. He basically came out of nowhere, which means, of course, that someone pick him to come out of nowhere and tell people how to think.
He’s a classic charlatan. He’s perfect for military or corporate conferences where he makes the audience feel smart without requiring them to think. He makes big, broad pronouncements and predictions that are just vague enough to allow all kinds of interpretations and wiggle room for later.
Someone described him as a “hippie neocon,” which sounds about right.
I’ve been fascinated by him too, not just because of what he says but the package of world traveling, connected sage he presents. Your observation that he “makes the audience feel smart” is spot on.
Hhmmm…
Peter Zeihan doesn’t seem to have had much of an “Early Life”.
However, Wikipedia threw in a bonus section, called, “See also George Friedman, founder of Stratfor”:
https://tinyurl.com/29bbxyr8
And “George Friedman” has precisely the Hungarian Early Life which one would expect of him.
Zeihan’s not a Jew. Just a useful idiot.
Good day to you CoaSC. Always a pleasure. Yeah. Zeihan’s appearance out of nowhere and his ability to travel the globe and make his videos is pretty suspicious.
He came out of George Friedman’s nursery. I guess we should consider it Friedman’s investment in making his, “predictions”, come true. Of course, whoever funds Zeihan is who funds Friedman is who wants to destroy Westernkind in order to keep GDP going up.
The guy is part of an op.
Zeihan is definitely part of an op. But he’s the perfect spy: one who doesn’t know that he’s a spy.
Zeihan is such a vapid narcissist that he’d never wonder why such praise and money are being heaped on him.
As far as I can tell, he writes a glib book every couple of years using well-known demographic info, and then travels around giving speeches. He’s literally too stupid to wonder why he gets to do this.
Before the kindergarten level demographic speaking circuit he did the America and Fracking speaking tour.
It is almost as if Friedman programs or reprograms him in a back office and trots him out for the next pseudo-elite adjacent conferences to build consensus amongst the lobotomized class.
The level of his analysis and presentation is ridiculous. The entire demographics discussion is stupid. It pains me to see people sit and nod at their dispossession and destruction. The sad part is, Friedman may not be malevolent. He may be as retarded as his acolytes.
“Sure, the banker has a Brazilian Jujitsu trainer and access to the finest steroids, but the working man knows how to fight and win, so it can never be much of a match.”
When is the Zuckerberg against Elon gladiator fight starting? 🙂
Just keep BJJ trainer away from your wife lol. Look at poor Tom Brady….
Same thing happened to Anthony Bourdain.
Keep any personal trainer away from your wife, it won’t end well for you or your marriage.
Are there tall slender athletic dykes [with very large cl!torises] which could serve as the personal traineress and the masseuse & the nanny?
[Short fat clumsy frigid dykes who hate children need not apply…]
SportsDykes:
Yes, they abound.
(Loathesome creatures.)
Oh no, Tom Brady lost his menopausal wife and is now dating younger, hotter, tighter super models (God help him) while that trainer dude gets a woman in her forties. Tom is definitely the loser in that arrangement, and not the dude who got a middle aged has been model who practices witchcraft.
Who gives a flyin’ shit one way or tuther?
There is the off chance Brady loves his kids and now no longer lives with them.
I recall my younger self shouting “We can’t ALL flip burgers!” when the politicians told us we were moving to a “service economy”.
We’re the good guys, the enlightened West, so you can exchange that cow for our magic beans.
Now we can all “learn to code.” Oh, wait, AI’s gonna do most of that? So we’ll all get BUI, own nothing, and be happy at last!
Both sides of the political aisle bought into this: the Leftists have their D.I.E (sic) and fake grievances; the Right have their Derivatives and “working across the aisle”. Screw them both. And Trump won’t change a damned thing.
Robbo: “And Trump won’t change a damned thing.”
Bro, we are rapidly descending upon a crossroads of potential timelines the complexity of which we haven’t seen since, gosh, Athens sent its fleet to Syracuse, or Spain sent its fleet to England, or Japan sent its fleet to Midway, or Der Fuhrer took a right-hand turn and headed due East into Mother Russia, or when Mother Russia had sent her fleet into the Tsushima Strait, or when Edward John Smith drove the Titanic straight into an iceberg.
There are so many possible futures for us in the next coupla decades that we don’t have the brain cells [nor the nukular-powered neural-net GPUs] to War-Game all the different possibilititties.
BTW, all of this is equally true for everyone else in the world.
If I were a world leader right now, I’d be concentrating on chilling the phμck out and letting all muh potential enemies slaughter one another [and, in particular, keeping my mouf shut whilst all my mortal enemies continued poisoning their own populaces with MRNA v@xxines].
Everything you needed to know about human behavior you already learned in nursery skrewl:
https://tinyurl.com/2xc7ysru