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[NotAPretender]

I totally get it, Chris...but you sound like a person that is doing the right things? Doesn't that point out a societal level problem? Money, the concept is a creeping virus.

[Wind]

, yes, of course...and I broke all the rules. I would play by myself because I knew I wasn't faking it. That is kind of a long scary story and I still really dont' know what to make of it.

I knew you were mad.

[NotAPretender]

Amen to that, brother, but I was young and innocent (really not so innocent)

[Dreamtimer]

There have been discussions on the forum about ouija boards. Potentially dangerous stuff, particularly if you don't close the door.


What's going on here in the States is not communism. The wealth has been redistributed, into fewer and fewer hands. The numbers speak for themselves. The majority of the wealth in America is in the hands of a very few people, most of whom don't pay taxes for all the services that they use.

At one time the laws in our country required corporations to take into account the communities they were part of. Now they don't have to care about anyone but their shareholders, and most of their wealth ends up outside of the country in tax shelters.

The middle class has been sucked dry and our leaders are still begging us to go out and spend while not wanting us to be paid enough to do so.

It's nothing like communism.

Wanting a man like Trump to round folks up and put them in prison sounds utterly insane. I don't believe you're insane, Chris, but that's some serious crazy talk.

[Chris]

There have been discussions on the forum about ouija boards. Potentially dangerous stuff, particularly if you don't close the door.


What's going on here in the States is not communism. The wealth has been redistributed, into fewer and fewer hands. The numbers speak for themselves. The majority of the wealth in America is in the hands of a very few people, most of whom don't pay taxes for all the services that they use.

At one time the laws in our country required corporations to take into account the communities they were part of. Now they don't have to care about anyone but their shareholders, and most of their wealth ends up outside of the country in tax shelters.

The middle class has been sucked dry and our leaders are still begging us to go out and spend while not wanting us to be paid enough to do so.

It's nothing like communism.

Wanting a man like Trump to round folks up and put them in prison sounds utterly insane. I don't believe you're insane, Chris, but that's some serious crazy talk.

DT, I never said the US currently has communism, of course not, it is a hypercapitilistic and ultra-unequal society, hence movements towards more equality are a natural reaction to that. I'm not opposed to more equality and some sort of Social Democratic model, however, the tactics used by the far-left currently to achieve that are revolutionary in nature and are reminiscent of Maoism and Bolshevism in their language and methods.

Their ultimate aim isn't Communism admittedly, but some sort of socialist system, with heavy redistribution, however, my point is that their tactics are likely to end up impoverishing everyone, rather than lifting up the poor from poverty, which was invariably the case, whenever such revolutionary methods were tried.

[Dreamtimer]

Everyone is already being impoverished. The stock market will tank again, and the folks who bet on a losing economy will make more money, again.

The same types have been making money off of the fall in the economy due to the coronavirus. And when election season hits full force and Trump fuels the fires of the Boogaloo Boys, more rich folks will get richer off the continuing collapse of the economy.

The left isn't making this happen. They are not the ones wielding power. The power in this country is where the money is.

[Chris]

Everyone is already being impoverished. The stock market will tank again, and the folks who bet on a losing economy will make more money, again.

The same types have been making money off of the fall in the economy due to the coronavirus. And when election season hits full force and Trump fuels the fires of the Boogaloo Boys, more rich folks will get richer off the continuing collapse of the economy.

The left isn't making this happen. They are not the ones wielding power. The power in this country is where the money is.

No, you don't get what I mean by impoverishment. People will be eating tree bark to stave off hunger (or each other), rather than live like kings off food stamps and benefits, like they currently do. You think poor Americans are poor, but in absolute terms, they live like kings. That is why most of them are enormous. Americans have always lived extremely well by world standards, the land is just so abundant and productive. However, if the current collapse continues, they may well find out what real poverty means, in absolute terms.

[Chris]

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nat...w-and-to-come/

Disorders Now and To Come

The desperate condition of the USA is a much greater illness than the symptomatic grievance of systemic racism — though, for the moment, that complaint galvanizes the nation’s attention because it is woven into so many strands of national myth, narrative, and historic psychodrama. The short version of systemic racism is that predatory white Europeans came upon the New World and raped it, and then, utilizing that ill-gotten treasure, proceeded to rape the rest of the world and the non-whites peacefully living there (a.k.a. Colonialism). Who has any sympathy for the rapist?

Leaving aside the omissions in that story, the USA faces a graver set of circumstances than the animus between blacks and whites. In the background these weeks of protests, riots, looting, and arson is the disintegrating economy, which signifies that pretty much everybody in this land will not be able to keep on keeping on in the ways we’re used to. Everybody will have a harder time making a living. Everybody will endure shocking losses in wealth, status, and comfort. And, sadly, everybody will be too perplexed and bamboozled by the rush of events to understand why.

The short version of that story is we’ve overshot our resources, especially the basic energy resources that all other activities require. This mystifies the public, too, but you can boil it down to the cost of getting oil out of the ground being too high for customers and not high enough for the oil producers to cover their costs — a quandary. One result has been the rapid bankruptcy of the shale oil industry. Another is the incremental impoverishment of what used to be America’s broad middle-class — a malady that has, just for now, ring-fenced off the denizens of Wall Street, the notorious One Percent (of the population), who still luxuriate in zooming share prices and dividends while everybody else sucks wind in a ditch with-or-without the added affliction of Covid-19.

The perplexed and bamboozled includes the entire leadership nucleus of the land, who seem starkly unable to act coherently in the tightening vortex of crisis. While Mr. Trump seems to dimly apprehend the urgent need for economic restructuring, he’s able to express it only in messages that sound like a 1961 Frigidaire commercial, with overtones of Marvel Comics superhero grandiosity. The president may understand that a country can’t consume stuff without producing stuff, but he doesn’t get that it’s too late to bring back all that activity at the scale we used to run it when he was a young man in the 1960s. His answer to the call of restructuring — what the Soviets called perestroika before they fell apart — is to pile on more debt, that is, borrow more from the future to pay for hamburgers today.

That dovetails neatly with the needs of the financial community, led by the hapless “Jay” Powell at the Federal Reserve, who is on a mission to destroy the US dollar in order to save the banking system and its auxiliaries in the stock markets. He literally doesn’t know what to do — except “print” more dollars to support share prices, a symbolic talisman of theoretical economics that has less and less to do with what people actually do on-the-ground in the hours when they’re not sleeping. It looks unlikely that the Fed will rescue either Wall Street or Main Street. The longer he props up the former at the expense of the latter, the more certain it is that it will provoke insurrection that goes well beyond the current hostilities.

Then there is the ever-seditious opposition to Mr. Trump, the Democratic Party and its Resistance allies. Race war is their latest “solution” to the woes of a disintegrating economy, which only adds social and cultural collapse to the darkening scene. Since much of the Resistance leadership is drawn from America’s intellectual class — the news media, the campus faculties, the honchos of bureaucracy, the politicized judiciary, and the performing monkeys of Hollywood — they will end up denouncing and eating each other in their zealous competition to bring down the hated Trump by inventing ever-fresh fantasies to justify destroying western civilization and all the horses it rode in on, namely: individual liberty, free inquiry in the pursuit of truth, the rule of and due process of law, and the consent of the governed.

Never in US history has there been a faction as dishonest as today’s Democratic Party or as habituated to the application of bad faith in political conflict. Their addiction to malicious hoaxes and engineered untruths knows no limits — and naturally so, since they are motivated primarily by dissolving all boundaries in policy, law, sexual relations, and personal conduct. They’ve been busy proving the past few weeks that they’re against the social contract as a basic proposition, exhorting for an end to law enforcement while inciting street violence, crimes against property, and murder.

Many voters are onto them, of course, so the Resistance is also determined to derail the 2020 elections by any means necessary, only starting with ballot fraud but surely escalating to new, innovative chicanes and disruptions. Their chosen candidate for president — that is, their putative “leader” — is an obvious empty vessel fronting for sinister forces in the background. They stuffed Joe Biden in a basement twelve weeks ago and have no intention of setting him loose on the landscape where he would reveal his unfitness with every breath he takes and every move he makes. The news media especially, in its bad faith role, pretends not to notice, but its minions are too self-important to realize that there are other ways for citizens to learn what is happening out there.

Events are rushing ahead at a pace you can barely follow. Summer begins in another week and why, now, would you expect any lessening in civil disorders? A heat wave is upon us here in the crowded eastern US at the end of this week and that’s always an invitation to raucous behavior on the steamy streets. Have Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi appealed to their followers to end their violence? Maybe I missed that. They are hinting at a return to Covid-19 lockdown conditions — but you can forget about anyone following that when the temperature tops ninety degrees (and certainly the Dem leadership knows that).

The devastation of small business, careers, livelihoods, households, and futures continues. Take measures to protect your own future, as far as possible. Put your energy into imagining how you can be helpful to other people, and perhaps incidentally earn their trust and their assistance in mutually beneficial ways. Think about finding a plausible place to live where the rule of law perseveres. Think about how you might fit into an economy run at a smaller scale. Start taking action on that thinking. There’s potential for a lot of people to get hurt in the disorders-to-come. There’s plenty you can do to not be one them.

[Dreamtimer]

Poor people don't live like Kings. I'm not sure why you think this is so, Chris, it isn't. Poor communities suck. There's crime, the roads are bad, there are no jobs there, I could go on.

Obesity comes from a very poor diet. Surely you must know this. Too many empty calories, too little fiber and fresh produce. When people are malnourished they remain hungry despite the amount of calories they injest. There is almost no fresh produce available in poor communities. The businesses which come into these communities offer the worst options, nutritionally poor food, alcohol, and tobacco.

And then there are the paycheck loan companies who bleed people dry with their usury.

I'm surprised you don't know about these things.

Food stamps don't leave anyone living like a King. 'Welfare Queens' are a myth used to make people mad and score political points. Clinton got rid of endless welfare, or didn't you get the memo?

[Dreamtimer]

From the Atlantic:

Twitter’s decision to label Trump’s posts as misleading was a hinge moment. For years, the company had provided the president with a platform for propaganda and a mechanism for cowing his enemies, a fact that long irked both critics outside Twitter and employees within. Only when Trump used Twitter to threaten violence against the protests did the company finally limit the ability of users to see or share a tweet.
Once Twitter applied its rules to Trump—and received accolades for its decision—it inadvertently set a precedent. The company had stood strong against the bully, and showed that there was little price to pay for the choice. A large swath of S&P 500 companies soon calculated that it was better to stand in solidarity with the protests, rather than wait for their employees to angrily pressure them to act.

A cycle of noncooperation was set in motion. Local governments were the next layer of the elite to buck Trump’s commands. After the president insisted that governors “dominate” the streets on his behalf, they roundly refused to escalate their response. Indeed, New York and Virginia rebuffed a federal request to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.* Even the suburb of Arlington, Virginia, pulled police officers who had been loaned to control the crowd in Lafayette Square.

As each group of elites refused Trump, it became harder for the next to comply in good conscience. In Sharp’s taxonomy, the autocrat’s grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished. Of course, the U.S. is far more democratic than the regimes Sharp studied and doesn’t fit his taxonomy neatly. But on Wednesday, the president’s very own secretary of defense explicitly rejected Trump’s threat to deploy active-duty military officers to American streets. It’s among the most striking instances of an official bucking a president in recent decades.

[Aragorn]

From the Atlantic:

witter’s decision to label Trump’s posts as misleading was a hinge moment. For years, the company had provided the president with a platform for propaganda and a mechanism for cowing his enemies, a fact that long irked both critics outside Twitter and employees within. Only when Trump used Twitter to threaten violence against the protests did the company finally limit the ability of users to see or share a tweet.
Once Twitter applied its rules to Trump—and received accolades for its decision—it inadvertently set a precedent. The company had stood strong against the bully, and showed that there was little price to pay for the choice. A large swath of S&P 500 companies soon calculated that it was better to stand in solidarity with the protests, rather than wait for their employees to angrily pressure them to act.

A cycle of noncooperation was set in motion. Local governments were the next layer of the elite to buck Trump’s commands. After the president insisted that governors “dominate” the streets on his behalf, they roundly refused to escalate their response. Indeed, New York and Virginia rebuffed a federal request to send National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.* Even the suburb of Arlington, Virginia, pulled police officers who had been loaned to control the crowd in Lafayette Square.

As each group of elites refused Trump, it became harder for the next to comply in good conscience. In Sharp’s taxonomy, the autocrat’s grasp on power depends entirely on the allegiance of the armed forces. When the armed forces withhold cooperation, the dictator is finished. Of course, the U.S. is far more democratic than the regimes Sharp studied and doesn’t fit his taxonomy neatly. But on Wednesday, the president’s very own secretary of defense explicitly rejected Trump’s threat to deploy active-duty military officers to American streets. It’s among the most striking instances of an official bucking a president in recent decades.

You know, this could be the end of the whole QAnon religion. If and when the US military itself turns its back on Trump, then the whole house of cards will come tumbling down on top of them.

This should be good. I can't wait.

[NotAPretender]

Poor people don't live like Kings. I'm not sure why you think this is so, Chris, it isn't. Poor communities suck. There's crime, the roads are bad, there are no jobs there, I could go on.

Obesity comes from a very poor diet. Surely you must know this. Too many empty calories, too little fiber and fresh produce. When people are malnourished they remain hungry despite the amount of calories they injest. There is almost no fresh produce available in poor communities. The businesses which come into these communities offer the worst options, nutritionally poor food, alcohol, and tobacco.

And then there are the paycheck loan companies who bleed people dry with their usury.

I'm surprised you don't know about these things.

Food stamps don't leave anyone living like a King. 'Welfare Queens' are a myth used to make people mad and score political points. Clinton got rid of endless welfare, or didn't you get the memo?

What's funny about Clinton is that even as President he bought into the myths and memes, Perhaps not but the ambient social zeitgeist forced his hand. Later, when the realities emerged having always been bolstered by real scientific research, Clinton not so publicly admitted he had made a mistake...but it never makes any difference to those whose urges run lower than logic. Not suggesting this of Chris but there are plenty around, not suggesting this forum...oy vey! Talk about political correctness, perhaps pc is just another poopoo hole to dive into. Ringo Starr once showed us how a little money will tip that balance.

[Chris]

Poor people don't live like Kings. I'm not sure why you think this is so, Chris, it isn't. Poor communities suck. There's crime, the roads are bad, there are no jobs there, I could go on.

Obesity comes from a very poor diet. Surely you must know this. Too many empty calories, too little fiber and fresh produce. When people are malnourished they remain hungry despite the amount of calories they injest. There is almost no fresh produce available in poor communities. The businesses which come into these communities offer the worst options, nutritionally poor food, alcohol, and tobacco.

And then there are the paycheck loan companies who bleed people dry with their usury.

I'm surprised you don't know about these things.

Food stamps don't leave anyone living like a King. 'Welfare Queens' are a myth used to make people mad and score political points. Clinton got rid of endless welfare, or didn't you get the memo?

Yes, DT, I know about these things. But I have seen real poverty and I can tell you that practically no one in the United States is poor in absolute terms. Look up the difference between relative and absolute poverty.

People who live in first world countries have no idea how lucky they are and how good they've been having it. All that is about to change and you are likely to see real poverty in America and the West for the first time in almost a century.

Unfortunately I know my history and geography all too well, so I can easily see the similarities and differences with other time periods and geographical regions. Poor people in the USA today live extremely well by world standards and especially compared to other historical periods. Nobody has to survive on less than a dollar a day, even a homeless beggar eats better than a factory worker in India or a farmhand in Africa. There are also various welfare programmes and charities that cater to basic needs. Nobody actually has to starve, if they apply for help.

BTW, Henry VIII was considered extremely large in his time, today he would feel small in your average Wal-mart aisle.

[NotAPretender]

"Food Insecurity" is the sociological measure...We can very much find that in the United States...

[Chris]

"Food Insecurity" is the sociological measure...We can very much find that in the United States...

Yes, indeed, but that is very different from people actually starving to death, or being on the brink of starvation all the time. Food insecure people in the US might have to skip some meals, but overall they get plenty of calories, as evidenced by their girth. Quality is another matter, but let's leave that aside for now. In many places in South Asia and Africa, people are starving and not just now, but probably have been for the last couple of centuries. America has always been well known for its extreme abundance and that remains true today.