What lurks in hiding for us there? Nothing good, and that is the general feeling one gets from the ripples and small currents in the wide ocean of the blogosphere. I’ve been paddling in that ocean since … 2002, when I gave up on Slate as an original aggregator news site shortly after 9-11, because the communities which gathered in the various comments sections just got too angry and irrational for words. Something let me to Instapundit, and through his links to the original incarnation of Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief. I became a contributor when the original Stryker appealed for other contributors and have been paddling away at the margins of the digital information ocean ever since. Back in the pre-internet day, I had subscriptions to all kinds of magazines. As a military public relations professional, I reasoned that I should know when and from which direction the next political-military-social sh*t-storm would arrive. Tracking blogs and digital media serves the same purpose for me that print media once did.
Ripples and currents – some of them, like the supply chain slow-downs have been addressed here by other Chicagoboyz contributors and commenters. Other blogs and comments have noted shortages of certain items on grocery store shelves. It’s not shortages of the same items, consistently across the board, but different things in different places; deliveries are starting to be unpredictable, in some locations more notable than others. One has the sense of things beginning to wobble dangerously, and a growing conviction that a dangerous crash – of an economic, social, or political nature cannot be avoided, only prepared for in as many ways as one can prepare by stocking up on those things which one would rather not do without, or that which would be too expensive in future. (Discussion here, from Bayou Renaissance Man.) For us, one of the most unsettling things was noticing that there was no Halloween candy at the local HEB on Halloween day itself, when there is usually enough left over afterwards for substantial sales of the stuff. And the San Antonio Ikea outlet had no packets of frozen Swedish meatballs last weekend – only the unappealing vegan or chicken variants. I mean – Ikea out of meatballs? Is this a sign that the end of the world as we know it is nigh, or what?
I suppose that many Americans have managed not to notice shortages and gaps on the grocery store shelves, but it would take a very willful and/or sheltered individual, or one employed by the National Establishment Media or the Biden administration to not notice how the price of everything has gone up – from gasoline to Thanksgiving turkey. The National Establishment Media can perform all kinds of jiggery-pokery in trying to avoid mention, or to plaster a kind of cheery lipstick on this pig of a situation, but as hard as the media monkeys dance and distract, they have less and less luck. I mean, who are we to believe; CNN and the ever-circulating Jen Psaki … or the evidence of our own lying eyes?
I also don’t suppose that many of us can ignore the evidence of our own lying eyes, regarding the two-tier system of justice, when BLM/Antifa violent protesters are freed on bail almost before they finish throwing the Molotov cocktails, while the January 6th conservative protesters are given the Abu Graib treatment by federal law enforcement. Or the two-tier social structure, in which the rich and powerful can cavort maskless at society events, while the pleb-level hired servers and help have to wear the face-diaper of servitude.
Comment as you wish – and what are you doing to prepare? Besides buying stuff while you still can.
Sgt Mom is right that the current situation cannot end well. And it looks like the tottering structure could start to crumble any day now.
However, I am old enough to have listened to Ross Perot warn convincingly about how the growing National Debt would destroy America in the near future, and believed him — yet we are still here.
There is no question about the bad outcome that awaits us. The only question is about timing. And people could make reasonable cases for that timing being anything from weeks to decades.
Conclusion: We can’t stop whatever is coming, so let’s enjoy life while we can and take advantage of a world where (until recently) we could travel freely and meet new people. And let’s remember that countries have collapsed before — life is miserable for a while, and then gets better; most people survive. My personal plan is to visit Yellowstone while that is still possible.
My wife went to the market today (Fry’s a local in Tucson). There were zero turkeys, 3 cans of cranberries. She had already bought a frozen turkey breast for the two of us. Gas was $3.50. A new high for Tucson. She did get two of the few boxes of dressing mix. I assume there will be more supplies coming but this is distressing two weeks before Thanksgiving.
I figure trustworthy neighbors will be the most important things you can find.
Thanks for your presence on the interwebs, I’ve seen you around often. I had a sort of similar journey by discovering the Good Professor in 2003, then Andrew Breitbart then others. I’ve also visited Chicago and it was my favourite US city because it was easily the most fun. At the time of the attack on those twin towers, I was studying, partying and apolitical and then suddenly off into active international lurkerdom. In those well-read, ignorant early days, the blogosphere opened up amazing new worlds without the cost of travel. Now even the freedom of the Internet we knew is evaporating.
Your post has a foreboding that we do not feel yet. There are reports now and then of oddly empty shelves, but most are ok every day. We also have truck drivers rightly incensed by horrid and threatening laws who have played a part in stalling deliveries.
But yes, something is very wrong, and we in Australia will be served up to our newly accelerating overlords before you are—you’d better get your shit together as a country because in every sense it looks very bad from here. Our supply lines will get cut off and then we are f*cked, having handed most of our manufacturing capacity to the CCP some crescent moons ago. However, we are really big, have plenty of resources and lots of crocs.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was what made me finally lose my temper with your great Republic that I admire so much. The Australian media were also useless bloody liars who never told us about those left behind or the thousands of refugees brought here suddenly in the night. I knew because being a subscriber at Blaze TV, Glenn Beck told me he helped fly them here. We are being run by cowards and fools and everybody is lying. FJB.
On a somewhat lighter note, I loved Chicago partly because I stayed at the University of Chicago for a few days and snuck into a couple of classes, which was brilliant. I’m so sorry for the city’s violent decline if news reports are true, because the place I visited was not perfectly safe but wonderful (if not an oil painting!) and I would have happily lived there had I ever been inclined to leave this land of mine for longer. We went to Buddy Guy’s Legends and even met him. People bought us drinks because we were from ‘Ostralia’, we listened to blues all night and it totally did my head in. I also remember being told Chicago wasn’t NY, if you couldn’t make it anywhere you could make it in Chicago. What a great attitude. What happened?
Oh dear, I’ve been ranting and I’m a long-time lurker. Well, I’ve never written at you before so I’ll just sign off with thanks for reading if you got this far, I hope the mighty USA and Australia survive this chaos, trickery and plot and if we don’t we go down fighting together because as someone famous says, ‘Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.’
I was pleasantly surprised a few days ago to see a freezer bursting with Turkeys at our local Kroger. I immediately grabbed one for our feast in a few weeks.
I see an empty shelf here and there but nothing of a hugely big deal, at least here behind the cheddar curtain. If you need MERV 13 filters or certain HVAC items, that’s certainly another story.
I wonder if it is possible for the powers that be to move trucking capacity to areas where they deem more important for people to not notice much of anything is really going on. It is obvious that they can’t move the prices, however.
Here in an unspecified midwestern state inordinately fond of cheese there are not obvious shortages of anything. Except of course ammo for deer hunting but that’s a special case. We make sufficient beer and toilet paper. I mean, we are the OPEC of paper products.
One of the few positives of the Recent Unpleasantness has been a tendency to stock up on things. It would take a pretty sizable supply chain FUBAR to impact life much.
But as to what is around the corner? Well I never thought I’d see the RCP average of a Democrat Pres ten points under water. This probably is only a modest under estimate, and is sure a lot more accurate than individual polls, where you can get any result you want to pay enough for. No, to use Star Trek imagery Deflector Shields are failing.
Sure, November 2022 and 24 are a long way off, but does anyone honestly think Biden has the resilience of say, a Bill Clinton, and will muster the force of personality that could, with some lucky breaks here and there, turn things around?
I’m encouraged by the new interest in normal people running for office. Heck, they don’t all have to even be of Conservative inclinations.
Having in much younger days seen fallout drills in 1st grade I figure everything is better than that. Sure the alliance of the tech industry, the educational system and the federal workforce looks invincible. So did the USSR until the point at which the discrepancy between reality and Pravda went past the joke stage and into glum resistance.
T
Sounds like finding ways to improve how one’s employer does business so that their job is more secure – AND at the same time, improving one’s ability to secure another, better job in a dog-eat-dog labor market – is prudent, instead of simply outsourcing such security to employer or union, thinking that they will maintain the status quo while you simply punch in/punch out each day.
Of course, it’s pretty late in the game for this, but we need to do what we can.
And while we’re at it, find ways to get leaders like DeSantis in place, who will actually challenge the Left’s status quo that is creating all these crises-not-to-waste via bull-in-china-shop actions like AB5, draconian WuFlu restrictions, and choking off American energy in the name of “saving the planet”.
The foundation for such leadership, however, is getting ordinary people to QUESTION the world around them, then build trust in their own insights and NOT delegate their decisions and oversight authority to others – even if that looks like more risk and effort for them. That reduces the scope of leadership that is necessary, replacing it with decision-making that is informed by both close proximity and direct consequence and therefore more likely to be correct and prudent.
I live in a small town in Central New York and haven’t seen any signs of any shortages yet, we’ll see how the next month or so goes. I don’t know anything about supply chains–I’m probably about as knowledgeable as Slow Joe and Mayor Pete, in other words–so I don’t know why some suburb big box stores seem to be having issues in some parts of the country…
Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by evil.
There’s a saying that things fail “gradually, then all at once.” I think we may on the point of the curve where it starts to climb asymptotically.
There are 2 well known ‘laws’ or aphorism which apply to life today:
1. ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence’ (B.Napoleon?)and
2) ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (A.Clarke’s 3rd law).
Mash these together and you get;
A) Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. And
B) Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence.
Rule A is what you think goes on at the DMV. But is what is going on now an artifact of Rule A, or Rule B?
“SanFran-sicko is not the result of many instances of Rule A in action”: Change my mind.
The good news is that the problems like turkeys will be solved because the both the producers and the stores will lose a lot of money if they aren’t. I have faith that they’ll find ways around this. Some will be more successful than others. This is a case where small stores will have an easier time being flexible and jumping on transient opportunities than the giants with their intricate supply chains. Those will have been “optimized” to the point where no one close enough to the action to see what’s happening can do anything about it.
The bad news is that however much of the problem is in purview of the government won’t be fixed any time soon. Does anyone think the five billion dollars in the “infrastructure” bill that is supposed to go to ports will do anything but reinforce the existing snafu. And it’s sure not going to do anything in time for Christmas.
The real question is if enough people will come to see that government is the problem. not bad government or too little government but just government. That anything the government is involved in will be slow, expensive, inefficient, always working to solve last year’s problem before they notice this year’s and in most places, corrupt.
Here’s something I hadn’t considered:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10190119/Buffalo-rams-woman-scooter-injuring-seven-rampage-Chinese-city-Video.html
Maybe we should take a page out of China’s book and add more ox carts to our logistics mix. (The errant buffalo was making a delivery to a food stall when it made its break.) You can’t get any greener than direct conversion of biomass to mechanical power, especially the waste.
Assuming a Harris-AOC administration, the oxen will be much easier to eat than a Kenworth that you haven’t been able to get fuel for in years.
Fry’s is owned by Kroger so it is reassuring that Kroger is not showing shortages elsewhere. Maybe it is a local phenomenon or the day of the week was a significant factor. My wife has gotten all her Christmas shopping done as all our family is remote. None local.
the Abu Graib treatment by federal law enforcement
Only thing is that I don’t think it’s really “federal” law enforcement. I understood they were in a DC jail, run by the local constabulary. I don’t think the Capitol Police even have a real jail (just a couple of cells).
I just want to make sure we identify our targets properly. Because targets they need to be.
I was surprised to see a load of 2 x 4s going south on I-95 in central Florida wrapped in a company label marked “Product of Sweden”. I guess the Florida ports are open.
The real food shortages will come next year, when fertilizer and Ag equipment parts are not available or not sufficient to plant the acreage we need to both feed ourselves and the rest of the world which depends on our surpluses.
We already have Pestilence, in the form of our present government, and it looks like Famine and War are on the way, so Death can not be far behind.
I highly recommend the noted article at Bayou Renaissance Man.
John in Indy
I failed to note that most of our fertilizer is a by-product of natural gas production.
At the risk of being a pedant, fertilizer (anhydrous ammonia), is produced from natural gas rather than as a byproduct. It can then be used directly or it is reacted with either sulfuric acid to produce ammonium sulfate or phosphoric acid to produce ammonium phosphate or nitric acid to produce ammonium nitrate. There is not a shortage of natural gas, what’s happening is that the high price of natural gas is driving the price of ammonia as well as the higher price of energy generally raising the cost of other inputs.
A lot of the fertilizer for next year is already purchased, the real impact will come next year, assuming continued high prices. Farmers are already modifying plans to control production costs. Substituting lower input crops for those that take more or sometimes taking a yield hit by reducing fertilizer use. In any case, expect higher commodity prices next year.
I was working on a farm during the ’70’s energy shock and saw the price of fertilizer triple overnight. A lot of farmers didn’t survive.
There’s still the problem of transporting all this to the farm that the transportation bottle necks will affect. All of it has to make its way on railroads and barges and finally trucks. All of it requires a hazmat licensed driver, which are in especially short supply.
A major issue for China is they are very dependent on producers in South America which is having drought related problems right now and is more vulnerable to the input price shocks than we are.
My dilemma– if I don’t have insulin I will die, no two ways about it. At the same time, my HMO severely limits how often I can get refills. I could buy it without prescriptions, but the cost is very high and insulin’s shelf life is finite. I’m doing what I can under these constraints to stockpile some without any idea of what may constitute “enough”. On the other hand, I do own lots of guns.
What you’re seeing play out in front of us is precisely what happens when you put ideologues in charge of anything. They don’t make rational decisions–Biden’s confusion about the high price of gas is a perfect example. He implemented the decisions to block fracking, shut down pipelines, and did all that in a vacuum of knowledge about the effect that those policies would have. Boom.
These people are idiots. We’re even bigger idiots for ever listening to them or allowing them to be elected to office. Their inherent ineptitude is going to kill millions and impoverish the nation.
The root of all this is unthinking ideology. Someone decided that “global warming” was a thing, when it isn’t, and that shutting down modern industry was the way forward. Even the benighted Chinese Communists have bought into this fantasy, which is about to fall in on all our heads with the coming mini-Ice Age we’re about to enter.
The maddening thing is, you can show people the evidence, point out the fraud, and they simply ignore you–Because, they heard it on the nightly news, and they find it easier to believe the traditional propaganda source than think for themselves.
Critical thought is simply too hard for most people. They read the headlines, the lede paragraph, and then never get to the body of the text, wherein you’d learn that the actual data and details of the story don’t support either the headline or the lede.
We’ve been subjected to this BS for so long that most of us aren’t even aware of it. I first started noticing the discrepancies in the media when I was reading two or three papers a day, in high school. It’s amazing how two different editorial staffs can slant the same basic AP or UPI story in totally and diametrically opposite ways–And, now that the AP and UPI are captured and under the control of similiarly-minded ideologues, guess what? You can’t even try to interpolate between the two different interpretations of the same event’s writeup.
Collectively, I think society has gone mad. The stupidity has been accelerating all my life, and it’s finally reached what I fear is the denouement. You almost have to postulate something like the widespread lead poisoning of the Roman Empire’s elites, in order to explain it. These dumbfscks are marching us all off a cliff, and we’re letting them do it. It’s utter madness. Every time you point out what is going on to other sane people, they throw up their hands and say “Well, what are you gonna do…? It’s just us that see this shit…”.
Ah, well–When the end times come, I’m just going to be over here, watching the Mad Max cosplayers do their thing. It’s gonna be epic. Entertaining as hell, in a macabre way.
The sheer, incomprehensible bloody-minded incompetency of the so-called Ruling Class is about to bear fruit – that’s what my crystal ball says to me. It’s all about to collapse. What exact form the collapse will take, what will trigger it, what the outcome will be … I honestly don’t know. I’ll have to send my crystal ball out to be recalibrated, I suppose. But the collapse will happen, and likely soon.
All that we can do, I expect, is make personal plans … and to relish and enjoy the last bits of normality-as-we-once-knew-it before it all comes flaming down.
The thing I can’t get over is how blind to reality they have to be, in order for any of this to look even vaguely workable.
Sure, let’s make over the entire energy infrastructure via mandates; never mind that the technology to do all this ain’t there as of the moment–It’ll show up when we say it will. Meanwhile, let’s shut down what we have, and what’s actually working, and never worry about how we’re gonna bridge over from what we have to what we’ve legislated…
The problem we have here is that the people running things in this civilization are in no way capable of comprehending that they don’t create reality with their words. You can say all the nice things you like about “lowering greenhouse gasses”, but when you actually start to do things the way they are, what results? Real-world consequences.
And, what’s even more insane is that they don’t seem to comprehend that the whole “Anthropogenic Global Warming” line is mostly imaginary–Even doing the worst that it could, carbon dioxide simply doesn’t have enough effect to do the things they’re attributing to it. Not in the quantities that we have in the air today, or in any foreseeable projected future. It’s nuts–The science doesn’t actually back any of this BS up, and if you go digging into the numbers, they’ve blatantly falsified a lot of the data via subterfuges like “norming” the temperature records. The whole thing is a colossal, monumental fraud.
What’s worse is that people can’t see the BS–You have trees coming out of the glaciers that are so “dangerously” receding, that are only a few thousand years old–Which sorta points towards there having been forests there well within historic times, not even pre-history. Somehow, the evidence that it was even warmer back then than it’s gotten up to today sort of escapes all of them–They rant on and on about all the signs of apocalypse, not recognizing that the actual apocalypse came in the form of ice a long time ago. When you have medieval mine workings come out from under the glaciers in the Alps, they fail to note that those mines were accessible during the Middle Ages… Something which, again, points to the fact that it used to be a lot warmer than it is now.
But, let’s destroy the entire complex economy we’ve built up around petrochemicals, ‘cos that’s gonna save the world. While impoverishing billions, and enriching a select few who can shape where the money is going to go…
The whole thing is a travesty, and the fact that anyone buys into the BS is incomprehensible to me. What, you don’t remember the things they discussed in history class, during high school…? Good grief… I knew they were feeding me a line of BS the minute they started talking about the Medieval Warm Period as being imaginary. Never mind the rest of it all… The whole thing is insane.
The really amazing thing is how many people who otherwise look reasonably intelligent just go along with it all, nodding in unison with whatever the talking heads on their idiot box tells them, never questioning anything.
Frankly, I’ve had questions about the narrative since the day I started noting all the little discrepancies in the “conventional wisdom”. Damn near nothing of what they were telling me was “reality” in high school has turned out to be actually, y’know… Real. Remember the days when the Soviets were gonna bury us, and how they were ohsosuperior in every way? How’d that turn out, again…? All the lefties telling us we had to bend the knee, ‘cos “World Communism” would triumph? All the righties telling us that the Evil Empire was forever, and we couldn’t possibly fight it…? Meanwhile, spend all this money on weapons we’ll never use…? And, how running up the national deficit was terrible, unless it was your party doing it? Remember when a 1 trillion dollar debt was going to ruin us? All the months and months of hand-wringing in the press about how Reagan was bankrupting America? Meanwhile, it was mostly the Democrats in Congress who were running up the bills, with behind-the-scenes help from all the RINOs…
I’ve been saying it for years, and I fear it may finally be happening: Eventually, the bills will have to get paid. The piper will demand his due, and we’re gonna have to pass the hat around to pay it. Thing is, I don’t remember being asked whether we should hire the guy, and I sure as hell haven’t been the one calling the tunes, either… So, while I’m sure I’ll pay and pay and pay for it all, I’m not gonna be happy about it. All y’all who were responsible for that whole sorry mess? I have some words not fit for commenting on this blog for you all…
When he was inaugurated, Biden took an oath that he would see that the laws be “faithfully executed.” He is not doing so with the immigration laws. Surly violating his oath of office is grounds for impeachment.
Of course, that would put Kamala into office. I’m not sire she would do better.
News flash for you: None of the current lot of “public employees” in Washington DC want those laws enforced, so they won’t be.
If Trump were in office, he’d have been impeached for the third time, already. God alone knows for what, but whatever it took to keep him from acting in the actual interests of the American electorate.
It’s past time to recognize that the machinery of our government has been captured by actual enemies of our nation and its people. It’s not just the elected officials, either–Think back on events of years past: Fast and Furious? Were there any whistle-blowers on that manifest violation of Federal weapons laws and international law? Nope; not until one of their anointed own got killed, Brian Terry. I feel bad for his family, but the fact that nobody in the BATF or other knowledgeable agency went public with what they had to have known was going on until he died? That absolutely enrages me–How many Mexican citizens died at the hands of cartel gunmen, armed with those weapons they let go across the border so blithely?
And. NONE. Of. Them. Said. A. Word.
Look at how gleefully the Washington DC jail system is taking part in the petty harassment of the January 6th protestors who’ve been rolled up in all of that. See any sign of those “minions” having the least bit of empathy or concern?
I’m reading the tea leaves, folks… And, it ain’t looking good. There’s a mass of madness in the air, and I have no idea where it’s going to end. They’ve ginned up so much illegitimate hatred here that the only thing I can think of which is remotely analogous is the pre-Civil War border wars in Kansas and Missouri, or the WWI-era anti-German hatred that Wilson built up and exploited. We’re not so far off from people kicking to death Dachshunds because they’re “Germanic” in nature…
What’s amazing to me is that they’re somehow turning people on their own kind–Nearly all the really violent BLM types are other whites, who’re operating in apparent total obliviousness to their own skin color, and who apparently don’t recognize where this is all going. It’s like the Nazis somehow managing to recruit Jews to go around breaking windows of Jewish stores for Kristallnacht… Mind boggling, really. I used to think we were unlikely to do things like this, here in this country, but I can clearly see that my fellow countrymen have decided to go out and do Nazi Germany several magnitudes more irrationally.
I look forward to the eventual post-denouement show trials and “reconciliation commissions”. Should be absolutely epic.
Sgt Mom” “All that we can do, I expect, is make personal plans … and to relish and enjoy the last bits of normality-as-we-once-knew-it before it all comes flaming down.”
Spot on, Sarge! Do it now, while we can. If the world goes pear-shaped soon, then we will at least have pleasant memories as we throw the sofa on the fire to keep warm. And if by some miracle it takes longer than expected before the world goes pear-shaped, then we still will have those pleasant memories. Rather like Pascal’s Wager.
Thinking about the coming collapse, there is justice. The inflationary future is going to be hardest on retirees and people living off savings — older people, in a word. It won’t be easy for working people, but their inflating wages will at least partly compensate for inflating prices. Putting this burden on the old is fair — since it is the older people who have allowed the National Debt to soar and have benefitted from FedGov’s borrowing from the future. The winners will be those who go to their final reward with a smile on their faces before the dollar collapses.
I’m currently, unfortunately, in Montgomery County, Maryland, People’s Communist Republic. I will be moving to a more mountainous rural area, like West Virginia, cash out my IRAs and buy a small farm, and raise some combination of herbivores and omnivores: sheep, cattle, pigs, chickens. They mostly increase in size and numbers, and are not subject to currency inflation. I’m retired now, and on Social Security, which will run out in 10-12 years. That’s also about the time it takes to get a livestock farm well established.
ray ward, you sound like an optimist!
Since I haven’t seen any mention of the date so far, and it’s almost over, here’s a salute to you veterans.
Hrm, a long thread about how everything is about to collapse and not a mention of “covid” or “vaccine”…
” Putting this burden on the old is fair — since it is the older people who have allowed the National Debt to soar and have benefitted from FedGov’s borrowing from the future.”
Y’know… You can pretty much go screw yourself, Gavin. I did not and never have “allowed” the National Debt to soar–I had no control over that BS, never voted for anyone who did that, and have voted only for people who said they were against it and would do something about it. I also haven’t “benefitted” from the Federal Government’s borrowing from the future, so you can take your glee at the impending “screwing” that I’m about to get and shove it.
You and your attitude are more than half the problem, here. Blaming people who you blindly claim “approved” of this shit, somehow? Really? I don’t recall ever telling anyone “Yeah, go ahead, run up the bills… I don’t care…”, nor did I ever vote for anyone to do that. Yet, I’m somehow part of the collective failure, here? While you are not? What the fsck do you expect me to have done, assassinated all the asshole politicians that did this to us? It’s not like I or any of us other “beneficiaries” had any damn control over this, or asked for it.
You’re sloughing off responsibility for this BS onto people who had neither control or ability to influence any of the spending. The responsible parties are the assholes who voted for this in Congress, not the people who were sitting out here in the rest of the country who very often consistently voted against the stupidity. I’d like to know what the hell you think “we” should have done about it–I already spent my adult life voting against idiots that did vote for this stuff to happen, and ya know what? Most of them didn’t win.
Stupidity apparently has a huge constituency. From the way you’re gleefully consigning all of “us” to the fires we “deserve”, I’d have to say you’re a member of that block.
Kirk @ 7:51pm,
The elites you mention are talkers, not doers. It’s certainly not up to them to do the literally dirty work of implementing the wonderful world they have dreamt of in their philosophy.
Kirk: “You can pretty much go screw yourself, Gavin.”
OK, Kirk. I will go and do that. Thanks for the suggestion.
The responsible parties are the assholes who voted for this in Congress, not the people who were sitting out here in the rest of the country who very often consistently voted against the stupidity.
I would add the folks who voted to support the corrupt “ruling class” who voted for the spending. I used to have on my own blog a video of Maxine Waters and Barney Frank telling Bush admin official that they would not rein in the “liar loans” and abuses of the mortgage backed securities, in spite of his warning. That video went away after Google took over YouTube.
Ray W: “… Social Security, which will run out in 10-12 years.”
It is worth stating what we all know — Social Security has already run out. It is effectively a Ponzi scheme — takes in money from those who are working and gives it to those who are retired or disabled. SS pays out more than it takes in, and FedGov prints the difference.
There was a time when SS took in more than it paid out. It Invested the money in FedGov bonds; FedGov spent the money. The only “saving” is an obligation on future taxpayers to repay those bonds.
I once got the opportunity to ask a Congressman (actually, a decent guy) about why they did this. He responded that the expectation was that the economy would grow fast enough to offset the Ponzi nature of the scheme. Of course, the Congresscritters we elected then imposed so many restrictions on industry that the economy went offshore instead.
Pigeons coming home to roost — unfortunately. We can get angry if we want — but what we really need to do is to get serious. We are where we are, and we need to change things.
Just from this morning:
JUST IN – Austria to impose nationwide lockdown for the unvaccinated population, Chancellor Schallenberg announces amid “sharply rising infection rates”.
JUST IN – Norway to reintroduce its coronavirus “health pass” after lifting all restrictions in late September.
JUST IN – Latvia bans lawmakers who refuse the #COVID19 vaccine from voting on legislature and participating in parliamentary discussions (AP)
Maybe we have bigger things to worry about than Social Security solvency?
Here in sunny FLA, it appears that the main Dem funding org has decided that there is no one who can even begin to challenge Ron DeSantis, so they aren’t even going to bother… as a contrast, last election they pumped about 15m into his opposition.
So we are almost certain to re-elect DeSantis.
The real question is, more than anything … who will be FL governor when DeSantis becomes the nominee, and the winner, of the 2024 election…. ? :-P
At 75 right now, Trump is getting a bit old to be PotUS again, and, though there was no sign of him showing his age, he’s smarter to run interference for someone like DeSantis, and to assist him in controlling the damage the wireheads can do.
Hopefully, he’ll realize this and just back DeSantis in 2024, rather than run himself…
It’s about time to realize and recognize that this is the end-game for the Ponzi scheme they started back during the last major self-created “economic crisis”. We all got conned, some of us believing what they told us, and others who thought that their votes against the scheming meant something.
Gavin made me see red, last night. The dismissive manner in which he glommed together everyone of a certain generation as deserving of what’s coming because “they let it happen” flatly pisses me off. I’ve railed against this crap from the day I recognized it, voted against it, and watched the assholes who represent me in Congress do the diametric opposite of what they told me to my face they were going to do–The current corruptocrat klepto serving as Governor of my fine state being precisely who I am speaking of, when his carpet-bagging ass managed to con us into giving him one term as our Representative from a relatively sane and somewhat conservative district. Bastard told me to my face what he “stood for” when campaigning, I believed him, voted for him in that election… And, when he got to DC? Sorry little worthless POS did the exact opposite. He was out of office in a term, and went back to the cesspool he came out of to be elected again and again to do the same thing. Now, my area has been gerrymandered to where we have a staunchly progressive Democrat, and with the way the boundaries are drawn now, we’re never going to have anything else.
This isn’t anyone’s fault, other than the people who voted for it. Blaming an entire generation of “old timers” for what has happened? False premise, and entirely bullshit. Not all of us were in lock-step with the fools; many of us pointed out the flaws in the premises, voted against them, only to see the idiot class overwhelm us through the apathy of the people who couldn’t see what was coming.
If Gavin and his ilk need someone to blame, the people they need to excoriate are the con artists and their apathetic marks out in the general electorate. His attitude is akin to blaming every German for the Nazis, including the ones like Dietrich Bonhoffer–And, that’s what pissed me off. No apologies are coming for that, either.
Do consider, when you say these things, that you’re playing into the divisory politics that the Democrat thugs so love and enjoy. Of course, it’s all the boomer’s fault… Right? They “all” protested Vietnam, even the guys who went there voluntarily, with simply trusting patriotism, believing the things their “betters” were telling them, at the time? Certainly, it was the boomers who did all these bad things to us, like setting up the Social Security ponzi scheme, back in the 1930s? I just wonder where they’ve hidden the time machine they must have used to go back and vote for that…
The generational blame-game needs to stop, as it isn’t at all productive, and it plays into the divisive politics that the con-artists have used to do these things to the general public of all generations.
And, again–I never voted for any of this bullshit, and I refuse to accept responsibility for it. Blaming an entire generation for these stupidities makes about as much sense as blaming a white person today for the slavery of two or three hundred years ago, when the man in front of you today had not a thing to do with it. It’s divisive, it’s destructive, and it is fundamentally fscking stupid. We can do better.
“Gavin made me see red, last night. The dismissive manner in which he glommed together everyone of a certain generation as deserving of what’s coming because “they let it happen” flatly pisses me off.”
Agreed. I expect to see such callously wrongheaded rhetoric on Instapundit comment threads, not here.
I can’t imagine anything less useful than apportioning blame for this mess by generation. For one thing, we started on this road long enough ago that the culprits are long enough dead that even their bones have moldered away. See David Crockett’s explanation of why he wouldn’t support appropriating money to relieve a poor widder woman who’s house had burned down. I suppose we could disinter Roosevelt and behead him as the British did to Cromwell.
I’ll bet no one here has refused to cash their tax refund checks, thus directly contributing to the deficit.
The question is what can we do to fix it or even improve it slightly? If I knew, I’d be posting this from my yacht rather than my bedroom. I’m afraid, as are many here, that we may have reached the terminal phase now that the pols have gotten around to just directly handing out money without even the pretense a legitimate government purpose.
}}} I was working on a farm during the ’70’s energy shock and saw the price of fertilizer triple overnight. A lot of farmers didn’t survive.
Part of that was the first stage of the whole collapse of the small family farm that completed in the 1980s, leading to things like “Farm Aid”, etc.
The real problem was that the price of most crops had become very volatile, and hence anyone farming needed to have a mix of crops to depend on and enough of a cushion to bear through a down year.
I know for a fact that many small farmers tended to use a shoebox accounting method, rather than proper bookkeeping — that is, they threw the money they got from crop sales into a shoebox, and paid bills out of the same shoebox.
Yes, that’s actual and serious, not being facetious at all. I worked for UF Food and Resource Economics Dept (IFAS) at the time, working on software for personal computing for farmers.
Hence you can see the real problem — how do you know if you’re investing well if you don’t know what things you did made more money than other things you did? And the margins on farming are not large by any means, that’s where the larger farms have a major benefit, by having both a larger cash flow and a wider base of crop choices open to them each year.
THAT, the failure to adjust to more complicated business needs (i.e., smaller margins needing more careful business/investment decisions), was the real reason for so many small farm failures in the 70s and 80s.
===========
P.S., there were obvious questions about the early-mid 80s regarding the wisdom of backing a loan to keep a farm afloat (i.e., buying sticks to prop up a dead cow). There were specific bookkeeping modules that were going to be connected to getting farm loans, but the farmers balked at aaaaaalllll that paaaaaaper WORK!! And after AAAALL THAAAAT, they STILL didn’t get the Loaaaans!!!
So they complained to their various state and federal legislators… so the regulators backed off on those requirements… so the farmers got their loans, and subsequently lost everything when they defaulted… but if course it was the eeeevil banks for taking their farms, not them for demanding loans even when the smart move — and the one the banks would actually prefer since they don’t LIKE being the bad guys and throwing people out of their homes and off their land — would have been to accept it while they still had a semblance of their own piece of the assets of the farm, and could get some money of their own by selling the farm.
we know what so called blm and antifa are about, they were seeded by soros through the kellogg foundation, where a self proclaimed maoist terrorist susan rosenberg, holds court in natch berkeley california, now much of the bureaucracy the media the security services, are effectively a fifth column, they are pushing an actual marxist as currency comptroller, just to fix our wagon,
Yes Desantis is safe, Nunez his running mate was very effective on one spanish language program she was on, that gave her a fair shake, (they cancelled that one) the latest fishwrap bandwagon, is ‘thank you brandon’
}}} Critical thought is simply too hard for most people. They read the headlines, the lede paragraph, and then never get to the body of the text, wherein you’d learn that the actual data and details of the story don’t support either the headline or the lede.
It’s not even “too hard” — it’s just that we allow them to be lazy. There used to be a measure of social opprobrium when you didn’t THINK.
Nowadays, it’s a Badge of Honor to cite the mantra.
“I’ll bet no one here has refused to cash their tax refund checks, thus directly contributing to the deficit.”
lol, what? That tax refund is my money, that I overpaid during the year, why on earth would I refuse it, and therefore just pay far more in taxes than the law requires?
“Hopefully, he’ll realize this and just back DeSantis in 2024, rather than run himself…”
It’s been obvious since last November that unless Trump is dead or in prison, he’s running and will be the GOP nominee again. Not saying it’s a good thing, not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s obviously what’s going to happen.
}}} And, what’s even more insane is that they don’t seem to comprehend that the whole “Anthropogenic Global Warming” line is mostly imaginary–Even doing the worst that it could, carbon dioxide simply doesn’t have enough effect to do the things they’re attributing to it.
The REAL problem with AGW is that there are two personally observable examples that demonstrate how whack it is. You don’t need to be a stats expert with all the temperature gradients at hand.
1 — Before you heat up the atmosphere, you have to heat up the OCEANS. Water, as pretty much ANY student of P-Chem will tell you, is a massively effective heat sink. So if you heat up the atmosphere, it’s going to transfer into the ocean, to regulate and balance it.
When this happens, the end result is that the ocean itself will warm up, notably.
And when this happens, hurricane formation goes through the roof, and, more critically, the severity of the storms increases as they have more time and more energy to feed off of… a hurricane is basically a very inefficient way to move heat from point A (the Caribbean) to point B (somewhere else much further north). Q.E.D., if the earth is warming, the oceans MUST be warming. And this means more and more powerful hurricanes. They even “predicted” this in 2005, after Katrina and three other class 3+ hurricanes… “We have to get used to this, it’s the new normal…”
Except it wasn’t. What followed was actually the longest period of ZERO class 3+ hurricanes striking the entire eastern seaboard from Texas to Maine since there were enough people along the entire seaboard to get actually reliable reports of said hurricanes, ca. 1820 (the previous record was during the Civil War)
“The validity of a science is its ability to predict.”
AGW isn’t valid. It continually fails major, self-evidently observable outcomes.
2 — The Citrus Line. Living in FL for lo, these many decades, you tend to learn a few things that most others aren’t familiar with … in this case, about citrus. The typical life of a citrus tree is about 20y. So the worst thing that can happen to your citrus farm is to have a sustained hard freeze during that lifespan, which kills or stunts the trees. Hence, the “Citrus Line” — a nominal line north of which the chances of a sustained hard freeze in any given 20y span is high enough that you don’t plant citrus trees, at least, not if you plan to make money from said trees by collecting and selling the fruit…
Now, not only has the Citrus Line observably moved in my lifetime — I can recall a section of rolling hills to the North of Orlando, along the Florida Turnpike, which used to be covered with orange trees, and now… nary an orange tree in sight… you have to go south of Orlando to find citrus groves for the most part. I saw an article in one of the FL newspapers which detailed that, in 1880, the Citrus Line was all the way up in Georgia.
Now, pull up a map of FL-Georgia. That is NOT a short distance. It’s around 250 MILES. That is, to say, “Orlando is quite a ways from the northern border of FL”. Now, it can be asserted that some of this can be explained by business changes, that citrus farmers are more particular about where they site their trees…. blah blah blah. No, you can’t justify 300 miles of change that is in the exact OPPOSITE direction from what warming would “predict”. If AGW was seriously real, then they would be growing citrus in North Carolina.
Yeah, I think Trump is going to make another run at it all.
Which, if he doesn’t come in with a plan to actually take control of the Deep State from day one is why I’m probably not going to vote for him in the primary. If he does what he did last time around, which is come in trusting, naive, and unprepared to actually win? It’s going to be another four years of meaningless stopgap BS while he’s thrown around by the machine again.
You could make a case, I am afraid, that he was a stalking horse from the get-go, meant to serve as yet another RINO anodyne to keep us quiescent as the con-artists of the Uniparty worked their wiles in the background. The real issues that led to Biden being able to do what he has done so quickly, and with such enthusiasm by the apparatchiks were never addressed by Trump–And, if we’re to be successful in turning this shit-show around, we badly need to start doing things like shutting down the corrupt FBI and investigating just how it is that organs of the state like the New York Times are getting access to documents that are obviously straight out of Project Veritas’s privileged communications with their lawyers, after the pretext search for the diaries of Biden’s daughter…?
Yeah; I have my suspicions about Trump. I’ve had them since 2015, and while they’re somewhat ameliorated by his performance in office, I still have them. If Trump was who he and everyone else says he is, I find it curious and strange that the “Deep State” isn’t moving to utterly neutralize him right now–And, maybe they are, behind the scenes.
Paranoid, much, Kirk? Yeah; sadly, I am. Right now, we could have Cincinnatus or George Washington show up on the scene, and I’d still question their motivations, ability to effect change, and their performance.
}}} I’ll bet no one here has refused to cash their tax refund checks, thus directly contributing to the deficit.
Heyyyy, nice attempt to shift and dodge blame!!
Not buying it, though.
As others have long since noted, what the Left has been doing since the sixties is executing a Cloward-Piven strategy to destroy the country, the better to give them the capacity to remake it as they want it remade.
We are getting to the endgame portion of this…
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
So, yes, it’s been getting worse for a very long time… particularly due to the efforts since the 60s by the left.
And, as Warren Oates said to Roy Scheider in the movie Blue Thunder:
“The moral of the story, Frank, is that, if you’re walking on eggs, don’t hop.”
The left has not been hopping, they’ve been stomping around in lead boots.
we go to war, with the army we have, now I came up with the minefield and tripwire after comey was removed, their were about eight hedgerows of bureaucracy at fbi and cia, from mccabe to ohr, from brennan down to some other character, mayorkas was the one that set up the kids in cages, the mild immigration pause relied on the 2016 omnibus language, now General Mattis was not optimum, then again who was confirmable, same with Tillerson the first time around, Pompeo proved his bonafides, Wray was not a great replacement, then the same problem obtains, was their anyone down the line who was reliable,
Desantis would face the same problem, obviously Russia would not work as the squirrel, but when facts are immaterial to policy, who knows what they would come up with, we’re dealing with a much larger global network, haklyut orbis, the link campus, which are comflicted as to policy,
those checks were the smallest part of the boondoggle, now the lockdowns were criminal, but the alternative data was crowded out by the arrangements, made around the time of the 2019 WEF Wargame, which had all the players, CDC WHO Rockefeller Foundation, John Hopkins Imperial College, how to wriggle out of that tholian web,
Kirk: “… if we’re to be successful in turning this shit-show around, we badly need to start doing things like shutting down the corrupt FBI …”
Absolutely agree! Now, how are we going to do that?
Vote for a Republican? The same kind of Republican Congresscritter who lined up to stab President Trump in the back? The same kind of Republicans who could never find the time to fund the border wall for which their Republican President campaigned when they controlled House & Senate?
It is a serious question. And it needs a serious answer.
“The sheer, incomprehensible bloody-minded incompetency of the so-called Ruling Class ”
They make the last of the Romanovs seem like wise, careful stewards, don’t they?