I can be as squeamish as the next guy, but I have had occasion to see some grim stuff. Once on a video I watched as they amputated a dude’s face by pulling it over the top of his forehead, with the eyeballs rolling around underneath and such. I guess they were exchanging his face surgically.
I don’t want to turn any stomachs but the stuff they do with a man’s junk when they reverse his gender…take a geoduck (Washington State reference for a huge clam) and slice it on the long axis three parts – two up and one down. Invert that motha and tuck it down inside. Viola! Now yer a gRl.
I understand that taking out an appendix is a simple appendectomy. But did you know when a chick becomes a dude that’s an addadicktome?
I am no saint, and I’ve inadvisedly and wrongly told a few lies in my life. I’ve tried to avoid them – I don’t believe in lies, and anyway in some measure of grace I am very bad at telling them. But the business of saying you’re another sex. That is egregious, ain’t it?
ghostsniperMarch 15, 2024, 12:28 PM
Much of this nonsense going on these days is considered “First World” problems, largely fabricated due to boredom.
You know, Idle Hands, and all that.
As my ol’ gray Pappy would say, “There ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that boy that a good beatin’ or hard work won’t fix.”
So yeah, you coddle these bored 21st century children and they never will grow up.
If you try to ignore them, as one is want to do with wailing brats, you’ll rue the day.
No sir, raisin’ chillin’s is a hands on activity and the sooner the better.
A 5 year old brat eventually turns into a 25 year old brat if a parent is not online to show em the error of their ways.
I’ll suggest that with spring fast approaching, that 20 something dood that wants to swim like gurl should be shipped to Iowa right away and start his new job as an apprentice farmer of crops.
He’ll be paid $100 a day in cash for a 16 hour day and that’s 6 days a week with a day off for thanking his maker that he has the opportunity to live this life.
Then at 6am on Monday he’ll be right back in that field workin’ and sweatin’ like a draft animal earning his keep like a man should.
Come 10pm at quittin’ time he’ll wash his nasty ass and cram his face with 3000 calories and then drop in the sheets til 6am in the morn when he’ll do it all over again.
He’ll be too dam tired to play little kid games of pretend.
Those blistered hands and that tortured back will serve as bookends to the library of hard work that winds it’s way through his soul.
After a year of this kind of life he’ll never ever consider behaving like a child again and bear the eternal embarrassment that he had.
And, he’ll have a nice little nest egg to start off the rest of his now productive life.
THAT is the sort of thing the US gov’t should be doing in support of a thriving national society.
I likes me sum clam chowdah now and then and just had a bowl of it 3 nights ago, with a dash of Old Bay. So if I was in proximity to them geo’s I’d more’n likely have them my “To do” list at least monthly. When you get to the part where the dood is laying on the sand with his arm in the hole stick with it for a surprise.
Casey KlahnMarch 16, 2024, 7:07 AM
We’d go on the ebb tide and clam ourselves silly when I was a runt. Razor clams. The Geoduck’s up by Olympia, where I go not except to pick fights.
Good eatin’ no lie
Casey KlahnMarch 18, 2024, 6:46 AM
Those little kids need to be locked up in Juvee. They are pulling the necks off of immature clams, killing the creature and wasting the body meat. The equivalent in hunting or ranching would be decapitating your animal and disposing his body.
That is some sickshit in that video. People are stupid AF in Olympia. Those are probably the kids of some legislator or state lawyer.
azlibertarianMarch 15, 2024, 9:32 AM
[Apologies in advance for the length. This may have to go as 2 comments, and if you’re not up for it, then please pass on by with my understanding.]
Casey, I’m sorry that I missed your sarcasm. Sarcasm and humor is very difficult for me to pull off with the written word, and sometimes it is difficult to see when others might be so afflicted. Regardless, I’ve come to understand that Presidents have only so much political capital. It is easy, and very tempting, to attribute every good or evil to that one man. While a President certainly has more influence than you or I do, he can only work in the world in which he lives. The Enemy Always Gets a Vote, and a President’s enemy might be another country, that country’s leader, the budget, your internal political opponents, an Executive Branch which may, or may not adhere to your policies, or any combination of the above (or other) entities. That a President can’t accomplish every single thing on his agenda is probably a good thing: Were that the case, the next President might undo every single thing and the public would be left whip-sawn between one extreme and another.
I wander through life with these thoughts bouncing around in my head, which at first glance might seem to be disconnected, random thoughts, but in which I try to find some order. The Mrs. is off at a movie with her girlfriends, and this gives me a bit of time to convert those random thoughts into pixels, hopefully with some coherence.
And more recently, here, Ghost gives me the perfect segue when he asks…..
“….But what’s the bigger picture?
Two things.
1. Why are all the illegals swarming the US in the first place?
2. Why are the politicians allowing it?….”
So here is where I see America and most of the world…..
* Our spending is waaaay past out of control. The budget isn’t just a trainwreck, but a train loaded with a burning, radioactive sludge derailing itself right off the bridge and into a pool of molten lava. We all know that what cannot continue, won’t. We’ve been going broke forever, and yet we still keep adding to our completely-recognized problem.
* The Dollar is probably headed to extinction. The sun will rise on the day after the Dollar dies, but make no mistake, when it does, Joe Sixpack will be crushed in the process, and everyone will have to start over from nothing.
* Our overseas adversaries have become increasingly emboldened, both in regional conflicts and in opposition to American presence.
* We (and the Euro’s) have abandoned every pretense of an immigration policy. The borders aren’t just open: They are gone.
So how in the world does any of this (and more) make any sense? Why is this happening? Why can’t they control it?
I look at all this, and from a 40,000′ view, I cannot help but to go back to Glenn Beck’s introduction to me to the Cloward-Piven Stratagy. From Wiki’s first paragraph….. “…It is the strategy of forcing political change to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse….”
Of course, Wiki is a horrible reference….it is randomly biased. But here is a 2015 reprint of the original 1966 article that Cloward and Piven wrote for The Nation. I encourage you to read the entire article to see exactly what they were thinking almost 60 years ago. But a couple of points stand out for me….
* First is the image that The Nation uses at the top of the article. They really believe this. “Tax the Rich” or sometimes seen as “Eat the Rich” is something that the lefty circles use all the time. Paraphrasing….The Top 1% have accumulated too much wealth, and every dollar of that wealth has come to them on the backs of the rest of us. We need to take it back. Bill Whittle filleted this concept back in 2012. For whatever wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the Top 1%, they don’t have enough to cover the debts that we are all incurring.
* Then I see that Piven was stung by Beck’s examination of her idea. She notes in her 2015 forward of the reprint that “…Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious….” That isn’t quite a fulsome denial. The C-P Strategy says explicitly in several places that they want to remove control over welfare programs from the cities and states and concentrate those decisions into the Borg that is Washington, DC. They don’t believe in the sovereignty of the cities and states (much less the individual). This, my friends, is socialism….the polar opposite of capitalism.
A few selected lines from the C-P Strategy [emphases, mine]….. “…If [our] strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty…. “…[T]he strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls….” “…A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition….” “….The ultimate objective of this strategy–to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income–will be questioned by some….” “….the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated…..”
I have barely dented the quotes I could pull out of this article, but I’ll sum up with this: Cloward and Piven, and their adherents, want to overload the government with every conceivable program as a way to end the “oppression of the poor”. What they miss is a definition of “the poor”. How poor would one have to be to enjoy a “guaranteed income”? Once you’ve been given that guaranteed income, what is the effect of those “free dollars” on the rest of the economy? Are the lives of the poor simply made less difficult, or do those additional dollars only serve to drive up the price of everything they might buy? If the CPI of the poor increases, do you then have to raise the guaranteed income again? Where does the “guaranteed income” end?
And so a “guaranteed right to income for the poor” has morphed into what is now known as a Universal Basic Income (UBI). “They” (whoever “they” are) decide that everyone, universally, gets some certain amount. Great idea, right? Who couldn’t, or wouldn’t use another $1000 a month? It’s your birthright. You, as an American, deserve this money. You can wisely spend it on the proverbial “coke and hookers” or waste it on rent, car insurance, food, whatever. Spread it around the economy in whatever way you think is right.
Andrew Yang was a proponent of the UBI. Not surprisingly, so is the biological son of a Kenyan father and intellectual son of a far-left militant revolutionary, Barack Obama. While the political left love a UBI, in fairness, so does the libertarian, Milton Friedman (which disappoints me terribly). And I can’t end this paragraph without noting Richard Nixon’s dalliance with a UBI.
I’ve gone on long enough here, but my point is this: We each chafe at how much the budgets at every government level have exploded. We wonder: Maybe I’m successful at spending only what I can afford, or maybe not, but deep down inside, I know that no one should spend excessively. Yet the government spends like the proverbial drunken sailors.
But here, I have to admit that I am a beneficiary of some of that drunken spending. Two confessions/illustrations….
* As you probably remember, I am a retired airline pilot. When covid hit, if things were right with the world, the airline industry would have vanished. As in “overnight”. We had nowhere near enough passengers to justify our existence. During covid, I, and the vast majority of my colleagues, spent months on Reserve, collecting a paycheck as I waited for a phone call for a trip, but knowing that there weren’t any trips to be had. And so I sat at home, week-after-week, with nothing to do but yardwork. I was flying my former airline’s biggest airplane(s) at the time, and my flying would be long-haul overseas. When my phone would ring, it would often be for a cargo flight. We’d fly with no flight attendants (because there were no passengers), but lightly loaded with cargo. True story#1: I once flew a 777 from the upper Midwest to Seoul with zero passengers and 60 pounds of cargo. Sixty. Six. Zero. True story #2: I had maybe 6 passengers (capacity: 276, if I remember right) on a flight between Los Angeles and Sydney with the cargo holds full of new and empty beer cans. We did this for one simple reason…..it was cheaper for the beer industry to fly the empty cans to Australia, have the labels printed there, and then fly them back, than it was to do this all in America. Ridiculous. You know that without seeing any of the spreadsheets. But it was decided, rightly or wrongly, that the country (not to mention the globe) needed an airline industry to survive the pandemic, and the best way to do that was to keep it on taxpayer-supplied life support until the economies and markets recovered. There was no reason for me to have a job during Covid, but that I did was due to the .gov (read: “taxpayer”) going into further debt to make that happen.
* One of the secrets of the airline industry is that almost no one goes through an entire career without having been furloughed and/or having your company go through a bankruptcy. I managed to escape the furloughs, but my former-company did go through a bankruptcy in the 2000’s. Back then, our union-negotiated (more socialism) contract included a rather generous chapter on retirement. But when the company went into bankruptcy, one of the things that did not survive the Bankruptcy Court was that retirement plan that I had been basing my future on. What would have been a very generous and comfortable retirement was turned over to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation….a government corporation (which in itself is an oxymoron) which supplies insurance to corporations in the event that their retirement plans fail. I am not crying poor here at all here–for a number of reasons, I have retired comfortably–but the retirement that I receive today from the PBGC is about 28% of what I had expected from my former-company. My point here is that the PBGC is a government body, and the retirement that I enjoy now is only due to the taxpayers paying for it.
I could go on here, but if you look in the mirror, you’d see a number of places where government spending is benefitting your life. Social Security, Medicare and maybe Obamacare are the most obvious illustrations. But there are dozens of other areas. Here are just a few….the FDIC, the much-maligned FDA, the FAA, and the NTSB (who are <a href="https://youtu.be/2EaycS1VHUo?si=0tigLl9gE6SuCVeC"making me proud this week), Midnight Basketball and all similar programs, Cash-for-Clunkers, .gov guarantees of student loans, and then the completely-predictable forgiveness of these same student loans, bailouts of Wall Street in 2008, the more distant bailout of Long Term Capital Management. On and on and on again.
One of my YouTube haunts is a Brit who goes by “Stoic Finance”. And in his latest, he explains why our Treasuries are in trouble. Now, I’ll put a big asterisk here…..IMO, one of the valid, and unanswered complaints against all the economic Doomsayers, whether on YouTube or the wider internets, is that their track records show that they’re really, really good at predicting 10 out of the last 3 recessions. This goes back to my 60% Rule. With that out of the way, Stoic does make a good case that Treasuries may be seeing their last days. No one will want to buy US debt and that will have a big affect on what happens with the Dollar.
If you haven’t read it yet, I really recommend the The Creature From Jekyll Island. I found it to be a difficult topic to wade through, but once you’ve done it, you’ll see how Central Banking and our Federal Reserve works. The Dollar—the paper kind in your wallet, the electronic versions of those slips of paper sitting in your bank accounts, the numbers in your retirement accounts, and the numbers reported by companies and governments everywhere–each Dollar anywhere is created out of nothing but debt. Anyway, buy Creature. And don’t be tempted to buy it as an audio-book or in some other electronic version. Buy a physical copy, and then read it. IMO, it is second only to the Bible.
Here’s a fun fact…..
We kinda have this idea that we each labor at our jobs, and thereby convert our labor into Dollars with which we pay our bills and live our lives. Those Dollars sit in a bank account and the bank moves those Dollars in and out constantly. But since bouncing a check is not a way to have a good relationship with your bank, we each keep a little more than is necessary for our bills. That excess is our “Reserve”. The banks notice this, and they’ll accumulate all those excesses and lend it out to others…..maybe something small on a credit card purchase, or maybe something larger like a loan for a car or a home. That’s how the banks make their monies. But a sane view of this would imply that the Banks have to keep something behind in order to keep this system running. We have our reserves; The banks ought to have theirs. But they don’t: In March, 2020, the Federal Reserve said that the Reserve Requirement is precisely: Zero.
So, yes, the Dollar is in big trouble. But so is the Yen and the Yuan and the Euro and the Pound. Every currency everywhere is in trouble, and it is my (very amateur) opinion that this is because the World banks (which I use here as a verb) using Central Banking and Fractional Reserve currencies. What we’re really seeing is a failure of Central Banking. But what is different this time is that all these major currencies are failing, in one degree or another, at the same time. Creature kinda predicted this.
The next question is: What comes next? Honestly, I don’t know. All the kiddies are into Bitcoin and all the other cryptos, and if that’s you, then good on ya’. But for me, I remain suspicious. They have faaaar too much volatility for me to be comfortable in putting my life-long acquired wealth into a currency that swings in value as much as the cryptos do. And FWIW, any crypto that has a CEO carries with it a flashing red light. Stay away from those. And please: Please don’t bring up the BRICS. Yes, they’re trying to put themselves together as a new and different way to bank, but they’re pipsqueaks. All this might imply a return to the Gold Standard, which I like, but the Gold Standard is not without it’s problems too.
I’ll sum up with this: Change is afoot. The US is and has been headed towards socialism. Globally, the US domination of Currencies and military power around the world may be coming to an end. We might be seeing a change into power being concentrated among multiple players instead of concentrated in just America. [That definitely won’t be good for Americans, but I maintain that it won’t be good for most of the world either.]
ghostsniperMarch 16, 2024, 3:57 AM
A lot of good stuff in there AZ and I appreciate a good read.
Also, I have the ebook about “Creature” (not audio) and your mention has put the spark to my ass, I will take it on this week.
I’ve long held that the financial aspect of this rotten assed gov’t is what will be it’s downfall and I still believe that. For the life of me I just don’t understand how they can keep digging that debt hole deeper and deeper with seemingly no limits. Each of us, as individuals, have automatic limits in how far into debt we can go, but the gov’t seems to have none.
I have no solutions for any of this “big picture” stuff as I am but a poor white sharecroppers chow, and the only solution I have for my wife and I is to stay well under the radar sweep and be ready to live like animals in the woods if it comes to that. Or grab a pistol and start the next chapter…
You need to make more posts like this, it’s nice to hear more than your own yappin all the time. lol
azlibertarianMarch 16, 2024, 12:39 PM
“…Each of us, as individuals, have automatic limits in how far into debt we can go, but the gov’t seems to have none…..”
Honestly, Ghost, that the government seems to have no limits to the debt they incur is largely due to almost no one refusing any of the largese that the .gov spreads around. When Social Security announces a Cost-of-Living Adjustment to SS benefits, who refuses them? Who wouldn’t take an Obamaphone? Who wouldn’t take a home loan which had been backed by Fannie or Freddie?
ghostsniperMarch 17, 2024, 7:07 AM
az, I’m appalled the gov’t is bestowing in the first place. If they did not, then no one would be partaking.
===============================
NOT YOURS TO GIVE
From The Life of Colonel David Crockett, compiled by Edward S. Ellis
(Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1884)
David Crockett
Member of Congress 1827-31, 1832-35
One day in the House of Representatives, a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in it’s support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:
“Mr. Speaker– I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblence of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every memeber of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”
He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.
Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett gave this explanation:
“Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made homeless, and besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.
“The next summer, when it began to be time to think about the election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly.
“I began: “Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and—-‘
“Yes, I know you you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again.’
“This was a sockdolager….I begged him to tell me what was the matter.
“Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth-while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intended by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest…. But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.’
“‘I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, For I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.’
“‘No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live here in the back woods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings in Congress. My papers say last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some suffers by fire in Georgetown. Is that true?’
“‘Well, my friend, I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve it’s suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.’
“‘It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to anything and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favortism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief.
There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the suffers by contributing each one week’s pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditable; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.
“‘So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch it’s power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you…’
“I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have oppostion, and this man should go talking, he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, for the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:
“Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head, when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully, I have heard many speeches in congress about the powers of the Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.’
“He laughingly replied: “Yes Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the distict, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.’
“‘If I don’t,’ said I. “I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbeque, and I will pay for it.’
“‘No Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbeque, and some to spare for those who have none.. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbeque. This is Thursday; I will see to getting up on Saturday week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.’
“‘Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-by. I must know your name.’
“‘My name is Bunce.’
“‘Not Horatio Bunce?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend.’
“It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.
“At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifested before.
“Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.
“I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him — no, that is not the word — I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times a year; and I will tell you sir, if everyone who professes to be a Christian, lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.
“But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted—at least, they all knew me.
“In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying: “Fellow-citizens — I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgement is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.’
“I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:
“And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.
“‘It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the credit for it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.’
“He came upon the stand and said:
“‘Fellow-citizens — It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.’
“He went down, and there went up from that crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.
“I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the rememberance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the reputation I have ever made, or shall ever make, as a member of Congress.
“Now, sir,” conluded Crockett, “you know why I made that speech yesterday.
“There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week’s pay. There are in that House many verywealthy men– men who think nothing of spending a week’s pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased — a debt which could not be paid by money — and the insignificant and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them reponded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, intergrity, and justice to obtain it.”
AnneMarch 15, 2024, 9:44 AM
The trouble with lies is that they come back and bit you in the a&s!
DTMarch 15, 2024, 3:34 PM
I find it easier to tell the truth. That way I don’t have to keep my lies straight. On the other hand, I have this aura such that if I tell people the sun will rise in the east, they’ll all look west.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”-William J. Casey, CIA Director
azlibertarianMarch 15, 2024, 10:52 AM
[Apologies in advance for the length. This may have to go as multiple comments, and if you’re not up for it, then please pass on by with my understanding.]
Casey, I’m sorry that I missed your sarcasm. Sarcasm and humor is very difficult for me to pull off with the written word, and sometimes it is difficult to see when others might be so afflicted. Regardless, I’ve come to understand that Presidents have only so much political capital. It is easy, and very tempting, to attribute every good or evil to that one man. While a President certainly has more influence than you or I do, he can only work in the world in which he lives. The Enemy Always Gets a Vote, and a President’s enemy might be another country, that country’s leader, the budget, your internal political opponents, an Executive Branch which may, or may not adhere to your policies, or any combination of the above (or other) entities. That a President can’t accomplish every single thing on his agenda is probably a good thing: Were that the case, the next President might undo every single thing and the public would be left whip-sawn between one extreme and another.
I wander through life with these thoughts bouncing around in my head, which at first glance might seem to be disconnected, random thoughts, but in which I try to find some order. The Mrs. is off at a movie with her girlfriends, and this gives me a bit of time to convert those random thoughts into pixels, hopefully with some coherence.
And more recently, here, Ghost gives me the perfect segue when he asks…..
“….But what’s the bigger picture?
Two things.
1. Why are all the illegals swarming the US in the first place?
2. Why are the politicians allowing it?….”
So here is where I see America and most of the world…..
* Our spending is waaaay past out of control. The budget isn’t just a trainwreck, but a train loaded with a burning, radioactive sludge derailing itself right off the bridge and into a pool of molten lava. We all know that what cannot continue, won’t. We’ve been going broke forever, and yet we still keep adding to our completely-recognized problem.
* The Dollar is probably headed to extinction. The sun will rise on the day after the Dollar dies, but make no mistake, when it does, Joe Sixpack will be crushed in the process, and everyone will have to start over from nothing.
* Our overseas adversaries have become increasingly emboldened, both in regional conflicts and in opposition to American presence.
* We (and the Euro’s) have abandoned every pretense of an immigration policy. The borders aren’t just open: They are gone.
So how in the world does any of this (and more) make any sense? Why is this happening? Why can’t they control it?
I look at all this, and from a 40,000′ view, I cannot help but to go back to Glenn Beck’s introduction to me to the Cloward-Piven Stratagy. From Wiki’s first paragraph….. “…It is the strategy of forcing political change to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse….”
Of course, Wiki is a horrible reference….it is randomly biased. But here is a 2015 reprint of the original 1966 article that Cloward and Piven wrote for The Nation. I encourage you to read the entire article to see exactly what they were thinking almost 60 years ago. But a couple of points stand out for me….
* First is the image that The Nation uses at the top of the article. They really believe this. “Tax the Rich” or sometimes seen as “Eat the Rich” is something that the lefty circles use all the time. Paraphrasing…. The Top 1% have accumulated too much wealth, and every dollar of that wealth has come to them on the backs of the rest of us. We need to take it back. Bill Whittle filleted this concept back in 2012. For whatever wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the Top 1%, they don’t have enough to cover the debts that we are all incurring.
* Then I see that Piven was stung by Beck’s examination of her idea. She notes in her 2015 forward of the reprint that “…Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious….” That isn’t quite a fulsome denial. The C-P Strategy says explicitly in several places that they want to remove control over welfare programs from the cities and states and concentrate those decisions into the Borg that is Washington, DC. They don’t believe in the sovereignty of the cities and states (much less the individual). This, my friends, is socialism….the polar opposite of capitalism.
A few selected lines from the C-P Strategy [emphases, mine]….. “…If [our] strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty…. “…[T]he strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls….” “…A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition….” “….The ultimate objective of this strategy–to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income–will be questioned by some….” “….the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated…..”
I have barely dented the quotes I could pull out of this article, but I’ll sum up with this: Cloward and Piven, and their adherents, want to overload the government with every conceivable program as a way to end the “oppression of the poor”. What they miss is a definition of “the poor”. How poor would one have to be to enjoy a “guaranteed income”? Once you’ve been given that guaranteed income, what is the effect of those “free dollars” on the rest of the economy? Are the lives of the poor simply made less difficult, or do those additional dollars only serve to drive up the price of everything they might buy? If the CPI of the poor increases, do you then have to raise the guaranteed income again? Where does the “guaranteed income” end?
And so a “guaranteed right to income for the poor” has morphed into what is now known as a Universal Basic Income (UBI). “They” (whoever “they” are) decide that everyone, universally, gets some certain amount. Great idea, right? Who couldn’t, or wouldn’t use another $1000 a month? It’s your birthright. You, as an American, deserve this money. You can wisely spend it on the proverbial “coke and hookers” or waste it on rent, car insurance, food, whatever. Spread it around the economy in whatever way you think is right.
Andrew Yang was a proponent of the UBI. Not surprisingly, so is the biological son of a Kenyan father and intellectual son of a far-left militant revolutionary, Barack Obama. While the political left love a UBI, in fairness, so does the libertarian, Milton Friedman (which disappoints me terribly). And I can’t end this paragraph without noting Richard Nixon’s dalliance with a UBI.
Part 2 continues below…..
Casey KlahnMarch 16, 2024, 7:12 AM
Some plains zombie decided he needed a dope fix, and to get it he needed copper and other bargaining/trading material. He cut the lock and chains up at the internet tower bewixt me and my provider, and stole off with the hardware.
I’m internet impoverished now until they fix it early next week, I’m hoping.
I don’t really mind the idea of prairie zombies, as long as there’s a season for them, and a bottomless issue of tags. I mean, let’s make things fair.
Be back in a few days.
ghostsniperMarch 16, 2024, 7:33 AM
BREAKING INSIDE THE PENTAGON: Associate Director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense says, “Why not just have an open border?” “Tear down the wall.”
“I think we should repeal the Second Amendment and take the guns all away!” says Jason Beck, who has a classified security clearance and works for the Department of Defense. Beck, who uses a fake name Aiden Grey in his meetings with a disguised James O’Keefe, describes his extremist policies, including “mobilizing the national guard” to confiscate guns from people’s homes. Beck says he wants a “monopoly on state violence,” a concept he describes as “‘We {the government), are the only ones with guns.”
Jason Beck works in Total Force Requirements & Sourcing Policy in the Office of
@SecDef
Lloyd Austin. This office oversees the
@DeptofDefense
and acts as the principal defense policy maker and adviser to the President of the United States. Beck says he helps “writes answers for testimony” of “the department’s senior leadership – basically they go over to the Hill for hearings on the department’s posture.”
In this shocking footage we get an INSIDE look as Jason Beck tells James O’Keefe, “we need to pack the Supreme court,” ban the United States Senate, and abolish the electoral college. He also discusses his “bottom surgery’ being painful and the changes to his plumbing.
I caught wind of this story from my wife. Can’t look at it for a few days, but after that dynamic duo of Milley – Austin, it’s no surprise the pentagon has sheisters within its walls. Look at the proactive tyranny agenda, and note the list of what keeps these demons from full power. Civvies with guns, the electoral college, the 2A. The border wall.
azlibertarianMarch 16, 2024, 12:14 PM
First of all, James O’Keefe is doing the Lord’s Work in keeping the feet to the fire of those who need to have their feet singed a bit.
However, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has noticed a pattern here: O’Keefe and his accomplices often get their videos while on what appears to be a Tinder date. And as is the case here, and with other recent videos, these videos show what I have to believe is a homosexual date. Now, I don’t care a whit about anyone’s sexuality. If you’re attracted to those of your gender, then fine. Have a date, get married, live your lives as you will.
But it used to be that being gay was disqualifying for holding a security clearance. Much of that was because you could be shamed for being who you are. That part of it is wrong. But some of that disqualification came from the tendancy among gays to brag or spill secrets as a way of developing a relationship with that Tinder date.
I don’t want to start witchhunts for gays holding security clearances, but that said, I also don’t want secrets slipping out as a means of getting laid.
ghostsniperMarch 16, 2024, 2:17 PM
I think these mentally damaged creatures should be hunted down and eviscerated.
They serve no positive purpose and are known carriers of diseases as well as are prone to criminal atrocities.
azlibertarianMarch 16, 2024, 12:02 PM
My apologies to everyone for reposting the first half of my tome above. When I first posted it, the comment contained a warning that my comment was awaiting moderation. Then it disappeared. Thinking that I had written too much for a comment, I posted the first half and got the same warning: “Your comment is awaiting moderation”.
ghostsniperMarch 16, 2024, 2:14 PM
It keep getting worse.
I had never seen anything like this before.
A more disappointing display I have not seen.
However, this can be corrected as per my recipe above.
Imagine, 10,000,000 of these specimens out working the fields this summer.
Think of all the tractor fuel that would be saved, lessening the “strain” on our planet by way of green house gases. And, since a fair amount of these people are grossly obese, they would be getting healthier too.
OK, disregard. I got trolled. Bound to happen eventually. Still…
DTMarch 16, 2024, 5:02 PM
Anyone notice how obscenely the stock market (SP500) has gone up almost linearly since Nov 1 (mostly due to options games with Nvidia)? Unheard of – unless one considers that the Fed announced an influx of $10T into the market – or should I suggest just a few favored companies? (The govt supporting favored corporations – or the other way round. Definition of facsism).
Nvidia designs AI chips, Apple and Microsoft build the majority of computers, Facebook and Google are the major social media surveillance companies. All these stocks have gone up in an unreasonable manner for the last several months. While that may be good for holders of significant number of shares, the reality is that the market hasn’t gone up so much as the dollar has gone down (though games with the numbers would disguise that). The crash is coming – too much of a flimsy foundation.
Do y’all realize that Microsoft alone is worth about $3.1T? Using Wiki as a source, that would place Microsoft #7 in GDP ranking – between Great Britain and France. (The US GDP is about $27T). The next largest companies are Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and Facebook; all over $1T. Just over $1T, Facebook by itself would rank #17 – between Indonesia and Turkey. Unsustainable in the present system. Note that none of these companies actually manufactures anything (they may design but outsource mfg for the most part): Facebook’s value is in advertising.
Your IRAs and other paper assets are going to bite the big one here pretty soon. A “good” war (one where TPTB don’t get hurt), digital currency, and other such manipulations to reduce debt will affect all of us.
Recall what happened when FDR criminalized gold by means of an executive order in 1933: gold had been valued at $20.77 when FDR confiscated the peon’s gold; it was immediately raised to $35/oz. Almost a 30% devaluation overnight. Allowed the Fed to print even more money and led to what was once known as The Great Depression. Like the Great War recently passed, it was followed by an even “greater” war. The coming depression will make the Great Depression seem like child’s play (the nation survived that one; not likely it will survive what’s coming).
The Federal debt is unsustainable but drastic measures will be put in place to hold up the house of cards even in the face of the coming tornado. I suspect such measures will stay in place until DJT is elected and the disaster can be blamed on him (or not … after that danger has come about or passed by … but come it will).
There must be a fine line between a pessimist and a realist. I’m not sure which side of that line I live on.
“It’s cynicism when you’re young; it’s experience when you’re old”
ghostsniperMarch 16, 2024, 5:16 PM
Jeez. A Saturday night horror story….
When do you think this might occur?
You seem to be implying it could happen any day now.
My wife has some decent coin wrapped up in an IRA and has been resistant to my suggestion that she cash it in because she’ll take a hit to the pocketbook.
DTMarch 17, 2024, 3:51 PM
I make no predictions of the future but I read the tea leaves which seem to say there’s a tornado warning in play with no information of when or where it will hit. On the other hand, the market generally has an up and down motion – sometimes a little more up, sometimes a little more down. For the past few months, it seems to have equivalent to flipping a coin and coming up heads 11 out of 12 flips. What are the odds of the next flip being heads or tails? 50-50. But in a sequential set of flips, one might expect the next flip to be tails.
One thing I consider is that if the market goes hard-core kablooey, “dollars” of any sort won’t be worth much so I might as well keep playing the market … though I now have somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 held as cash (I have control over my IRAs and such). If nothing else, fuel for the “bargains” if the market does have a 30% or so dump.
AnonymousMarch 16, 2024, 6:05 PM
DT, Throw in another manmade virus, aided and abetted by more man made cures and the proverbial one world system will fall into place quickly. Then the horsemen will be released. And the sheeple will go bah, bah, bah.
Government debt is nothing more than a funny money system since 1913, a system to keep the man obedient.
Anonymous, I assume that you are speaking of the World Health Organization Pandemic Treaty.
azlibertarianMarch 17, 2024, 7:32 AM
“Anyone notice how obscenely the stock market (SP500) has gone up almost linearly since Nov 1 ….”
Yeah, I have noticed that.
I play around with one of my smaller accounts and recently had SPY as part of that. I got in at what I thought was a good entry point, and then when it appeared to me to begin to turn over, I got out. I made a little beer money (more correctly, ammo money) out of the deal, so that’s great. But to your point, since then SPY has done little but keep heading to the moon.
But Mrs. azlib has wisely (and very insisently) made sure that the bigger portion of our financial futures is managed by a professional. If were up to me, I would have gone to cash at least 2 years ago. That my finanacial advisor doesn’t see the world in the same way has only benefitted me, and maybe I have to look in the mirror and recognize that my core pessimism has been premature.
But speaking of retirement accounts, here’s one of the things that worries me…..
Vanguard recently reported on the average and median 401k balances among their 5 million retirement accounts. I’ve seen similar reporting from other financial houses (Fidelity, primarily).
When looking at these numbers, you have to keep a couple of things in mind….
* These are from across all age groups. Obviously, the 20-something, having just started out in life and just begun contributing to his future retirement, is going to have less in the account than the boomer approaching retirement.
* And once you look more granularly at the age groups, what is the difference between the average and the median. The average will be an artificially high number compared to the median, because the guy who has had a high income and who invests well will pull that number higher. The median–the guy for whom there are an equal number of accounts less than and greater than his–is an important marker.
And that’s what strikes me. I’m a boomer, and here’s what Vanguard reports for my age group.
2022 Average 2022 Median
$232,710 $70,620
The average is greater than the median, but wow, three times greater? And I look at that Average and I think…..Ok, I’ve got to take whatever that number is and live off of what that number can generate in investment returns. A $232k 401k returning 5% a year would generate $11,600. That amount is going to be taxable (although an income of $11k won’t generate much, if any, income taxes).
But then look at the Median. $70k returning 5% brings in just $3500. Living on $3500 a year is less than half of the poverty level. And by definition, half of the 401ks start with less than that.
All this brings greater pressure onto Social Security, which is in obvious fiscal trouble.
Anyway, I’m headed out to a grandson’s 7th birthday party today, so I’m going to try to put all this doom out of my mind and enjoy one of the important things in life. I hope that you do too.
DTMarch 17, 2024, 4:06 PM
Not really intended as doom – more along the lines of “Do you see what I see?” prepping. Myself, I’m holding a substantial amount in cash – some under the pillow so to speak (bank holiday anyone?) because I do believe the market is due for a substantial correction “soon”. YMMV.
I like to achieve a bit more than 5% (I can get a CD that pays better than 5%); careful management should achieve 15%-20%. Sometimes. It’s not my only income though; I’d rather have five things pay $20k/year than one that pays $100k (and I’ll get there eventually 🙂 ).
SS wouldn’t be in trouble if Congress would quit writing themselves IOUs on it.
On the other hand, it’s just money – it comes, it goes. The crocus are in bloom as are the dandelions a bit further down the hill. It’s beginning to push high 60s – maybe 70s during the day and barely getting below freezing at night. Spring has arrived (except for at least one more blast of winter after the fruit trees blossom) and – speaking to myself – it’s a beautiful day to not be on a computer.
ghostsniperMarch 17, 2024, 5:15 PM
I’ve had a nagging fear for more than a few months, now, that most Americans have their election math totally wrong.
You know these people. You love these people. We’re talking about your friends and family. The problem is not that they’re stupid or disengaged or indifferent.
The problem is: they’re living in the old America.
The brutal truth is that many people are still mentally living in that vanished country where the rule of law exists — where your vote actually counts — where the FBI doesn’t create a false flag operation on January 6th to stop investigations of election fraud in swing states — and where major cities don’t release violent criminals onto the streets without bail.
They still don’t fully grasp the truth: they’re now actually residents of the Banana Republic of Biden.
These people are fully convinced that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump — which is true — and so they plan to remedy this disaster by voting once again for President Trump in 2024.
Do you see the flaw in their plan?
Sure, President Trump has the overwhelming support of the American people — but the Biden regime has everything else. They’ve got control of the CIA — and the FBI. They have the NSA. They have DHS too — and the Pentagon. They’ve got the legacy media — and most of the courts. The Democrats have kept an iron grip on the federal bureaucracy since before I was born — and the NGOs for most of my life. They’ve got Hollywood. They’ve got Big Tech. They’ve got the schools and the universities.
Need I continue?
Now you have to be really honest with yourself: which side controls the 2024 election?
That’s why America is headed for chaos.
After all: if the voting machines are rigged, then how does it matter if your favorite candidate is leading in the polls right now?
What you’re saying is both entirely correct, and at the same time a very sophisticated form of vote suppression. I’ll vote like I always have, but after the elections get stolen, I’ll have a right to bitch.
I’m wanting to upgrade my home propane tank, and replace a vehicle, and replace my lawn ZPT ride-em mower. All three of those things have specific laws in pace or pending in the Soviet of Washington that want to outlaw them. They want me riding horses. They want farmers and loggers to put around in electric vehicles. The batteries required in an electric tractor or combine would be so heavy they’d compact the soil and make it un-usable. Imagine a load of cedar with a 20 ft. diameter, and you hit an upgrade. Your battery might make it but then you’ll need a few recharges to get to the log yard and forget about making it to the port. Where the container or cargo ship now puts out to sea on electric power, and glides across the Pacific Ocean. This is the same regime that is actively seeking to tear down the hydro-electric dams…I suppose they’ll just import that fukn electricity from Mars or something.
I’m very aware of the state of the country, as it is in danger of rolling up the earth itself and swallowing the occupants whole. Not two years ago I rented a hot muscle car and took my boy to the coast to celebrate his 21st birthday. He floated the idea of renting an electric car, which I was fully against. I swear as smart as they are, this new generation also engages in magical thinking about physics. I looked at MapQust or something and plotted a road trip from near Spokane (me) to the Pacific Ocean beaches, and sorted it for an EV. I shityounot, the damn thing would want 5 recharge stops, with a nominal addition of, iirc, 5 hours of loiter time!!! In a power car, the trip is about 6-7 hours with one gas stop and assorted pee breaks, as needed. Factor in how there’s a line at the EV recharge stations, and the possibility of no service when you get to one, and the GD’nd trip would be an entire day! This is the electric vehicle utopia as it now stands, and Inslee and crew are all for it and I and my family can basically eatshit as far as he’s concerned.
Logging trucks with EV engines! The weigh 80,000 lbs loaded, my friends. What do you suppose the battery array on that muther would weigh? It’s actually in the plans. Now, I believe in my fevered mind that they are fukn with us mentally, and that eventually someone sane will accidentally go into the capitol and un-pass those idiotic environmental laws.
Casey KlahnMarch 18, 2024, 7:13 AM
Ghost, in my first sentence, I didn’t mean you were suppressing voters; I meant that the conditions created by this situation and by the powers that be are a sophisticated mindfark that paralyzes Righty. They stole the election, and have the largest and most sophisticated election theft ring ever, and at the same time the open knowledge of that (“We stole your elections and you know we did even though we’re saying otherwise but we know that you know and fuck y’all quit voting”) is depressing American voters. Not you; them. They are 5G warfaring us up the pooter non-stop.
ghostsniperMarch 18, 2024, 12:06 PM
We use propane for heat only, and have a 400 gal tank.
We use about 600 gal per season, so, it gets filled twice a year.
I told the propane company I wanted a 1000 gal (the next size they offer) and was told we don’t generate enough use per year to justify it. If I want to buy a new 1000 gal tank (from someone else) it will cost almost $4000 and there’s no guarantee the propane company will approve it. I dug my dik sukkin boots outta the closet but they no longer fit.
With everything I’ve read that whole EV thing seems to only work for very specific parameters at this point. It also seems that the more you learn about them the worse they are, and the gov’t expects the citizenry to be the hapless guinea pigs with fat wallets until the EV manuf get all the bugs worked out. I wasn’t born rich or biden so I’ll just keep my little 23 yo Blazer thank you just the same.
Casey KlahnMarch 18, 2024, 1:05 PM
I was half joking a couple years ago when I said that someone could make a killing retro-fitting gas engines in Teslas, but as with some other things I’m weirdly prescient. Now it’s a very good idea! Wish I were the guy that could do it.
It’ll be like Cuba here soon and we’ll all be driving good IC engined classics after the apocalypse. Buy ’em up now. Just like with the propane thing, I envision a black market on cars, gas, propane, beef…you name it.
ghostsniperMarch 18, 2024, 2:59 PM
Been awhile but I’ve purchased quite a bit of “stuff” on the black market.
Was burned a few times but eventually you figure out who the good vendors are and patronize them exclusively, even get on their discount program, maybe even become a local distributor for a cut of the action.
I joke with a friend that owns 90 acres, that we should become reefer farmers after the collapse.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
round n round n round it goes,
where it’s goin’ nobody knows
She was forced to view his entire exposed genitalia.
https://tinyurl.com/7xme578b
I can be as squeamish as the next guy, but I have had occasion to see some grim stuff. Once on a video I watched as they amputated a dude’s face by pulling it over the top of his forehead, with the eyeballs rolling around underneath and such. I guess they were exchanging his face surgically.
I don’t want to turn any stomachs but the stuff they do with a man’s junk when they reverse his gender…take a geoduck (Washington State reference for a huge clam) and slice it on the long axis three parts – two up and one down. Invert that motha and tuck it down inside. Viola! Now yer a gRl.
I understand that taking out an appendix is a simple appendectomy. But did you know when a chick becomes a dude that’s an addadicktome?
I am no saint, and I’ve inadvisedly and wrongly told a few lies in my life. I’ve tried to avoid them – I don’t believe in lies, and anyway in some measure of grace I am very bad at telling them. But the business of saying you’re another sex. That is egregious, ain’t it?
Much of this nonsense going on these days is considered “First World” problems, largely fabricated due to boredom.
You know, Idle Hands, and all that.
As my ol’ gray Pappy would say, “There ain’t nuthin’ wrong with that boy that a good beatin’ or hard work won’t fix.”
So yeah, you coddle these bored 21st century children and they never will grow up.
If you try to ignore them, as one is want to do with wailing brats, you’ll rue the day.
No sir, raisin’ chillin’s is a hands on activity and the sooner the better.
A 5 year old brat eventually turns into a 25 year old brat if a parent is not online to show em the error of their ways.
I’ll suggest that with spring fast approaching, that 20 something dood that wants to swim like gurl should be shipped to Iowa right away and start his new job as an apprentice farmer of crops.
He’ll be paid $100 a day in cash for a 16 hour day and that’s 6 days a week with a day off for thanking his maker that he has the opportunity to live this life.
Then at 6am on Monday he’ll be right back in that field workin’ and sweatin’ like a draft animal earning his keep like a man should.
Come 10pm at quittin’ time he’ll wash his nasty ass and cram his face with 3000 calories and then drop in the sheets til 6am in the morn when he’ll do it all over again.
He’ll be too dam tired to play little kid games of pretend.
Those blistered hands and that tortured back will serve as bookends to the library of hard work that winds it’s way through his soul.
After a year of this kind of life he’ll never ever consider behaving like a child again and bear the eternal embarrassment that he had.
And, he’ll have a nice little nest egg to start off the rest of his now productive life.
THAT is the sort of thing the US gov’t should be doing in support of a thriving national society.
OK, how come I’ve never heard of these geoduck phenoms before?
Take a look:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=v-vNWsSjSog
I likes me sum clam chowdah now and then and just had a bowl of it 3 nights ago, with a dash of Old Bay. So if I was in proximity to them geo’s I’d more’n likely have them my “To do” list at least monthly. When you get to the part where the dood is laying on the sand with his arm in the hole stick with it for a surprise.
We’d go on the ebb tide and clam ourselves silly when I was a runt. Razor clams. The Geoduck’s up by Olympia, where I go not except to pick fights.
Good eatin’ no lie
Those little kids need to be locked up in Juvee. They are pulling the necks off of immature clams, killing the creature and wasting the body meat. The equivalent in hunting or ranching would be decapitating your animal and disposing his body.
That is some sickshit in that video. People are stupid AF in Olympia. Those are probably the kids of some legislator or state lawyer.
[Apologies in advance for the length. This may have to go as 2 comments, and if you’re not up for it, then please pass on by with my understanding.]
I have meant to respond to both Ghostsniper and Casey from this now-ancient comment thread from late last month.
Casey, I’m sorry that I missed your sarcasm. Sarcasm and humor is very difficult for me to pull off with the written word, and sometimes it is difficult to see when others might be so afflicted. Regardless, I’ve come to understand that Presidents have only so much political capital. It is easy, and very tempting, to attribute every good or evil to that one man. While a President certainly has more influence than you or I do, he can only work in the world in which he lives. The Enemy Always Gets a Vote, and a President’s enemy might be another country, that country’s leader, the budget, your internal political opponents, an Executive Branch which may, or may not adhere to your policies, or any combination of the above (or other) entities. That a President can’t accomplish every single thing on his agenda is probably a good thing: Were that the case, the next President might undo every single thing and the public would be left whip-sawn between one extreme and another.
I wander through life with these thoughts bouncing around in my head, which at first glance might seem to be disconnected, random thoughts, but in which I try to find some order. The Mrs. is off at a movie with her girlfriends, and this gives me a bit of time to convert those random thoughts into pixels, hopefully with some coherence.
And more recently, here, Ghost gives me the perfect segue when he asks…..
“….But what’s the bigger picture?
Two things.
1. Why are all the illegals swarming the US in the first place?
2. Why are the politicians allowing it?….”
So here is where I see America and most of the world…..
* Our spending is waaaay past out of control. The budget isn’t just a trainwreck, but a train loaded with a burning, radioactive sludge derailing itself right off the bridge and into a pool of molten lava. We all know that what cannot continue, won’t. We’ve been going broke forever, and yet we still keep adding to our completely-recognized problem.
* The Dollar is probably headed to extinction. The sun will rise on the day after the Dollar dies, but make no mistake, when it does, Joe Sixpack will be crushed in the process, and everyone will have to start over from nothing.
* Our overseas adversaries have become increasingly emboldened, both in regional conflicts and in opposition to American presence.
* We (and the Euro’s) have abandoned every pretense of an immigration policy. The borders aren’t just open: They are gone.
So how in the world does any of this (and more) make any sense? Why is this happening? Why can’t they control it?
I look at all this, and from a 40,000′ view, I cannot help but to go back to Glenn Beck’s introduction to me to the Cloward-Piven Stratagy. From Wiki’s first paragraph…..
“…It is the strategy of forcing political change to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse….”
Of course, Wiki is a horrible reference….it is randomly biased. But here is a 2015 reprint of the original 1966 article that Cloward and Piven wrote for The Nation. I encourage you to read the entire article to see exactly what they were thinking almost 60 years ago. But a couple of points stand out for me….
* First is the image that The Nation uses at the top of the article. They really believe this. “Tax the Rich” or sometimes seen as “Eat the Rich” is something that the lefty circles use all the time. Paraphrasing….The Top 1% have accumulated too much wealth, and every dollar of that wealth has come to them on the backs of the rest of us. We need to take it back. Bill Whittle filleted this concept back in 2012. For whatever wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the Top 1%, they don’t have enough to cover the debts that we are all incurring.
* Then I see that Piven was stung by Beck’s examination of her idea. She notes in her 2015 forward of the reprint that “…Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious….” That isn’t quite a fulsome denial. The C-P Strategy says explicitly in several places that they want to remove control over welfare programs from the cities and states and concentrate those decisions into the Borg that is Washington, DC. They don’t believe in the sovereignty of the cities and states (much less the individual). This, my friends, is socialism….the polar opposite of capitalism.
A few selected lines from the C-P Strategy [emphases, mine]…..
“…If [our] strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty….
“…[T]he strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls….”
“…A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition….”
“….The ultimate objective of this strategy–to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income–will be questioned by some….”
“….the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated…..”
I have barely dented the quotes I could pull out of this article, but I’ll sum up with this: Cloward and Piven, and their adherents, want to overload the government with every conceivable program as a way to end the “oppression of the poor”. What they miss is a definition of “the poor”. How poor would one have to be to enjoy a “guaranteed income”? Once you’ve been given that guaranteed income, what is the effect of those “free dollars” on the rest of the economy? Are the lives of the poor simply made less difficult, or do those additional dollars only serve to drive up the price of everything they might buy? If the CPI of the poor increases, do you then have to raise the guaranteed income again? Where does the “guaranteed income” end?
And so a “guaranteed right to income for the poor” has morphed into what is now known as a Universal Basic Income (UBI). “They” (whoever “they” are) decide that everyone, universally, gets some certain amount. Great idea, right? Who couldn’t, or wouldn’t use another $1000 a month? It’s your birthright. You, as an American, deserve this money. You can wisely spend it on the proverbial “coke and hookers” or waste it on rent, car insurance, food, whatever. Spread it around the economy in whatever way you think is right.
Andrew Yang was a proponent of the UBI. Not surprisingly, so is the biological son of a Kenyan father and intellectual son of a far-left militant revolutionary, Barack Obama. While the political left love a UBI, in fairness, so does the libertarian, Milton Friedman (which disappoints me terribly). And I can’t end this paragraph without noting Richard Nixon’s dalliance with a UBI.
I’ve gone on long enough here, but my point is this: We each chafe at how much the budgets at every government level have exploded. We wonder: Maybe I’m successful at spending only what I can afford, or maybe not, but deep down inside, I know that no one should spend excessively. Yet the government spends like the proverbial drunken sailors.
But here, I have to admit that I am a beneficiary of some of that drunken spending. Two confessions/illustrations….
* As you probably remember, I am a retired airline pilot. When covid hit, if things were right with the world, the airline industry would have vanished. As in “overnight”. We had nowhere near enough passengers to justify our existence. During covid, I, and the vast majority of my colleagues, spent months on Reserve, collecting a paycheck as I waited for a phone call for a trip, but knowing that there weren’t any trips to be had. And so I sat at home, week-after-week, with nothing to do but yardwork. I was flying my former airline’s biggest airplane(s) at the time, and my flying would be long-haul overseas. When my phone would ring, it would often be for a cargo flight. We’d fly with no flight attendants (because there were no passengers), but lightly loaded with cargo. True story#1: I once flew a 777 from the upper Midwest to Seoul with zero passengers and 60 pounds of cargo. Sixty. Six. Zero. True story #2: I had maybe 6 passengers (capacity: 276, if I remember right) on a flight between Los Angeles and Sydney with the cargo holds full of new and empty beer cans. We did this for one simple reason…..it was cheaper for the beer industry to fly the empty cans to Australia, have the labels printed there, and then fly them back, than it was to do this all in America. Ridiculous. You know that without seeing any of the spreadsheets. But it was decided, rightly or wrongly, that the country (not to mention the globe) needed an airline industry to survive the pandemic, and the best way to do that was to keep it on taxpayer-supplied life support until the economies and markets recovered. There was no reason for me to have a job during Covid, but that I did was due to the .gov (read: “taxpayer”) going into further debt to make that happen.
* One of the secrets of the airline industry is that almost no one goes through an entire career without having been furloughed and/or having your company go through a bankruptcy. I managed to escape the furloughs, but my former-company did go through a bankruptcy in the 2000’s. Back then, our union-negotiated (more socialism) contract included a rather generous chapter on retirement. But when the company went into bankruptcy, one of the things that did not survive the Bankruptcy Court was that retirement plan that I had been basing my future on. What would have been a very generous and comfortable retirement was turned over to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation….a government corporation (which in itself is an oxymoron) which supplies insurance to corporations in the event that their retirement plans fail. I am not crying poor here at all here–for a number of reasons, I have retired comfortably–but the retirement that I receive today from the PBGC is about 28% of what I had expected from my former-company. My point here is that the PBGC is a government body, and the retirement that I enjoy now is only due to the taxpayers paying for it.
I could go on here, but if you look in the mirror, you’d see a number of places where government spending is benefitting your life. Social Security, Medicare and maybe Obamacare are the most obvious illustrations. But there are dozens of other areas. Here are just a few….the FDIC, the much-maligned FDA, the FAA, and the NTSB (who are <a href="https://youtu.be/2EaycS1VHUo?si=0tigLl9gE6SuCVeC"making me proud this week), Midnight Basketball and all similar programs, Cash-for-Clunkers, .gov guarantees of student loans, and then the completely-predictable forgiveness of these same student loans, bailouts of Wall Street in 2008, the more distant bailout of Long Term Capital Management. On and on and on again.
Going back to the top, the Cloward-Piven Strategy has won the day. It expands government spending in every way possible. According to C-P, blowing the budget is a feature, not a bug. The .gov is infected with socialism. Same too with Big Tech, MSM, academia, C-level executives in damned near every industry. Here’s one that you may have forgotten about: Lorain (OH) County Common Pleas Judge James Burge. (In proof that karma does exist, Burge had his law license suspended in 2019 over failing to disclose his financial interest in an office building, among other indiscretions.) They’re all socialists. As much as I hate to admit it, but Newsweek was right.
On the failing Dollar….
One of my YouTube haunts is a Brit who goes by “Stoic Finance”. And in his latest, he explains why our Treasuries are in trouble. Now, I’ll put a big asterisk here…..IMO, one of the valid, and unanswered complaints against all the economic Doomsayers, whether on YouTube or the wider internets, is that their track records show that they’re really, really good at predicting 10 out of the last 3 recessions. This goes back to my 60% Rule. With that out of the way, Stoic does make a good case that Treasuries may be seeing their last days. No one will want to buy US debt and that will have a big affect on what happens with the Dollar.
If you haven’t read it yet, I really recommend the The Creature From Jekyll Island. I found it to be a difficult topic to wade through, but once you’ve done it, you’ll see how Central Banking and our Federal Reserve works. The Dollar—the paper kind in your wallet, the electronic versions of those slips of paper sitting in your bank accounts, the numbers in your retirement accounts, and the numbers reported by companies and governments everywhere–each Dollar anywhere is created out of nothing but debt. Anyway, buy Creature. And don’t be tempted to buy it as an audio-book or in some other electronic version. Buy a physical copy, and then read it. IMO, it is second only to the Bible.
Here’s a fun fact…..
We kinda have this idea that we each labor at our jobs, and thereby convert our labor into Dollars with which we pay our bills and live our lives. Those Dollars sit in a bank account and the bank moves those Dollars in and out constantly. But since bouncing a check is not a way to have a good relationship with your bank, we each keep a little more than is necessary for our bills. That excess is our “Reserve”. The banks notice this, and they’ll accumulate all those excesses and lend it out to others…..maybe something small on a credit card purchase, or maybe something larger like a loan for a car or a home. That’s how the banks make their monies. But a sane view of this would imply that the Banks have to keep something behind in order to keep this system running. We have our reserves; The banks ought to have theirs. But they don’t: In March, 2020, the Federal Reserve said that the Reserve Requirement is precisely: Zero.
So, yes, the Dollar is in big trouble. But so is the Yen and the Yuan and the Euro and the Pound. Every currency everywhere is in trouble, and it is my (very amateur) opinion that this is because the World banks (which I use here as a verb) using Central Banking and Fractional Reserve currencies. What we’re really seeing is a failure of Central Banking. But what is different this time is that all these major currencies are failing, in one degree or another, at the same time. Creature kinda predicted this.
The next question is: What comes next? Honestly, I don’t know. All the kiddies are into Bitcoin and all the other cryptos, and if that’s you, then good on ya’. But for me, I remain suspicious. They have faaaar too much volatility for me to be comfortable in putting my life-long acquired wealth into a currency that swings in value as much as the cryptos do. And FWIW, any crypto that has a CEO carries with it a flashing red light. Stay away from those. And please: Please don’t bring up the BRICS. Yes, they’re trying to put themselves together as a new and different way to bank, but they’re pipsqueaks. All this might imply a return to the Gold Standard, which I like, but the Gold Standard is not without it’s problems too.
I’ll sum up with this: Change is afoot. The US is and has been headed towards socialism. Globally, the US domination of Currencies and military power around the world may be coming to an end. We might be seeing a change into power being concentrated among multiple players instead of concentrated in just America. [That definitely won’t be good for Americans, but I maintain that it won’t be good for most of the world either.]
A lot of good stuff in there AZ and I appreciate a good read.
Also, I have the ebook about “Creature” (not audio) and your mention has put the spark to my ass, I will take it on this week.
I’ve long held that the financial aspect of this rotten assed gov’t is what will be it’s downfall and I still believe that. For the life of me I just don’t understand how they can keep digging that debt hole deeper and deeper with seemingly no limits. Each of us, as individuals, have automatic limits in how far into debt we can go, but the gov’t seems to have none.
I have no solutions for any of this “big picture” stuff as I am but a poor white sharecroppers chow, and the only solution I have for my wife and I is to stay well under the radar sweep and be ready to live like animals in the woods if it comes to that. Or grab a pistol and start the next chapter…
You need to make more posts like this, it’s nice to hear more than your own yappin all the time. lol
“…Each of us, as individuals, have automatic limits in how far into debt we can go, but the gov’t seems to have none…..”
Honestly, Ghost, that the government seems to have no limits to the debt they incur is largely due to almost no one refusing any of the largese that the .gov spreads around. When Social Security announces a Cost-of-Living Adjustment to SS benefits, who refuses them? Who wouldn’t take an Obamaphone? Who wouldn’t take a home loan which had been backed by Fannie or Freddie?
az, I’m appalled the gov’t is bestowing in the first place. If they did not, then no one would be partaking.
===============================
NOT YOURS TO GIVE
From The Life of Colonel David Crockett, compiled by Edward S. Ellis
(Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1884)
David Crockett
Member of Congress 1827-31, 1832-35
One day in the House of Representatives, a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in it’s support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:
“Mr. Speaker– I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblence of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every memeber of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”
He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.
Later, when asked by a friend why he had opposed the appropriation, Crockett gave this explanation:
“Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown. It was evidently a large fire. We jumped into a hack and drove over as fast as we could. In spite of all that could be done, many houses were burned and many families made homeless, and besides, some of them had lost all but the clothes they had on. The weather was very cold, and when I saw so many women and children suffering, I felt that something ought to be done for them. The next morning a bill was introduced appropriating $20,000 for their relief. We put aside all other business and rushed it through as soon as it could be done.
“The next summer, when it began to be time to think about the election, I concluded I would take a scout around among the boys of my district. I had no opposition there, but, as the election was some time off, I did not know what might turn up. When riding one day in a part of my district in which I was more of stranger than any other, I saw a man in a field plowing and coming toward the road. I gauged my gait so that we should meet as he came to the fence. As he came up, I spoke to the man. He replied politely, but, as I thought, rather coldly.
“I began: “Well, friend, I am one of those unfortunate beings called candidates, and—-‘
“Yes, I know you you are Colonel Crockett. I have seen you once before, and voted for you the last time you were elected. I suppose you are out electioneering now, but you had better not waste your time or mine. I shall not vote for you again.’
“This was a sockdolager….I begged him to tell me what was the matter.
“Well, Colonel, it is hardly worth-while to waste time or words upon it. I do not see how it can be mended, but you gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in honesty and firmness to be guided by it. In either case you are not the man to represent me. But I beg your pardon for expressing it in that way. I did not intend to avail myself of the privilege of the constituent to speak plainly to a candidate for the purpose of insulting or wounding you. I intended by it only to say that your understanding of the Constitution is very different from mine; and I will say to you what, but for rudeness, I should not have said, that I believe you to be honest…. But an understanding of the Constitution different from mine I cannot overlook, because the Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions. The man who wields power and misinterprets it is the more dangerous the more honest he is.’
“‘I admit the truth of all you say, but there must be some mistake about it, For I do not remember that I gave any vote last winter upon any constitutional question.’
“‘No, Colonel, there’s no mistake. Though I live here in the back woods and seldom go from home, I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings in Congress. My papers say last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000 to some suffers by fire in Georgetown. Is that true?’
“‘Well, my friend, I may as well own up. You have got me there. But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve it’s suffering women and children, particularly with a full and overflowing Treasury, and I am sure, if you had been there, you would have done just as I did.’
“‘It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle. In the first place, the government ought to have in the Treasury no more than enough for its legitimate purposes. But that has nothing to do with the question. The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be intrusted to man, particularly under our system of collecting revenue by tariff, which reaches every man in the country, no matter how poor he may be, and the poorer he is the more he pays in proportion to his means. What is worse, it presses upon him without his knowledge where the weight centers, for there is not a man in the United States who can ever guess how much he pays to the government. So you see, that while you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to anything and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favortism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other. No, Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.If twice as many houses had been burned in this county as in Georgetown, neither you nor any other member of Congress would have thought of appropriating a dollar for our relief.
There are about two hundred and forty members of Congress. If they had shown their sympathy for the suffers by contributing each one week’s pay, it would have made over $13,000. There are plenty of men in and around Washington who could have given $20,000 without depriving themselves of even a luxury of life.. The congressmen chose to keep their own money, which, if reports be true, some of them spend not very creditable; and the people about Washington, no doubt, applauded you for relieving them from the necessity of giving by giving what was not yours to give. The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution.
“‘So you see, Colonel, you have violated the Constitution in what I consider a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch it’s power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the people. I have no doubt you acted honestly, but that does not make it any better, except as far as you are personally concerned, and you see that I cannot vote for you…’
“I tell you I felt streaked. I saw if I should have oppostion, and this man should go talking, he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin. I could not answer him, for the fact is, I was so fully convinced that he was right, I did not want to. But I must satisfy him, and I said to him:
“Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head, when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. I intended to be guided by it, and thought I had studied it fully, I have heard many speeches in congress about the powers of the Congress, but what you have said here at your plow has got more hard, sound sense in it than all the fine speeches I ever heard. If I had ever taken the view of it that you have, I would have put my head into the fire before I would have given that vote; and if you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law I wish I may be shot.’
“He laughingly replied: “Yes Colonel, you have sworn to that once before, but I will trust you again upon one condition. You say that you are convinced that your vote was wrong. Your acknowledgment of it will do more good than beating you for it. If, as you go around the distict, you will tell people about this vote, and that you are satisfied it was wrong, I will not only vote for you, but will do what I can to keep down opposition, and perhaps, I may exert some little influence in that way.’
“‘If I don’t,’ said I. “I wish I may be shot; and to convince you that I am in earnest in what I say I will come back this way in a week or ten days, and if you will get up a gathering of the people, I will make a speech to them. Get up a barbeque, and I will pay for it.’
“‘No Colonel, we are not rich people in this section, but we have plenty of provisions to contribute for a barbeque, and some to spare for those who have none.. The push of crops will be over in a few days, and we can then afford a day for a barbeque. This is Thursday; I will see to getting up on Saturday week. Come to my house on Friday, and we will go together, and I promise you a very respectable crowd to see and hear you.’
“‘Well, I will be here. But one thing more before I say good-by. I must know your name.’
“‘My name is Bunce.’
“‘Not Horatio Bunce?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Well, Mr. Bunce, I never saw you before though you say you have seen me, but I know you very well. I am glad I have met you, and very proud that I may hope to have you for my friend.’
“It was one of the luckiest hits of my life that I met him. He mingled but little with the public, but was widely known for a heart brimful and running over with kindness and benevolence, which showed themselves not only in words but in acts. He was the oracle of the whole country around him, and his fame had extended far beyond the circle of his immediate acquaintance. Though I had never met him before, I had heard much of him, and but for this meeting it is very likely I should have had opposition, and had been beaten. One thing is very certain, no man could now stand up in that district under such a vote.
“At the appointed time I was at his house, having told our conversation to every crowd I had met, and to every man I stayed all night with, and I found that it gave the people an interest and a confidence in me stronger than I had ever seen manifested before.
“Though I was considerably fatigued when I reached his house, and, under ordinary circumstances, should have gone early to bed, I kept up until midnight, talking about the principles and affairs of government and got more real, true knowledge of them than I had got all my life before.
“I have known and seen much of him since, for I respect him — no, that is not the word — I reverence and love him more than any living man, and I go to see him two or three times a year; and I will tell you sir, if everyone who professes to be a Christian, lived and acted and enjoyed it as he does, the religion of Christ would take the world by storm.
“But to return to my story. The next morning we went to the barbecue, and, to my surprise, found about a thousand men there. I met a good many whom I had not known before, and they and my friend introduced me around until I had got pretty well acquainted—at least, they all knew me.
“In due time notice was given that I would speak to them. They gathered up around a stand that had been erected. I opened my speech by saying: “Fellow-citizens — I present myself before you today feeling like a new man. My eyes have lately been opened to truths which ignorance or prejudice, or both, had heretofore hidden from my view. I feel that I can today offer you the ability to render you more valuable service than I have ever been able to render before. I am here today more for the purpose of acknowledging my error than to seek your votes. That I should make this acknowledgement is due to myself as well as to you. Whether you will vote for me is a matter for your consideration only.’
“I went on to tell them about the fire and my vote for the appropriation and then told them why I was satisfied it was wrong. I closed by saying:
“And now, fellow-citizens, it remains only for me to tell you that the most of the speech you have listened to with so much interest was simply a repetition of the arguments by which your neighbor, Mr. Bunce, convinced me of my error.
“‘It is the best speech I ever made in my life, but he is entitled to the credit for it. And now I hope he is satisfied with his convert and that he will get up here and tell you so.’
“He came upon the stand and said:
“‘Fellow-citizens — It affords me great pleasure to comply with the request of Colonel Crockett. I have always considered him a thoroughly honest man, and I am satisfied that he will faithfully perform all that he has promised you today.’
“He went down, and there went up from that crowd such a shout for Davy Crockett as his name never called forth before.
“I am not much given to tears, but I was taken with a choking then and felt some big drops rolling down my cheeks. And I tell you now that the rememberance of those few words spoken by such a man, and the honest, hearty shout they produced, is worth more to me than all the reputation I have ever made, or shall ever make, as a member of Congress.
“Now, sir,” conluded Crockett, “you know why I made that speech yesterday.
“There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a week’s pay. There are in that House many verywealthy men– men who think nothing of spending a week’s pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of those same men made beautiful speeches upon the great debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased — a debt which could not be paid by money — and the insignificant and worthlessness of money, particularly so insignificant a sum as $10,000, when weighed against the honor of the nation. Yet not one of them reponded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, intergrity, and justice to obtain it.”
The trouble with lies is that they come back and bit you in the a&s!
I find it easier to tell the truth. That way I don’t have to keep my lies straight. On the other hand, I have this aura such that if I tell people the sun will rise in the east, they’ll all look west.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”-William J. Casey, CIA Director
[Apologies in advance for the length. This may have to go as multiple comments, and if you’re not up for it, then please pass on by with my understanding.]
I have meant to respond to both Ghostsniper and Casey from this now-ancient comment thread from late last month.
Casey, I’m sorry that I missed your sarcasm. Sarcasm and humor is very difficult for me to pull off with the written word, and sometimes it is difficult to see when others might be so afflicted. Regardless, I’ve come to understand that Presidents have only so much political capital. It is easy, and very tempting, to attribute every good or evil to that one man. While a President certainly has more influence than you or I do, he can only work in the world in which he lives. The Enemy Always Gets a Vote, and a President’s enemy might be another country, that country’s leader, the budget, your internal political opponents, an Executive Branch which may, or may not adhere to your policies, or any combination of the above (or other) entities. That a President can’t accomplish every single thing on his agenda is probably a good thing: Were that the case, the next President might undo every single thing and the public would be left whip-sawn between one extreme and another.
I wander through life with these thoughts bouncing around in my head, which at first glance might seem to be disconnected, random thoughts, but in which I try to find some order. The Mrs. is off at a movie with her girlfriends, and this gives me a bit of time to convert those random thoughts into pixels, hopefully with some coherence.
And more recently, here, Ghost gives me the perfect segue when he asks…..
“….But what’s the bigger picture?
Two things.
1. Why are all the illegals swarming the US in the first place?
2. Why are the politicians allowing it?….”
So here is where I see America and most of the world…..
* Our spending is waaaay past out of control. The budget isn’t just a trainwreck, but a train loaded with a burning, radioactive sludge derailing itself right off the bridge and into a pool of molten lava. We all know that what cannot continue, won’t. We’ve been going broke forever, and yet we still keep adding to our completely-recognized problem.
* The Dollar is probably headed to extinction. The sun will rise on the day after the Dollar dies, but make no mistake, when it does, Joe Sixpack will be crushed in the process, and everyone will have to start over from nothing.
* Our overseas adversaries have become increasingly emboldened, both in regional conflicts and in opposition to American presence.
* We (and the Euro’s) have abandoned every pretense of an immigration policy. The borders aren’t just open: They are gone.
So how in the world does any of this (and more) make any sense? Why is this happening? Why can’t they control it?
I look at all this, and from a 40,000′ view, I cannot help but to go back to Glenn Beck’s introduction to me to the Cloward-Piven Stratagy. From Wiki’s first paragraph…..
“…It is the strategy of forcing political change to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse….”
Of course, Wiki is a horrible reference….it is randomly biased. But here is a 2015 reprint of the original 1966 article that Cloward and Piven wrote for The Nation. I encourage you to read the entire article to see exactly what they were thinking almost 60 years ago. But a couple of points stand out for me….
* First is the image that The Nation uses at the top of the article. They really believe this. “Tax the Rich” or sometimes seen as “Eat the Rich” is something that the lefty circles use all the time. Paraphrasing…. The Top 1% have accumulated too much wealth, and every dollar of that wealth has come to them on the backs of the rest of us. We need to take it back. Bill Whittle filleted this concept back in 2012. For whatever wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the Top 1%, they don’t have enough to cover the debts that we are all incurring.
* Then I see that Piven was stung by Beck’s examination of her idea. She notes in her 2015 forward of the reprint that “…Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious….” That isn’t quite a fulsome denial. The C-P Strategy says explicitly in several places that they want to remove control over welfare programs from the cities and states and concentrate those decisions into the Borg that is Washington, DC. They don’t believe in the sovereignty of the cities and states (much less the individual). This, my friends, is socialism….the polar opposite of capitalism.
A few selected lines from the C-P Strategy [emphases, mine]…..
“…If [our] strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty….
“…[T]he strategy we propose, is a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls….”
“…A series of welfare drives in large cities would, we believe, impel action on a new federal program to distribute income, eliminating the present public welfare system and alleviating the abject poverty which it perpetrates. Widespread campaigns to register the eligible poor for welfare aid, and to help existing recipients obtain their full benefits, would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments. These disruptions would generate severe political strains, and deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition….”
“….The ultimate objective of this strategy–to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income–will be questioned by some….”
“….the right to income must be guaranteed, or the oppression of the welfare poor will not be eliminated…..”
I have barely dented the quotes I could pull out of this article, but I’ll sum up with this: Cloward and Piven, and their adherents, want to overload the government with every conceivable program as a way to end the “oppression of the poor”. What they miss is a definition of “the poor”. How poor would one have to be to enjoy a “guaranteed income”? Once you’ve been given that guaranteed income, what is the effect of those “free dollars” on the rest of the economy? Are the lives of the poor simply made less difficult, or do those additional dollars only serve to drive up the price of everything they might buy? If the CPI of the poor increases, do you then have to raise the guaranteed income again? Where does the “guaranteed income” end?
And so a “guaranteed right to income for the poor” has morphed into what is now known as a Universal Basic Income (UBI). “They” (whoever “they” are) decide that everyone, universally, gets some certain amount. Great idea, right? Who couldn’t, or wouldn’t use another $1000 a month? It’s your birthright. You, as an American, deserve this money. You can wisely spend it on the proverbial “coke and hookers” or waste it on rent, car insurance, food, whatever. Spread it around the economy in whatever way you think is right.
Andrew Yang was a proponent of the UBI. Not surprisingly, so is the biological son of a Kenyan father and intellectual son of a far-left militant revolutionary, Barack Obama. While the political left love a UBI, in fairness, so does the libertarian, Milton Friedman (which disappoints me terribly). And I can’t end this paragraph without noting Richard Nixon’s dalliance with a UBI.
Part 2 continues below…..
Some plains zombie decided he needed a dope fix, and to get it he needed copper and other bargaining/trading material. He cut the lock and chains up at the internet tower bewixt me and my provider, and stole off with the hardware.
I’m internet impoverished now until they fix it early next week, I’m hoping.
I don’t really mind the idea of prairie zombies, as long as there’s a season for them, and a bottomless issue of tags. I mean, let’s make things fair.
Be back in a few days.
BREAKING INSIDE THE PENTAGON: Associate Director in the Office of the Secretary of Defense says, “Why not just have an open border?” “Tear down the wall.”
“I think we should repeal the Second Amendment and take the guns all away!” says Jason Beck, who has a classified security clearance and works for the Department of Defense. Beck, who uses a fake name Aiden Grey in his meetings with a disguised James O’Keefe, describes his extremist policies, including “mobilizing the national guard” to confiscate guns from people’s homes. Beck says he wants a “monopoly on state violence,” a concept he describes as “‘We {the government), are the only ones with guns.”
Jason Beck works in Total Force Requirements & Sourcing Policy in the Office of
@SecDef
Lloyd Austin. This office oversees the
@DeptofDefense
and acts as the principal defense policy maker and adviser to the President of the United States. Beck says he helps “writes answers for testimony” of “the department’s senior leadership – basically they go over to the Hill for hearings on the department’s posture.”
In this shocking footage we get an INSIDE look as Jason Beck tells James O’Keefe, “we need to pack the Supreme court,” ban the United States Senate, and abolish the electoral college. He also discusses his “bottom surgery’ being painful and the changes to his plumbing.
https://twitter.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1768009862963728480
I caught wind of this story from my wife. Can’t look at it for a few days, but after that dynamic duo of Milley – Austin, it’s no surprise the pentagon has sheisters within its walls. Look at the proactive tyranny agenda, and note the list of what keeps these demons from full power. Civvies with guns, the electoral college, the 2A. The border wall.
First of all, James O’Keefe is doing the Lord’s Work in keeping the feet to the fire of those who need to have their feet singed a bit.
However, I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has noticed a pattern here: O’Keefe and his accomplices often get their videos while on what appears to be a Tinder date. And as is the case here, and with other recent videos, these videos show what I have to believe is a homosexual date. Now, I don’t care a whit about anyone’s sexuality. If you’re attracted to those of your gender, then fine. Have a date, get married, live your lives as you will.
But it used to be that being gay was disqualifying for holding a security clearance. Much of that was because you could be shamed for being who you are. That part of it is wrong. But some of that disqualification came from the tendancy among gays to brag or spill secrets as a way of developing a relationship with that Tinder date.
I don’t want to start witchhunts for gays holding security clearances, but that said, I also don’t want secrets slipping out as a means of getting laid.
I think these mentally damaged creatures should be hunted down and eviscerated.
They serve no positive purpose and are known carriers of diseases as well as are prone to criminal atrocities.
My apologies to everyone for reposting the first half of my tome above. When I first posted it, the comment contained a warning that my comment was awaiting moderation. Then it disappeared. Thinking that I had written too much for a comment, I posted the first half and got the same warning: “Your comment is awaiting moderation”.
It keep getting worse.
I had never seen anything like this before.
A more disappointing display I have not seen.
However, this can be corrected as per my recipe above.
Imagine, 10,000,000 of these specimens out working the fields this summer.
Think of all the tractor fuel that would be saved, lessening the “strain” on our planet by way of green house gases. And, since a fair amount of these people are grossly obese, they would be getting healthier too.
Must see:
https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2024/03/is-there-level-above-grand-wizard.html
OK, disregard. I got trolled. Bound to happen eventually. Still…
Anyone notice how obscenely the stock market (SP500) has gone up almost linearly since Nov 1 (mostly due to options games with Nvidia)? Unheard of – unless one considers that the Fed announced an influx of $10T into the market – or should I suggest just a few favored companies? (The govt supporting favored corporations – or the other way round. Definition of facsism).
Nvidia designs AI chips, Apple and Microsoft build the majority of computers, Facebook and Google are the major social media surveillance companies. All these stocks have gone up in an unreasonable manner for the last several months. While that may be good for holders of significant number of shares, the reality is that the market hasn’t gone up so much as the dollar has gone down (though games with the numbers would disguise that). The crash is coming – too much of a flimsy foundation.
Do y’all realize that Microsoft alone is worth about $3.1T? Using Wiki as a source, that would place Microsoft #7 in GDP ranking – between Great Britain and France. (The US GDP is about $27T). The next largest companies are Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, and Facebook; all over $1T. Just over $1T, Facebook by itself would rank #17 – between Indonesia and Turkey. Unsustainable in the present system. Note that none of these companies actually manufactures anything (they may design but outsource mfg for the most part): Facebook’s value is in advertising.
Your IRAs and other paper assets are going to bite the big one here pretty soon. A “good” war (one where TPTB don’t get hurt), digital currency, and other such manipulations to reduce debt will affect all of us.
Recall what happened when FDR criminalized gold by means of an executive order in 1933: gold had been valued at $20.77 when FDR confiscated the peon’s gold; it was immediately raised to $35/oz. Almost a 30% devaluation overnight. Allowed the Fed to print even more money and led to what was once known as The Great Depression. Like the Great War recently passed, it was followed by an even “greater” war. The coming depression will make the Great Depression seem like child’s play (the nation survived that one; not likely it will survive what’s coming).
The Federal debt is unsustainable but drastic measures will be put in place to hold up the house of cards even in the face of the coming tornado. I suspect such measures will stay in place until DJT is elected and the disaster can be blamed on him (or not … after that danger has come about or passed by … but come it will).
There must be a fine line between a pessimist and a realist. I’m not sure which side of that line I live on.
“It’s cynicism when you’re young; it’s experience when you’re old”
Jeez. A Saturday night horror story….
When do you think this might occur?
You seem to be implying it could happen any day now.
My wife has some decent coin wrapped up in an IRA and has been resistant to my suggestion that she cash it in because she’ll take a hit to the pocketbook.
I make no predictions of the future but I read the tea leaves which seem to say there’s a tornado warning in play with no information of when or where it will hit. On the other hand, the market generally has an up and down motion – sometimes a little more up, sometimes a little more down. For the past few months, it seems to have equivalent to flipping a coin and coming up heads 11 out of 12 flips. What are the odds of the next flip being heads or tails? 50-50. But in a sequential set of flips, one might expect the next flip to be tails.
One thing I consider is that if the market goes hard-core kablooey, “dollars” of any sort won’t be worth much so I might as well keep playing the market … though I now have somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 held as cash (I have control over my IRAs and such). If nothing else, fuel for the “bargains” if the market does have a 30% or so dump.
DT, Throw in another manmade virus, aided and abetted by more man made cures and the proverbial one world system will fall into place quickly. Then the horsemen will be released. And the sheeple will go bah, bah, bah.
Government debt is nothing more than a funny money system since 1913, a system to keep the man obedient.
Anonymous, I assume that you are speaking of the World Health Organization Pandemic Treaty.
“Anyone notice how obscenely the stock market (SP500) has gone up almost linearly since Nov 1 ….”
Yeah, I have noticed that.
I play around with one of my smaller accounts and recently had SPY as part of that. I got in at what I thought was a good entry point, and then when it appeared to me to begin to turn over, I got out. I made a little beer money (more correctly, ammo money) out of the deal, so that’s great. But to your point, since then SPY has done little but keep heading to the moon.
But Mrs. azlib has wisely (and very insisently) made sure that the bigger portion of our financial futures is managed by a professional. If were up to me, I would have gone to cash at least 2 years ago. That my finanacial advisor doesn’t see the world in the same way has only benefitted me, and maybe I have to look in the mirror and recognize that my core pessimism has been premature.
But speaking of retirement accounts, here’s one of the things that worries me…..
Vanguard recently reported on the average and median 401k balances among their 5 million retirement accounts. I’ve seen similar reporting from other financial houses (Fidelity, primarily).
When looking at these numbers, you have to keep a couple of things in mind….
* These are from across all age groups. Obviously, the 20-something, having just started out in life and just begun contributing to his future retirement, is going to have less in the account than the boomer approaching retirement.
* And once you look more granularly at the age groups, what is the difference between the average and the median. The average will be an artificially high number compared to the median, because the guy who has had a high income and who invests well will pull that number higher. The median–the guy for whom there are an equal number of accounts less than and greater than his–is an important marker.
And that’s what strikes me. I’m a boomer, and here’s what Vanguard reports for my age group.
2022 Average 2022 Median
$232,710 $70,620
The average is greater than the median, but wow, three times greater? And I look at that Average and I think…..Ok, I’ve got to take whatever that number is and live off of what that number can generate in investment returns. A $232k 401k returning 5% a year would generate $11,600. That amount is going to be taxable (although an income of $11k won’t generate much, if any, income taxes).
But then look at the Median. $70k returning 5% brings in just $3500. Living on $3500 a year is less than half of the poverty level. And by definition, half of the 401ks start with less than that.
All this brings greater pressure onto Social Security, which is in obvious fiscal trouble.
Anyway, I’m headed out to a grandson’s 7th birthday party today, so I’m going to try to put all this doom out of my mind and enjoy one of the important things in life. I hope that you do too.
Not really intended as doom – more along the lines of “Do you see what I see?” prepping. Myself, I’m holding a substantial amount in cash – some under the pillow so to speak (bank holiday anyone?) because I do believe the market is due for a substantial correction “soon”. YMMV.
I like to achieve a bit more than 5% (I can get a CD that pays better than 5%); careful management should achieve 15%-20%. Sometimes. It’s not my only income though; I’d rather have five things pay $20k/year than one that pays $100k (and I’ll get there eventually 🙂 ).
SS wouldn’t be in trouble if Congress would quit writing themselves IOUs on it.
On the other hand, it’s just money – it comes, it goes. The crocus are in bloom as are the dandelions a bit further down the hill. It’s beginning to push high 60s – maybe 70s during the day and barely getting below freezing at night. Spring has arrived (except for at least one more blast of winter after the fruit trees blossom) and – speaking to myself – it’s a beautiful day to not be on a computer.
I’ve had a nagging fear for more than a few months, now, that most Americans have their election math totally wrong.
You know these people. You love these people. We’re talking about your friends and family. The problem is not that they’re stupid or disengaged or indifferent.
The problem is: they’re living in the old America.
The brutal truth is that many people are still mentally living in that vanished country where the rule of law exists — where your vote actually counts — where the FBI doesn’t create a false flag operation on January 6th to stop investigations of election fraud in swing states — and where major cities don’t release violent criminals onto the streets without bail.
They still don’t fully grasp the truth: they’re now actually residents of the Banana Republic of Biden.
These people are fully convinced that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump — which is true — and so they plan to remedy this disaster by voting once again for President Trump in 2024.
Do you see the flaw in their plan?
Sure, President Trump has the overwhelming support of the American people — but the Biden regime has everything else. They’ve got control of the CIA — and the FBI. They have the NSA. They have DHS too — and the Pentagon. They’ve got the legacy media — and most of the courts. The Democrats have kept an iron grip on the federal bureaucracy since before I was born — and the NGOs for most of my life. They’ve got Hollywood. They’ve got Big Tech. They’ve got the schools and the universities.
Need I continue?
Now you have to be really honest with yourself: which side controls the 2024 election?
That’s why America is headed for chaos.
After all: if the voting machines are rigged, then how does it matter if your favorite candidate is leading in the polls right now?
https://www.emerald.tv/p/welcome-to-2024-the-last-year-of
What you’re saying is both entirely correct, and at the same time a very sophisticated form of vote suppression. I’ll vote like I always have, but after the elections get stolen, I’ll have a right to bitch.
I’m wanting to upgrade my home propane tank, and replace a vehicle, and replace my lawn ZPT ride-em mower. All three of those things have specific laws in pace or pending in the Soviet of Washington that want to outlaw them. They want me riding horses. They want farmers and loggers to put around in electric vehicles. The batteries required in an electric tractor or combine would be so heavy they’d compact the soil and make it un-usable. Imagine a load of cedar with a 20 ft. diameter, and you hit an upgrade. Your battery might make it but then you’ll need a few recharges to get to the log yard and forget about making it to the port. Where the container or cargo ship now puts out to sea on electric power, and glides across the Pacific Ocean. This is the same regime that is actively seeking to tear down the hydro-electric dams…I suppose they’ll just import that fukn electricity from Mars or something.
I’m very aware of the state of the country, as it is in danger of rolling up the earth itself and swallowing the occupants whole. Not two years ago I rented a hot muscle car and took my boy to the coast to celebrate his 21st birthday. He floated the idea of renting an electric car, which I was fully against. I swear as smart as they are, this new generation also engages in magical thinking about physics. I looked at MapQust or something and plotted a road trip from near Spokane (me) to the Pacific Ocean beaches, and sorted it for an EV. I shityounot, the damn thing would want 5 recharge stops, with a nominal addition of, iirc, 5 hours of loiter time!!! In a power car, the trip is about 6-7 hours with one gas stop and assorted pee breaks, as needed. Factor in how there’s a line at the EV recharge stations, and the possibility of no service when you get to one, and the GD’nd trip would be an entire day! This is the electric vehicle utopia as it now stands, and Inslee and crew are all for it and I and my family can basically eatshit as far as he’s concerned.
Logging trucks with EV engines! The weigh 80,000 lbs loaded, my friends. What do you suppose the battery array on that muther would weigh? It’s actually in the plans. Now, I believe in my fevered mind that they are fukn with us mentally, and that eventually someone sane will accidentally go into the capitol and un-pass those idiotic environmental laws.
Ghost, in my first sentence, I didn’t mean you were suppressing voters; I meant that the conditions created by this situation and by the powers that be are a sophisticated mindfark that paralyzes Righty. They stole the election, and have the largest and most sophisticated election theft ring ever, and at the same time the open knowledge of that (“We stole your elections and you know we did even though we’re saying otherwise but we know that you know and fuck y’all quit voting”) is depressing American voters. Not you; them. They are 5G warfaring us up the pooter non-stop.
We use propane for heat only, and have a 400 gal tank.
We use about 600 gal per season, so, it gets filled twice a year.
I told the propane company I wanted a 1000 gal (the next size they offer) and was told we don’t generate enough use per year to justify it. If I want to buy a new 1000 gal tank (from someone else) it will cost almost $4000 and there’s no guarantee the propane company will approve it. I dug my dik sukkin boots outta the closet but they no longer fit.
With everything I’ve read that whole EV thing seems to only work for very specific parameters at this point. It also seems that the more you learn about them the worse they are, and the gov’t expects the citizenry to be the hapless guinea pigs with fat wallets until the EV manuf get all the bugs worked out. I wasn’t born rich or biden so I’ll just keep my little 23 yo Blazer thank you just the same.
I was half joking a couple years ago when I said that someone could make a killing retro-fitting gas engines in Teslas, but as with some other things I’m weirdly prescient. Now it’s a very good idea! Wish I were the guy that could do it.
It’ll be like Cuba here soon and we’ll all be driving good IC engined classics after the apocalypse. Buy ’em up now. Just like with the propane thing, I envision a black market on cars, gas, propane, beef…you name it.
Been awhile but I’ve purchased quite a bit of “stuff” on the black market.
Was burned a few times but eventually you figure out who the good vendors are and patronize them exclusively, even get on their discount program, maybe even become a local distributor for a cut of the action.
I joke with a friend that owns 90 acres, that we should become reefer farmers after the collapse.