HOGS TO SLAUGHTER « The Burning Platform

HOGS TO SLAUGHTER

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

America is a third world country, it’s just not ready to accept that reality yet. Politically it is thoroughly corrupted, economically it is too deeply indebted to ever extricate itself, morally it is without direction, rudderless in dangerous seas and heading for the rocks.

The divides between the wealthy and the impoverished too wide to ever cross, the races and generations set against one another deliberately, provoked hourly by the very people who should be doing everything possible to unite them, armed to the teeth, seething with rage, neutered or enraged by pharmaceuticals, depending upon the age and gender, divided by sex, generations of fatherless children at every level raising up children who have no connection to anything that isn’t coming from a glowing screen- and all the while deliberately it seems, provoking hostility with every nation, every race, every people and persuasion in order to stir up a seething cauldron of slights and revenge for the coming reckoning.

Those once magnificent buildings will burn and the swarms that dwelt there will fan out, like flames across the face of the old nation looking to settle the score, imagined or real.

Last night I had a dream. One of the last things I did before I called it quits just after dark was to feed the hogs. I stood on the tailgate of the truck and emptied bags of watermelon rinds and soft mangoes, wilted heads of lettuce, bunches of carrots, apples, sweet yellow hothouse peppers imported from Holland, strawberries by the gallon, string beans, potatoes, cabbages and onions. The sows stood up on the fence rails and lifted their snouts to me to pet, their way of thanking me for the meal although they’d waited all day long for it.

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Sioux Indian Dude Emigrates To Russia For Freedom « The Burning Platform

Sioux Indian Dude Emigrates To Russia For Freedom

His “100 million” claim is far off.  But, other than that, I like this guy!

If I was single with no family obligations, I would certainly consider Russia as an option. Why not?  Lots of white people, virtually zero kneegrows. Enormous amounts of space, and a government that doesn’t have 10,000 felonies listed on its registry. And (Orthodox) Christianity is making a huge comeback.

College Then and Now: Letter to a Bright Young Woman | Fred On Everything

College Then and Now: Letter to a Bright Young Woman

Dear ___,

You asked how college was when I was a kid, in the late Epicene, and what I thought of schools today. Herewith an answer which I will probably post on my website as I think the matter important:

Much has changed.

Long ago, before 1965 say, college was understood to be for the intelligent and academically prepared among the young, who would one day both provide leadership for the country and set the tone of society. Perhaps ten percent, but no more than twenty percent, of high-school graduates were thought to have any business on a campus.

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Whither the Shards of America?: It’s Us, or Them | Fred On Everything

Whither the Shards of America?: It’s Us, or Them

From the sewers they come. Anti-Trump animalia beating a supporter of Trump in San Jose. They have done the same to Sanders. Anti-Trump is legitimate. Beating up his supporters is not. Us or them.

From the Drudge Report, America’s thermometer, regarding the disruption  a campaign rally for Trump:

‘NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THAT IN AMERICA’…

TRUMP CAMPAIGNERS CHASED DOWN LIKE PREY…

DOZENS PUNCHED…

POLICE ASSAULTED…

SAN JOSE MAYOR JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE…

VIDEO: FEMALE PELTED WITH HUEVOS…

MEXICAN FLAGS RAISED AS AMERICAN FLAG BURNS…

Enough. This can’t last. If people want to demonstrate against anything at all, fine. If they detest any politician at all, fine. If they are vulgar subliterate rabble, let them be vulgar subliterate rabble where I am not. But when they run wild over and over and shut down politics, they need to be stopped, right now, with nightsticks and dogs and long jail sentences.

A country that allows a feral underclass to run unchecked, to attack and beat anyone it doesn’t like, to loot and burn and disrupt political rallies, to block highways and intimidate the citizenry, will not last. It is time to put an end to it. If we still can.

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Cassandra's Legacy: Social Equality and the Destruction of the Planet

Social Equality and the Destruction of the Planet


In this post, Jacopo Simonetta asks a fundamental (and politically incorrect) question: are we sure that social equality would be good for the environment? The answer turns out to be not politically very correct. (U.B.)

by Jacopo Simonetta


Exaggerated inequality is surely a major problem in today's societies, and it keeps increasing. I, too, certainly believe that this scandal must end, but the topic of the article is another one: is it true that redistribution of wealth would have a good effect on the Earth health? Many very influential people believe this, but I am not so sure.

Evidently, affluent people consume much more than poor people do, but how much? As far as I know, there are no studies correlating the environmental impact and social classes but, as starting point, we could compare how CO2 emissions change with income. (data Word Bank and Wikipedia respectively).  


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The Archdruid Report: Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns

Retrotopia: Diminishing Returns

This is the nineteenth installment of an exploration of some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative fiction. Our narrator, forced to grapple with the cognitive dissonance between everything he believes about progress and the facts of life in the Lakeland Republic, tries to evade the issue for an evening—and ends up even deeper in perplexity...

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The next day was Saturday, and for a change, I didn’t have anything planned. The marathon sessions of negotiation with President Meeker’s staff, exhausting though they’d been, had taken up less of my time in Toledo than I’d expected; even if I sat on my rump in my room until it was time to catch the train home Wednesday, I’d still get back to Philadelphia with everything taken care of that I’d officially been asked to do. That was comforting—or it should have been.

As it was, I woke up in a foul mood, and things didn’t get any better as I went through my morning routine and then stared at the window, trying to decide what to do with the day. Partly, I was annoyed at the way the evening had gone, annoyed with myself for almost getting into a fight with Melanie Berger, and with her for almost getting into a fight with me. The worst of it, though, was the bizarre logic she’d used to brush aside my concerns about the Lakeland Republic’s survival. Her notion that progress had somehow turned into the enemy of prosperity and the source of most of the world’s problems—I could barely frame the idea in my mind without shaking my head and laughing, it was so obviously wrong.

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How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard Of Living? | Zero Hedge

How Will You Cope With A Lower Standard Of Living?

Submitted by Tom Chatham via Project Chesapeake,

The forces are mounting that will eventually overwhelm most Americans and send their standard of living to unknown depths.Americans that have only known the post WWII prosperity are ill equipped and educated to deal with depression level living. Easy credit and instant gratification have created a nation of whining, self absorbed, entitlement minded people with no moral or mental toughness.

Doug Casey believes we are headed for what he calls a super depression created by the ending of a debt super cycle. The bigger the debt cycle the bigger the depression that follows. That’s how reality works and most people are not prepared for reality.

When this depression, which has already started, gets momentum, it will overwhelm the plans of a society that is expecting to get things like social security, pensions and payouts from retirement plans they have paid into for many years. All of those things will disappear almost overnight and leave society gasping and stupefied over what to do. Their reactions will be to yell and scream and try to identify who to blame but the only person they should blame is the one in the mirror.

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Tyranny Of The PhDs | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Tyranny Of The PhDs

by David Stockman • June 14, 2016

Sad to say, you haven’t seen nothin’ yet. The world is drifting into financial entropy, and it is going to get steadily worse. That’s because the emerging stock market slump isn’t just another cyclical correction; it’s the opening phase of the end-game.

That is, the end game of the PhD Tyranny.

During the last two decades the major central banks of the world have been colonized lock, stock and barrel by Keynesian crackpots. These academic scribblers and power-hungry apparatchiks have now pushed interest rate repression, massive monetization (QE) and relentless rigging of the financial markets to the limits of sanity and beyond. Honest, market-driven price discovery is dead as a doornail.

No more proof is needed than the “matrix” below. The very thing that financial history proves, above all else, is that governments can’t be trusted to honor their debts.  And that cardinal fact is supposed to be embodied in the yield.

In fact, modern welfare state democracies have a veritable fiscal death wish.

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ClubOrlov: The Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction


The Law of Attraction is a staple of motivational speakers. The premise is that thoughts determine outcomes. If you can visualize a better future, and conceive of the steps you need to take to reach it, a potential future magically pops into existence. 

In reality, change requires more than positive thinking. There is a feedback loop between thinking and acting. If we think differently, we must also act differently, and only by acting differently can we hope to achieve something new. In turn, new achievements lead to new experiences, which may cause us to think even more differently, revise our plan, try acting even more differently, and so on.

One of the issues we face in addressing massive, overwhelmingly complex problems such as, just to rattle off a few, climate change, economic inequality and social and political dysfunction, is that it is hard for us even to conceive of a better way of doing things. Not knowing what to do is bad enough; not knowing what to think is even worse!


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Whither the Shards of America?: It’s Us, or Them « The Burning Platform

Whither the Shards of America?: It’s Us, or Them

Guest Post by Fred Reed

From the sewers they come. Anti-Trump animalia beating a supporter of Trump in San Jose. They have done the same to Sanders. Anti-Trump is legitimate. Beating up his supporters is not. Us or them.

From the Drudge Report, America’s thermometer, regarding the disruption  a campaign rally for Trump:

‘NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THAT IN AMERICA’…

TRUMP CAMPAIGNERS CHASED DOWN LIKE PREY…

DOZENS PUNCHED…

POLICE ASSAULTED…

SAN JOSE MAYOR JUSTIFIES VIOLENCE…

VIDEO: FEMALE PELTED WITH HUEVOS…

MEXICAN FLAGS RAISED AS AMERICAN FLAG BURNS…

Enough. This can’t last. If people want to demonstrate against anything at all, fine. If they detest any politician at all, fine. If they are vulgar subliterate rabble, let them be vulgar subliterate rabble where I am not. But when they run wild over and over and shut down politics, they need to be stopped, right now, with nightsticks and dogs and long jail sentences.

A country that allows a feral underclass to run unchecked, to attack and beat anyone it doesn’t like, to loot and burn and disrupt political rallies, to block highways and intimidate the citizenry, will not last. It is time to put an end to it. If we still can.

Look at them. They are the muck at the bottom of the national drains, stupid, half-educated at best, without regard for notions of law or democracy. Many couldn’t spell democracy. They need to be stopped, hard.

They do it because they can. They know there won’t be consequences because governments are afraid of them. They sense it and do as they please. They will do so increasingly. They are in charge, and they know it.

These things are no longer incidents in the cute “culture wars,” half amusing and half-exasperating. We see something more like Weimar Germany, with organized mobs making targets of politicians and breaking up rallies. It is a deliberate, conscious assault on what America is supposed to be and to a reasonable approximation, was.

Somebody needs to take command to end this nonsense before it becomes irremediable. But is it possible? There is no nice way to do it. The scum  will ignore niceness. The police would have to beat the living dog-snot out of rioters, charge them with assault, and put them in slam for the maximum. Controlling them would require  martial law  in cities in insurrection and the shooting of arsonists and looters. Universities would have to expel without recourse of misbehaving college children.  These would take stomach, which we do not have.

It is probably too late.

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EBT Card Outage? 8 Days Into June And Many Americans Are Still Waiting For Food Stamp Money | Zero Hedge

EBT Card Outage? 8 Days Into June And Many Americans Are Still Waiting For Food Stamp Money

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Widespread reports continue to pour in from all over the nation of “glitches” with the food stamp system.  It is eight days into the month and large numbers of people still have not received their benefits, and in other instances it is being reported that EBT cards are simply not working correctly.  So what in the world is going on here?  On downdetector.com there are scores of reports of problems with the EBT system from people all over the nation.  Could this simply be another example of government incompetence, or is something else at work here?

I had heard some rumblings about this over the past few days, but I had not really taken them seriously until I read an article from highly respected author Ray Gano…

It interesting over the weekend I got several emails telling me about cell phones being down, internet being down, and get this, EBT cards not working and having no money associated to them.

This is a concern because when the US Government has payment failures, then there is possibly something happening that the press is not telling you about.

Now, we know that computers have problems and that states, counties and cities run on computers. But what is interesting is that since the beginning of 2016, The US government has had over 2,700 reports on downdetector.comshowing that they have been late loading the money onto these EBT cards.

Folks, we are now going on 8 days where the Government has not paid the EBT payments so that people have food.

So I went over to downdetector.com myself, and I was stunned to see that reports of EBT outages continue to pour in every hour.  Here are just a few of the recent comments that have been left by people that are still waiting for their food stamp benefits for June…

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The Archdruid Report: They Died of Progress

They Died of Progress

I'd intended this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report to continue the discussion of education that got started two weeks ago, but that’s going to have to wait a bit. As my readers have doubtless learned over the last ten years, whichever muse guides these essays is a lady of very irregular habits, and it happens tolerably often that what she has to say isn’t what I had in mind. This is one of those times.

In last month’s installment of my ongoing Retrotopia narrative, one of the characters summed up her position in a bit of intellectual heresy that left the viewpoint character flummoxed. Her argument was that progress has become the enemy of prosperity. That’s something you can’t even suggest in today’s society; the response of the viewpoint character— “With all due respect, that’s crazy”—is mild compared to the sort of reactions I’ve routinely fielded whenever I’ve suggested that progress, like everything else in the real world, is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Nonetheless, the unspeakable has become the inescapable in today’s world. It’s become a running joke on the internet that the word “upgrade” inevitably means poorer service, fewer benefits, and more annoyances for those who have to deal with the new and allegedly improved product. The same logic can be applied equally well across the entire landscape of modern technology.  What’s new, innovative, revolutionary, game-changing, and so on through the usual litany of overheated adjectives, isn’t necessarily an improvement. It can be, and very often is, a disaster. Examples could be drawn from an astonishingly broad range of contemporary sources, but I have a particular set of examples in mind.

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PICTURE OF DECLINE « The Burning Platform

PICTURE OF DECLINE

A population of illiterate, non-thinking morons can’t possibly obtain good paying jobs. This country spends $12,000 per public school student per year on education and this is the outcome? The factual data presented below paints a picture of an empire in rapid decline. We are too far gone. No amount of money or presidential election is going to change this course. We chose this path in the 1960s and now we will reap the consequences.

Education

• In a study of literacy among 20 ‘high income’ countries; US ranked 12^th

• Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 44 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children.

• 50% of adults cannot read a book written at an eighth grade level

• 45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level

• 44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year

• 6 out of 10 households do not buy a single book in a year

Economy

• According to the Pew Research Center, the median income of middle-class households declined by 4 percent from 2000 to 2014.

• The Pew Research Center has also found that median wealth for middle-class households dropped by an astounding 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.

• There are still 900,000 fewer middle-class jobs in America than there were when the last recession began, but the population has grown significantly larger since that time.

• According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

• An astounding 48.8 percent of all 25-year-old Americans still live at home with their parents.

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 49 percent of all Americans now live in a home that receives money from the government each month, and nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty right now.

• In 2007, about one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.

• The median net worth of families in the United States was $137, 955 in 2007. Today, it is just $82,756.

The Only Thing That Grows Is Debt - The Automatic Earth

The Only Thing That Grows Is Debt

Two months ago, there was a referendum in Holland about an association agreement between the EU and Ukraine. A relatively new Dutch law states that with an X amount of signatures a referendum can be ‘forced’ by anyone. Before, during and -especially- after the vote, its importance was -and is actively being- pooh-poohed by both the Dutch government and the EU. That in itself paints the issue better than anything else. Both the call and the subsequent support for the referendum stem from resistance against exactly that attitude.

The Dutch voted No to the EU/Ukraine agreement. It was with a turnout not much above the validity threshold, but a large majority of those who did vote agreed they want no part of the deal. This puts Dutch PM Rutte in an awkward position, he can’t be seen ignoring the population. Well, at least not openly. The EU can’t validate the agreement, and with Holland still holding the chair of the Union until July 1, a meeting on the topic has been pushed forward until the last weekend of June. With Rutte still in charge, but only just, and with the June 23 UK Brexit vote decided.

Brussels is frantically looking for a way to push through the agreement despite the Dutch vote, and likely some sort of bland compromise will be presented, which Rutte’s spin doctors will put into words that he can -with a straight face- claim honor the vote while at the same time executing what that same vote specifically spoke out against.

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Why 'Robbing Peter' To 'Pay Paul Something-For-Nothing' Doesn't Work | Zero Hedge

Why 'Robbing Peter' To 'Pay Paul Something-For-Nothing' Doesn't Work

Authored by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man's Pater Tenebrarum),

From Subject to Citizen

On June 5th, the Swiss cast their votes and registered their opinions: “No,” they said. We left off yesterday wondering why something for nothing never works. Not as monetary policy. Not as welfare or foreign aid. Not in commerce. Not never, no how. But something for nothing is what people most want.

The future Switzerland just managed to dodge… for now

The Swiss voted against awarding all citizens a “universal basic income” of about $30,000 a year, regardless of whether they have work or not. But the idea is unlikely to go away.

Two-thirds of British voters say they are in favor of the idea. And Canada’s Ontario province is set to try something similar. If you’ve been following these Diary entries, you know how and why we have a welfare state.

It’s not because our leaders are more thoughtful and caring than those in the past. Instead, the French and American Revolutions showed the relative greater value of “citizens” over “subjects.”

When people thought they were in charge of a government, rather than merely subject to it, they no longer found it absurd to ask not what the government could do for them, but what they could do for it! The elite, who control the government, had a quick response: You can pay higher taxes!

And you can get yourself blown up in one of our self-serving foreign wars. Instead of being dragooned to serve in the king’s army, in other words, citizens enlisted, willingly.

And because their money was now used for only projects that benefited them – as selected by their elected representatives – they’d pay more for them. At least, that was the theory.

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