Rambling After Midnight
Is it just me or has life taken up residency in the theatre of the absurd lately? "Shock and awe" I saw'em calling it, remember how that worked out the last time? DemocraticRepublican Guard puts up a token show of resistance and gives up, Mission Accomplished! Heh, 'freedom fries.' Guess we've been squatting in the basement of the theatre of the absurd for a while now.
Took a bit for people to organize amongst themselves but eventually it blew up in their faces like an IED on Route Irish. Went on a side quest this evening, ended up doing some math. Did you know that even with 49.8% of the popular vote, Trump voters make up just 22% of the US population? Some majority rule, eh?
As a lapsed historian, I have a huge favor to ask; can we please retire the Nazi comparisons? Even when they're apt, that horse has long since been beaten into glue, nobody takes it seriously and the kids have started sniffing it. Besides, why opt for intellectual laziness when there's a whole smorgasbord of atrocity and inhumanity to draw parallels from? Cultural Revolution makes for a much more fun comparison, and if you really need to give'em the Fear just trot out the Khmer Rouge.
This flood of words and photos from Frankfort has been brought to you by caffeine and pseudoephedrine. Hooray cats! There's some serious business going on in Frankfort right now, they're working on holding parents responsible for the threats their kids make. . . and also on lowering the concealed carry age to 18 (permit not required here).
Now ain't that some shit?
Seems like a lot is happening, and you're just on hand to capture it.
Great clicks 🫡
You know that feeling you get when you're bored and you just wish something, anything would happen to break up the boredom, and then it does and you just as fervently want your boredom back? I think I'm about to start missing the boredom again.
Thank you sir!
🤣🤣
I do know that feeling, It's an endless loop.
You're welcome ser 🫡
its seems like the same or very similar happening with most of the newly selected governments around the world.
It does seem that way. Can't shake the feeling that the next few years are going to be rather lively.
actually, for me this action started in 2020 with the "corona" hysterics, and since then we are only in the we are on the rise of events :-( not boring period of time at all.
It started in 2020 here too, although the corona hysterics were mostly on TV but we got a bit of a lull after Jan. 6th. It really wasn't much of a lull but it seemed that way because most people were lulled into inactivity.
yep, "people were lulled into inactivity" and the politicians used this inactivity to gain their power for the even higher pressure. we lived some crazy days here, especially in the central parts of the country
We forget that the purpose of speaking is not to gratify pent-up frustration. We can write in our journals for that. Speech is communication, and if the message isn't getting through, why bother?
If you've ever taught children, had children, or needed to give a public address, the first challenge is "How do I get their attention?"
Somehow I missed this, @coloneljethro ...Great blog
I'm beginning to suspect that it's just performance art.
While I had no children, my first job as a teenager was as a tutor of grade school kids, which taught me that rather quickly. Also, the corollary, "How do I keep their attention?"
Thank you! Nearly missed this, thought I'd responded to it earlier in the week.
This is the magic of democracy, and why I am not a democrat. You can do that same math for every democratic election ever, and you won't get a 'better' result (where better means a significantly larger proportion of the electorate winning the election).
Here's something that has changed, that underlies the absurd theatrics you notice. >80% of the dollars that exist have been created after 2019. BlackRock was availed the contract to distribute the newly minted dollars by the US after 2008 to bail out sectors of the economy that were threatened with insolvency by the claimed cause, investments in bad debt that weren't paying as subscribed, which actually translates into buying stock in the corporations that funded the collapse of the US housing market. Additionally, actors like John Podesta, one of the star suspects of the Wikileaks email releases regarding pizza, hot dogs, and walnut sauce, managed a climate relief fund of ~$370B, and at the end of the Biden administration an urgent policy of disbursing every available nickel through USAID, Podesta's fund, and across the USG was undertaken, to keep all that money out of Trump's little hands. A few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there, pretty soon it starts to add up to real money.
If you do the simple math the ~$34T US national debt results in ~$100k for each of 340M Americans (rounding to simplify the math), but, of course, that's not how the taxes extracted from Americans is divided to pay that debt. When you sort the numbers by who actually is a net contributor of taxes, that debt actually sorts to ~$500k per actual taxpayer. Do you feel like you're good for it? You can actually cover your share?
I don't, myself. Also, that money disbursed by BlackRock bought equity, and today BlackRock (and StateStreet and Vanguard) has a controlling interest in ~90% of stock corporations in the world. The rentiers that received that money in exchange for their stock still own most of the rest of the stock extant. The IRS is taxing wages, not rentier income, so the recipients of the funds aren't on the hook to repay it, but wage-earners who didn't get the money are who will pay it back. That's the truth about democracy you didn't mention.
If this isn't sorted and rectified, think of 'Elysium' when considering the coming polycrisis the WEF is engineering, the coming plandemics, WWIII, hyperinflation (that hasn't even started yet, because prices haven't quintupled to reflect the injection of dollars into the economy), and XR deathsquads funded by Soros et al (who got the money) presumably coming to avenge the squirrels slaughtered by climate change.
If voting could change anything, it'd be illegal, according to Emma Goldman (IIRC).
Awesome authoring. I'm really hoping to steal that line someday soon.
That last pic sure looks like HRC, and those signs could have been composed by her writers. However, 'Nazi' and 'Fascist' have even been re-defined by Britannica as slurs applicable to the Right only, despite Fascism being public private partnerships in practice by Mussolini, and Communists having been much more deadly totalitarians than Socialists, even those of the Nationalist variety, so, as you note, the words don't really have much meaning anymore, at least as a reflection of actual parties and policies. In the minds of the folks throwing those slurs about, the actual WWII polities that are the source of those words could hardly be more divergent in their minds from the Socialists like Bernie and Public Private Partnerships today.
Those are the sources of our sustainable salvation proposed by the UN, WEF, and assorted NWO AGW alarmist Climate Change CO2 scammers, after all.
Thanks!
Indeed, nor am I. In most corners of this country however, saying that out loud gets you the side-eye and not taken seriously. One of these days 'the will of the people' will take its rightful place alongside the divine right of kings and the mandate of heaven, but until then I will keep trying to reframe things so folks can figure it out for themselves.
I don't know where to even begin with verifying all that but I think that's largely moot. You mention 2019 as a start date but I suspect you might be off by nearly a half century. Would any of the things you mentioned have been possible if we hadn't walked away from Bretton Woods?
That's probably my favorite Emma quote, makes it into a blog at least once every other year :)
Thank you, feel free to steal away.
HRC as in the infamous email lady? Don't quite see that myself but that could be because the Rachel Maddow vibes were overwhelming it.
I'm all about the will of the people, but actually as the wills of the persons, because the people doesn't have a will. Persons do (mobs may be somewhat of a willful organism, but an unfortunate state in which We the People are voting). My point about democratic elections is that they aren't respecting the divine right of persons to rule themselves, instead subjugating the whole of the people to what evil the largest minority of voters reckons least bad. As a rule democracies impose governance via pluripotent propaganda that seeks to make electorates into mobs, because that primal mob mentality eschews reason and informed self interest for communal existential needs that can dramatically reduce sovereign liberties in the (perceived) name of survival. I mean, some people voted for Trump because Haitians were eating cats and dogs in Springfield.
Almost everything democracies have elections about infringes on individual liberties to begin with, so continually deprecate and degrade American freedom. As Churchill pointed out, democracies are the worst form of government there is, except for all the rest. The more we end up ruled by a mob, the less we are sovereign, and that's my most valued metric, because I think it best promotes industry, civil society, and even law and order, all of which underlie the felicity of America, and the rest of the world too.
I meant 2020 as the start. Using the plandemic lockdowns to limit public participation in the economy, and to divert attention, the Fed started printing money into the public monetary supply, which had never before been done. The real problem with the economy in 2008 was too much interest and not enough money to pay it, because money is created as principal when a loan is made, but the interest payable on that principal isn't, and the more money that is created in a debt based monetary system, the worse the crisis of not enough money to make interest payments on that debt becomes.
In 2020 the creation of public debt used to purchase equities enabled money to become available without creating lots of debts that wouldn't be possible to be paid at interest because of the scarcity of money, which was the 2008 liar loan subtext no one mentioned, and what the massive increase in the money supply in 2020 and since has undertaken to solve. It's getting so that hard money lenders are creeping out of the dark crevices they've been hidden in since Dodd-Frank passed, and private home ownership might be able to reverse it's decline, but for the damnable inflation all that fresh money has caused, pushing home prices up ~50% in 4 years. Wages are lagging that by half, significantly impeding home ownership.
As usual interacting with you is one of the most intellectually invigorating things I get to do of a day.